At 5 am on Thursday the 12th of July, Matt and Alissa arrived on North Street to collect me. Alissa and I were headed for Ljubljana, the 2007 IOSOT (International Organisation for the Study of the Old Testament) conference for to attend. Matt took us to Dundee to begin the journey. Before we actually left the country, however, Alissa and I had to endure the bus trip that would NEVER END! It was just about bearable past Manchester, but we sat in roadworks for a while, which ended any stoicism I may otherwise have enjoyed.
We got our hilarity in, nevertheless. In Preston we saw a sign that read: “Lord’s Walk leading to Church Street” – which sounds like it should be one of those notice boards outside churches that sometimes make you cringe. We read the guidebook for a while and found the recurring theme of fire in Slovenian history. There are all these monuments as a thanksgiving for deliverance from fire, but it seems that Slovenia may have endured more than its fair share!
Alissa duelled with fast food on the train to Gatwick. “Great,” she exclaimed. “I’m a PhD student and I’m smarter than the ketchup packet”
We tormented an Australian guy on the train with our food – “You guys are killing me!” He sounded pained, too, but politely declined our offer of fries, leftover kettle chips and M&Ms.
On checking in, the lady at the desk alerted Alissa to the fact that her ticket requested a special meal. She looked blank. “You mean, kosher or something?” Now, my mind went first to vegetarian, then diabetic, then to halal or kosher, but one must not assume that everyone’s mind works the same way. Having assured the check in lady that the special meal was fine, we left the desk. Alissa turned to be conspiratorially. “I just wanted to see what would happen.” Sneaky. Sneaky, yet experimental. We rendezvoused with fellow St Marys student Narges, who had come over from Oxford to fly out with us, and proceeded to the plane. Lately I’ve been getting so sick of the whole process – the check-in, the queues at security, the hanging around, queuing to get on the plane, sitting on the tarmac for ages, then taxiing for what seems like an unnecessary amount of time. The good bit about the deadly bus journey was that by flight time, I was totally placid. I was too tired to care, basically.
Alissa may have ordered a kosher meal, but she turned out not to be smarter than it. The leaflet that came with it had stars all over it, and they made much of the “gastronomy” pun. Classy. I loved it. However, it was a small consolation that the flight crew didn’t seem to be smarter than the meal, either. The kosher certificate was only valid if the meal was delivered sealed, and since it arrived in a gold metal container, the plastic knife was rather inadequate. Eventually Alissa asked for help, and the steward tried to break in for a while before giving up and disappearing to the front of the plane. That was funny in itself, but when the package came back open, it became obvious that the cold contents should have been heated up – I mean, cold chicken risotto? Oh, how we giggled.
We were picked up at a really nice airport by a friendly guy from the conference team, who was slightly confused by our numbers but didn’t mind us all squishing into the back. My first impression of Slovenia was that it has beautiful roads – I love a good infrastructure. The airport is some distance north of Ljubljana, which is not very big for a capital city, so there were thousands of stars overhead, something I love but rarely get to see in the northern summer. I gazed at the atypically bright Ursa major. Speaking of big bears…. It was interesting listening to our “tour guide” talking to the Belgian bloke in the front. He seemed laid back, a trait which I was soon to associate with Slovenia and its people. He spoke of bears – and not the astral kind. Slovenia has so many bears that they actually export them (no, I didn’t ask the obvious question). Much of the country is forest. How come in Sweden these things don’t seem anything special but in Slovenia it’s so exotic?
We learned a lot through our sleepy eavesdropping. The country is 20, 000 sq Km in area. “And you can drive across the country in… well, say you… take westernmost to easternmost point, say… northeast to southwest…” but I never found out how long it would take – probably a matter of three or so hours – as I was distracted by a glimpse of our first Slovenian church, spotlit on a hill.
I waited, as we drove long, wide boulevards (litter-free) coming into Ljubuljana, for the city centre to begin. Then suddenly, we were crossing the Ljubljanica River! The beautiful villa-type buildings were the centre.
We had several failed attempts to get into the car park of the hostel, before we got in, got a room for three, then… bed! Lay back and noted the graffiti on the underside of Narges’s bed. “Marjeta and Tomasz 4 ever”
Welcome to Slovenia.
Read on: Slovenian Summer #2: From Bed to Bled (and back again)
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