Horse burgers, traffic light countdown & old women with trolleys

We left Zagreb the same way we had entered it, tired and being rained on. I´m sure when the weather´s nicer the city is more charming, but from what I saw I can understand why most of the people we have met use the city as just a stopover to other destinations.

The train to Ljubljana was nice, we had a little compartment all to ourselves. After border control, where a band were asked to leave the train, we zoomed past the Slovenian countryside, which with its fields and pretty hills looked an awful lot like English countryside. We ate Jaffa Cakes in celebration.

The rain followed us from Croatia. We waited outside the station for Marko from the hostel, who was only 40 minutes late (this is good for him, apparently). While waiting we people watched, and there was not much of note apart from a priest wearing a medallion. While sitting in the back seat we noticed a little furry head poke through from the front seat and out popped a little sausage dog, eager to say hello. Neither of us are fans of dogs, but sausage dogs are definitely an exception! He was more like a cat anyway, tootling around our feet, trying to jump onto our laps.

The hostel is above a pizzeria and is lovely and spacious, feeling like an actual house rather than a hostel. We braved the rain after having bought an enormous umbrella and walked the 30 minutes into town, passing some odd tampon-related graffiti. The first thing we saw as we entered the central area of the city were some roadworks, it was not cordoned off with tape or a fence but instead with bunting! I loved the city immediately. The rain stopped after a while and we slowly made our way around the small centre of town. We saw an awful lot of graffiti, my favourite being one young lady who had tagged "Miss Vix" all over the place :)

We were quite obviously in the studenty area of the city, the young people and shops all looked very "cool" and we passed a fast food place called `Red Hot Horse Burger´. We had been entertained by the sounds the traffic lights make in Europe, ever since hearing the ones in Sarajevo, but here there were not only sounds but an LED countdown to the green man! We were incredibly excited and may well have danced across the road... maybe. We sat by one of the three bridges in the centre with our huge umbrella and watched people pass us in the rain. An old gypsy woman with a trolley walked past and for some reason John decided to make up a song about her. We sat on the bench singing and decided a good name for a band would be The Plazma Wrappers. I danced while he sang, in the preferred style of Margaret who we had met in Split. The rain started to get heavier so we walked back to the hostel, past a street of Embassies. We saw a particularly pretty one and I remarked that it was like a fairytale castle. John said it was like (cue American accent) "a make believe castle" and we chatted about how much better the phrase "fairytale" is than "make-believe" and we shook fists at the Americans for not using the term before noticing it was actually the American Embassy...

We bought bread for dinner, and Hobbit biscuits, in the local supermarket, Mercator, and discussed whether or not Jean Claude Van Damme would star in a film of that name. That evening we watched some incredibly low-budget and fairly humiliating kids TV and some very expensive looking but equally crappy Slovenian music videos. Nothing has yet beaten Bosnian TV! We ate our bread and cheese and chatted about music with Marko. He played us some traditional Slovenian music while Britney Spears was muted on the TV. They suited each other surprisingly well! He then played us some Slovenian pop which was really good! I think he was quite taken aback when we told him that we actually quite liked it. He told us there were over 200 radio stations in Ljubljana, most of which are based in peoples houses, and apparently even the house next door runs its own a radio station! We sat in the living room chatting with the hostels other guests until bedtime. There are 4 Aussies and 5 other Brits. For the first time on our trip the British are the majority. One of the girls was reading "Yes Man" by Danny Wallace, so we got chatting about Join Me and I told them that that was how John and I had met. They all laughed nervously at the mention of the word "cult".