After our trip to Ljubljana’s market, T., Kim, and I dropped off our loot at her place and then headed back out to continue our tour. Our next stop, if memory serves, was Prešeren Square, the dead center of the city and a people-watching hub to rival the Riva in Split, Croatia.
Day or night, this is the place to see or be seen in Ljubljana. Hmm… am I nursing a baby beer belly? I’ve eaten, and especially drunk, very well on this trip (2 June 2018).
A statue of France Prešeren, Slovenia’s greatest poet, stands on a pedestal in the center of Prešeren Square. The steps leading up to the pedestal are the perfect place to drink a beer, eat ice cream, and watch the world go by, which is exactly what I did a couple of days after this photo was taken (2 June 2018).
The Triple Bridge (here I just walked across the center span), designed, like many of Ljubljana’s most notable structures, by prolific Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik, connects Prešeren Square with Ljubljana’s Old Town. It is one of a dozen or more that cross the tiny Ljubljanica River — more moat than river, really. Even the unremarkable Royal River in my tiny hometown of Yarmouth, Maine dwarfs it. That’s Ljubljana Castle in the background, up on the hill. This is a small, compact city with nearly all of its top sights within walking distance of one another (2 June 2018).
As with my other European destinations, café culture is huge here. The workers — who as far as I can tell, consist primarily of waiters at cafés, bars, and restaurants — seem to be far outnumbered by people sitting at tiny outdoor tables, smoking (although, to be fair, there’s less of that here than in Iberia) and drinking and occasionally eating something. That’s true whether it’s 9am or 9pm, Sunday or Tuesday.
This is just one small portion of the long stretch of pedestrian streets lined with cafés on either side of the river. And there are similar cafés seemingly everywhere else in the city, too (2 June 2018).
And where there aren’t café tables fronting it (and in some places where there are), there are all sorts of scenic viewing platforms and parks along the river. I’d discover this for myself in the following days, finding nice gravel running trails along the embankment here and lazy local parks there.
I saw many couples sitting on platforms like this sharing beers and enjoying the sun (2 June 2018).
And the river is no obstacle to pedestrians. Possibly because it’s so narrow, there’s a bridge (most are pedestrian-only) every block or half-block in the center of the city. And even the bridges that support automobile traffic have sidewalks, sometimes with bike lanes as well, on both sides. This bridge here is adorned with locks that local couples have latched on to it to symbolize their undying love (2 June 2018).
And speaking of pedestrian-only streets, which by now you all know I love, Ljubljana takes the cake! Pretty much the entire city center is pedestrianized. It’s the dream of a car-hater like me.
No cars here! Time to try out another gesture I’ve used in way too many other photos (2 June 2018).
No cars here either. But when I say “pedestrian-only,” I count cyclists as pedestrians. I challenge you to find a single street scene photo of Ljubljana from my visit that doesn’t have a cyclist in it somewhere (2 June 2018).
OK, this one appears cyclist-free. But that’s only because of the Chinese tour group mob ahead of me taking up much of the street. No doubt in front of them, out of the line of sight of my smartphone camera, some bikes are rolling along (2 June 2018).
That (the preponderance of cyclists) also sets Ljubljana apart from my previous destinations. Even compared to the Spanish cities I visited, with their extensive bike lanes, Ljubljana is a place where the cyclist is king. I’ve never been to any city in the world before, other than my 1990s student days in China, where cyclists appear to outnumber drivers. Pedestrians actually have to be pretty alert to avoid getting run over!
Cyclists rule the roads (and, truth be told, rival actual pedestrians as rulers of the pedestrian-only streets too) in Ljubljana (2 June 2018).
Ljubljana is also the tidiest city I’ve visited yet. It occurred to me afterward (specifically, about five minutes into exploring my next destination, Zagreb, Croatia) that I didn’t see a single panhandler or homeless person in Ljubljana. On my final day in town, I did see a mattress, blankets, and other evidence that someone had bedded down under a bridge, but that was as close as I came.
Even before I reached Ljubljana, I began to get some sense of Slovenian tidiness. As I rode with Kim in T’s car those first few days, amid scattered thunderstorms, I noticed that Slovenian farmers covered the hay bales in their fields with tarps to keep the hay dry despite the rain. Driving around Croatia on 31 May, by contrast, the hay bales just sat outside unprotected, even in downpours.
And Ljubljana is clean, freer of graffiti than the other European cities I’ve visited thus far, and lacking the decay I saw in so many other places (notably Porto), even though like them it’s been inhabited since at least Roman times.
In other European cities, many older structures and buildings such as these are in disrepair (2 June 2018).
That isn’t to say Ljubljana is entirely free of graffiti or aging buildings in serious need of a new coat of paint. It’s not a museum, after all.
2 June 2018
2 June 2018
Anyway, getting back to the tour, we walked over to the modern part of the city, crossing Slovenska Cesta, arguably Ljubljana’s major street (this being Ljubljana, even this wide thoroughfare is partially pedestrianized, being open only to bus traffic and the occasional taxi) and heading up to the top of the Yugoslav-era “skyscraper” (14 stories) for great panoramas of the city.
The main drag, Slovenska Cesta. Predictably, the dominant vehicle is the bicycle (4 June 2018).
The “skyscraper” offers a 360˚ panorama of the city, including a fine view of Ljubljana Castle’s strategic, defensible position above the city (2 June 2018).
After taking in the view, the three of us ate lunch at a café near Slovenska Cesta. Slovenia, wedged as it is between Italy, Austria, and the Balkan Peninsula, is a fine place to sample cuisine influenced by all three regions. For this meal, I enjoyed some German-style sausage and sauerkraut.
The sausages and sauerkraut were excellent. The stuff that looks like gray, crumbly dirt is buckwheat meal, a Slovenian specialty. It tastes like gray, crumbly dirt (2 June 2018).
After lunch, we wandered over to Ljubljana’s huge Tivoli Park, just a short walk (or, as I discovered a few days later, a shorter bike ride) from the center. (Everything, seemingly, is a short walk from the center in tiny Ljubljana.) We enjoyed the sunshine and took an ice cream break at a café in the park.
Kim and I, squinting in the sun, in Tivoli Park (2 June 2018).
Off to the right, a tiny dog is rapturously rolling around in the turf (2 June 2018).
We finished T’s trademark tour with a visit to Ljubljana Castle — see photos of its exterior above — which, remarkably, is completely free and open to the public except for galleries with special exhibits.
Most of the interior of the castle is quite sparse (some of it deliberately — the fortress served primarily as a jail for decades — but its chapel is quite lovely (2 June 2018).
My favorite part of the chapel is its ceiling, decorated with the coats of arms of the various families that have called the castle home over the centuries (2 June 2018).
The castle offers a commanding view over the city in all directions, including this one… (2 June 2018)
…and this one (2 June 2018).
Having worked up a sweat and an appetite (well, I always have an appetite, but this really whetted it) hiking up and down the castle hill, we returned to T’s house, where she whipped up an amazing homemade feast from the ingredients we’d picked up at the market in the morning.
Those fancy shellfish-themed platters don’t just look nice. The clam shells also make a great place to place fish bones so they don’t slide back down into the food (2 June 2018).
I love Ljubljana! Of course, I had to make sure it wasn’t just because I had travel companions and a guided tour! By 6 June, my last full day in the city, Kim had departed and T. was back at work, so I was on my own. I enjoyed a blissful early afternoon riding a Ljubljana bike-share bicycle to Tivoli Park and then running along the park’s various gravel running trails. I had planned to limit my exercise to 30 minutes in the park (I wasn’t sure if I was fully recovered from my heel injury back in March), but it was such a perfect sunny late spring day and I was feeling so happy and energetic that I more than doubled my time allotment. I ran along Slovenska Cesta and the river to a cute little park T. had recommended to me earlier, situated where a tributary runs into the Ljubljanica River. Still feeling frisky, I ran over to the castle hill and ran up and down the steep trails the three of us had walked four days previous. It was glorious, and, what’s more, I think my heel is fully recovered.
I’ve given some thought to what my ideal city would be. It would be situated within walking distance of the ocean, a river, and a freshwater lake, so I could enjoy the different types of swimming in all three. It’d be surrounded by tree-covered hills and mountains crisscrossed with hiking and running trails, and wide paved bike trails would lead through the city and around the hills and mountains for miles. The city itself would be completely pedestrianized, except for commercial vehicles and public transit. No one would commute to work by car, not even by taxi or Uber. On every block, restaurants, cafés, and pubs would spill out on to the street with inviting outdoor tables. Naturally, there would be no restrictions on when and where the city’s residents could buy alcohol, and the outdoor tables would be populated by happy, slightly buzzed residents sipping from beer, wine, and cocktail glasses. And most importantly, my city would be populated overwhelmingly by sexy young women wearing revealing clothing. That, friends, is my Eden.
Ljubljana comes closer than any city I’ve visited thus far of meeting this ideal. In maybe an hour and fifteen minutes of cycling and running on 6 June, I moved through a largely pedestrianized, café-cluttered small city overrun with hot chicks, to steep, tree-shaded hills laced with hiking trails, back down through more cafés and hot chicks, to a sunny, shady park overlooking a river and inhabited by locals drinking outside under big umbrellas, up another steep, tree-shaded hill laced with hiking trails, and finally back down into a pedestrianized street inhabited by scores more hot chicks.
After scouting out this cute little park during my run, I made a boozy picnic of dinner leftovers, a brandy-and-Cockta mix, and some nice rosé wine here (6 June 2018).
All of that alcohol made me a little woozy with booze, so, using my man-purse as a pillow, I took a little nap under the shade of this tree (6 June 2018).
Ljubljana doesn’t meet this ideal. It’s far from the ocean, there’s no lake nearby, there are cars (although sometimes you have to look hard to find them), and, regrettably, there’s a fairly even gender balance, providing many of the svelte young women here with — sigh — husbands and boyfriends. But all the same, it’s pretty remarkable how many boxes this little capital of a tiny country ticks off.