Ljubljana. I stared at the word. I was going to have to say it to a bus driver soon, and I had no idea where to begin. La-joo-bell-jah-nah? Who the fuck would call their town that? Who puts Ls and Js next to each other at a dinner party or in a word? Slavs, man. Slavs do that.

My bus was an hour late, if it was coming at all. I was sitting alone on a concrete platform in The Middle of Nowhere, Bosnia, which is a truly weird name for a town. The sun had gone down and the other two people waiting for the bus to La-joo-bell-jah-nah had given up and left, puttering away in a taxi to God Knows Where (these town names!). I had nowhere to putter away to. This was the last bus today, and there were no buses tomorrow. I munched on one of the bizarre Hot Corn flavored Doritos I’d found at the local grocery store during my long wait for the bus.

Hmmm. I began to scroll through local hotel (there was only one) on my phone and contemplate what I was going to do for three days in Devil’s Armpit, Bosnia, when suddenly headlights appeared out of the murky darkness. A bus swiveled into the lot, bashfully, seeming to radiate remorse. The door swung open and the driver said to me:

“Loob-lee-ahh-nah?”

Ohhh, that’s how you pronounce it. The Js are Is because whatever sure Slovenia. I was on my way.

Ljubljana sure has a lot of graffiti. I noticed this even in the dark, walking through the misty streets of the city at 5am, fresh off an overnight bus that somewhere, at some point, I had imagined I was going to sleep on. The border crossings into Croatia and Slovenia had other ideas. We spent a solid 90 minutes at the Slovenian border, then did two U-turns and went through the border again, all because one person on the packed bus forgot their paperwork. That’s the impression I got anyway, all the announcements on the bus were in Bosnian.

It was almost me holding up the whole bus, as I stood in front of the Slovenian immigration window, the taciturn officer flipping, and flipping, and flipping through my passport.

“You travel a lot.”

“Sure do!”

“You go to Slovenia? Then where?”

“Estonia!”

“You go to Afghanistan and Iraq and now Estonia?” he raised his eyebrow at me suspiciously.

It’s somewhat disadvantageous that the three sparkly, holographed, full-page visas I currently have in my passport are from Afghanistan, Iraq and Russia. People frequently mistake the highly detailed Russian visa sticker for my actual passport page, and more than once I’ve been checked into a hotel as Имя идет сюда. It’s fun. But the Slovenian border guy was having none of this whimsy. He looked at me like he’d smelled a fart and handed my passport back, reluctantly letting me into his Not Iraq or Afghanistan country.

Anyway, Ljubljana: But not, like, nice street art graffiti. Cute little boutiques were covered in “DEEZ NUTZ WUZ HERE” type tagging graffiti. Jeez guys. Might want to paint some of that over.

The other thing Ljubljana is much nicer, and it is dragons.

Dragons are the symbol of Slovenia and they will not let you forget this for one minute.

The other nice thing Ljubljana has is the best vegan pie I’ve ever had.

“Welcome sir, would you like to see a menu?”

“Give me all your pie.”

“Uhm, sure, sir, but we have a full menu-”

“GIVE ME ALL YOUR PIE!”

I mean, it's not ALL pie and graffiti. There is some other stuff crammed in for dragon haters and pie agnostics.

Ljubljana has a palace with dog sculptures in front, which as the story goes the sculptor obsessed so much over getting right that he forgot to give them tongues. When someone pointed this out after they were finished he lost his mind, which is why I always half-ass my dog statues.

And of course they have an alleyway where the gutter is crammed full of little melting faces, because... Jesus Christ did you see the expiration date on this milk?

There's... dear God that was weird. Let's settle down with a... a Cyanometer?

This mirrored thing lets you know just how badly we've messed up the planet that the sky isn't even the color it's supposed to be. Good to know.

Ljubljana has trippy sidewalks.

And a standard-issue nice church.

They also have a very decent history museum, where I learned even more about the breakup of Yugoslavia to top off the history deep-dive I did in Bosnia.

Slovenia really got the easy end of this whole conflict, as when they decided in the early 90s that they didn’t feel like being part of Yugoslavia any more and declared their independence, and Serbia said “Unt-uh!” and moved to invade them, Europe said “Actually Slovenia is really close to us and kind of like us so Serbia you can go eat a dick” and Serbia had to storm off on a huff and pout and then work out their frustration by beating the living shit out of Bosnia for a few years. I was happy for Slovenia reading about their path to independence, but having just come from Bosnia and seeing the horrors of the war there, it was hard not to feel like Slovenia, which had already been the most successful and modern part of Yugoslavia, was born on third base a bit in this whole situation.

Visiting the museum, however, did seem to make sense of all the graffiti everywhere in Ljubljana. Graffiti had been one of the main forms of social protest in favor of Slovenia’s independence during the late 80s and early 90s, and though it wasn’t stated anywhere I got the impression that the work of DEEZ NUTZ and his friends was being left alone in honor of this tradition.

Slovenia’s crown jewel of tourism is a lake with a name that sounds like a Native American story about the time we mortally wounded Mother Earth. Nobody knows why they actually called it that.

It doesn’t matter though, because it’s pretty as shit... Hmmm. You know what English, you are a weird language.

Strange name or not, Lake Bled did not let down its reputation as one of the most lovely places on our wounded Earth.

Bobbing up and down in the middle of the lake there’s a cute little teardrop-shaped island. Getting there involves paying to pile into a traditional boat where a dude with oars pushes you veeeeeeeery slowly across the lake to the island, so slowly that I wished I’d paid for the less-traditional electric boat or had rented a paddleboard. Those paddleboards look amazing! And how hard can it be, you just stand there and-

“WAAAAAAAAUGH” a woman screamed from across the lake as she dramatically fell head-first off of her paddleboard and into the drink.

OK, but still. This boat is really slow.

Upon the island you have three choices for activities. You can walk around the island, which takes four minutes. You can dip some or all of your body into the water to cool off, which was lovely and a prime spot to witness the inaugural launch of the Polak 2.

And you can visit the island’s wee little church.

Inside the church there is a dangling rope hanging from the ceiling that you can pull to ring the church bell and make your singular wish come true. This is fun.

Next to the church is a clock tower you can run up and then back down if your slow-ass oar boat is about to leave without you.

Bled also has a cool castle up on the cliffs above the lake that provides spectacular views and sort of a jumbled history of the region, which apparently involved cavemen and then tourists.

I thought this bird weathervane was just a bit of castle whimsy...

Until I saw the same guy on one of the manhole covers on the outskirts of town.

So I guess that's the Bled Chicken.

Bled also has its own standard-issue Very Pretty Church.

You can walk all the way around the lake in about two hours, which involves a lot of sunbathers and Germans playing volleyball. As surprised as I had been by the number of tourists I ran into in Croatia earlier on this trip, I really ran teeth-first into the stunning recovery of European tourism this summer at Lake Bled. Spending six months bopping around Europe last Summer and Fall, I had become completely accustomed to having places to myself, not planning ahead in the slightest and deciding each morning where to go and what to do, encountering no difficulty in finding hotel rooms or seats on trains or planes in the barren 2020 tourism landscape. Now, tourism was back, maybe stronger than ever, as a lot of people apparently had a lot of pent-up need to yell at their kids on a beach.

This meant that I almost couldn’t go to Lake Bled at all, because there were no hotel rooms. Oops. At the last minute I was able to piece together a motley itinerary for three nights, staying at a different hotel each night since no single place had three nights of availability. And the middle night was a Saturday, when the town was so jam-packed I ended up booking the very last bed available in the entire town, a dorm bunk in a hostel with 7 other unlucky souls in the same room, all of whom were 22 and not yet familiar with the concept of having your loud 2am conversations some other place where people aren’t pretending to sleep.

But, it was all worth it because Bled was lovely as can be, and having three nights gave me time to both soak up the lake vibes and check out what else was in the area.

Like what? Like Vintgar Gorge! Holy crap was that place nice.

Getting up early (shockingly, none of my hostel-mates were on my “in bed by 10 and up at 6am” old person schedule) was worth it to be at the gorge right when they first let people in, the mist still curling above the surface of the river and few to no people yelling at their kids while you’re trying to appreciate the deep, crystalline waters and mystical whimsy of fairy-strewn waterfalls.

I enjoyed this so much that when I unexpectedly got to the end of the gorge trail after only about 40 minutes, I thumbed my nose at the one-way-traffic rule and doubled back to spend more time contemplating the tranquil waters and massive fish daydreaming below, as more people who were not sleeping in a hostel they were eager to leave by 6am started to trickle in and drag their kids through appreciating the majesty of nature.

What else was in the area? Why, how about Lake Bohinj? About 40 minutes away there sits another storybook lake, which some had recommended even more highly than Bled because it was less crowded and touristy. Neither of these things ended up being true in the slightest, if anything there were more people at Bohinj (trying to beat the crowds no doubt) and I chuckled at the sight of hundreds of camping tents carpeting the lakefront, mere inches from each other. Nothing like getting away from it all out in nature!

Seeing as the lake was a zoo and I hadn’t brought my giraffe-feeding hat, I opted to take the cablecar up nearby Mount Vogel instead, and take it all in from an altitude where you couldn’t make out the overweight Austrians in speedos. This proved to be a fantastic choice as the vertiginous kilometer trip nearly straight up left us with a gorgeous view of the entire lake.

From the top you could take the skiing chair lifts even higher, and I enjoyed this immensely, being ferried up over the treetops in the open air like a soaring bird. I could have ridden the chair lift all day, feeling like a God hovering above the beautiful mountain scenery.

Up top the hiking about was lovely and a good time was had by all, except the children.