Another easy ride with Flixbus and I entered Slovenia (even though Croatia and Slovenia are members of the EU we had to go through border passport check and customs, which is weird). The landscape has changed somehow, from craggy mountains and dense forest to a more genteel landscape of grass-covered hills with small quaint towns scattered over the slopes. Feels more like Germany than Hungary.
The capital city is Ljubljana (pronounced Liu-bliah-nah) and it occupies a star-shaped intermontane valley. The old city center wraps around a small hill, where a meander of the Ljubljanica River provided a moat on three sides. Naturally there is a castle on top of the hill, and my tourist activity for the day was to climb the hill to see the grounds, the vineyard, and the main yard of the castle. To the north of the skyline there is a tall range of snow-clad mountains (the Grintovec Range), and right below me I could see the old town, with dozens of slender Lutheran churches and more delicate architecture than that of Zagreb (either these are pre-XIX century or Franz Joseph never gave much attention to what must have been a small provincial capital).
Today is Saturday, and I can see the unmistakable signs of a city that has stopped working and is ready to party. The pubs will be lively tonight, but I forecast that tomorrow there will be many penitents repenting at church and little happening in the streets.
I am staying at the Dragon's Dream Hostel, which has the distinction of using "capsules" to host its guests. I have been in a capsule hotel before, in Sidney, so I was ready to find my berth carved out of the wall, like in a Roman catacomb. Not quite. It is more like a cabinet room in a train, so I have a bit of room to stand, and a small cabinet to put my clothes. There are communal showers, but they are more like six small bathrooms, where you have privacy to use the WC and the shower.
The "kitchen" is a sink and a microwave, but as people come and go they leave supplies behind, so there is coffee, sugar, and all sorts of noodles. I should add that everything is finished in gleaming light wood, and is spotlessly clean. Best of all, the young woman who checked me in was super friendly and gave me all sorts of good info about how to move using the buses. They are more expensive than the trams in Zagreb (1.30 euro for the bus vs. 80 cents for the tram), and you need to have a card to which you can add money (like the Clipper card in BART) but my young friend was happy to lend me the hostel card, to which I added 5 euros at the machine by the bus stop (later I found out I had been lucky, because very few bus stops have such machine). Cards and QR codes are fine, but if you don't know these little things you can get really stuck.
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