After WJUC, we rented a car in Milan for a quick road trip to Slovenia before heading back to Italy for our own Ultimate Champtionships, the WUCC tournament.
Autogrill is the Italian Buckee's! One stop shop for all things necessary for a good road trip: gas, coffee, clean bathrooms, and tractor tire sized wheels of parmesan cheese. Like the rest stops/gas stations in the Midwest, some of them go over the highway. This is me with my loot from our first stop.
Our first night we drove all the way to Maribor, a small city in the northeast, to visit with our Slovenian friends from Spinning in Paradise. Jaka invited us to his house for dinner, where we enjoyed a delicious home-cooked meal, home-made wine/spirits, and great conversation with his parents, Zen, Sbeila, and Jaka's girlfriend.
We stayed with Zen in his awesome flat in the middle of the town, and then met up the next day with the crew while Jaka played tour guide. He took us around town and told us interesting things about the history of the city, a cute little riverside college town.
This statue in the main square commemorates the plague of the 1680s that claimed one third of the city's population.
Next we went to see the oldest living and producing grape vine in the world! It's over 400 years old, and they continue to make wine out of it today.
Of course we stopped in for a wine tasting of Slovenian wines.
Jaka and I along the main river, the Drava.
Mike and Jaka the tour guide in one of the traditional handmade wine barrels that are no longer in use.
Jaka then drove us to a nearby town (Vurberk) with a castle (grad)
at the top. The view of the surrounding countryside was incredible. The castle was used as many things throughout it's existence, from private residence for nobles, to a Russian Red Cross station during WWI and then a health sanitarium between the wars. It was then take over by the Germans during WWII and used as an officer training camp, until it was bombed out.
It's also apparently a center of some immense electromagnetic energy, since there are signs everywhere telling people not to sit for more than 15 minutes or fall asleep on the benches because their energy will get all out of whack.
Next stop was Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Jaka hooked us up with a few Ultimate players as well as his friend Nate, a college student on summer vacation who kindly offered us his flat for two nights. We got in a practice with the Ljublana team and their awesome captain Spooks.
There was a pretty excellent Slovenian history museum at the Ljubljana Castle, atop a hill above the city. One of my favorite pieces was this mural called "Dance With Death", which depicts the emerging ideas popularized during the latter Reformation and Renaissance that class didn't protect anyone from death. There is a series of poor peasants and rich royalty all making the march to the casket.
Dragons are everywhere in Slovenia! Slovenia has a lot of karst topography (Karst was a Slovenian!), which is made up of porous sedimentary limestone. The geology in some places is eerily similar to Austin in fact, and caves are a big tourist draw here as well. Well, similar to the endangered Barton Creek Salamander in Austin, there is a species of pigment free salamander called the olm that lives in the caves of Slovenia. After a heavy rain in the 1600s, olms were seen outside of the cave and people believed them to be (or at least wrote down) that they were the baby dragons. They ran with it and dragon lore is entrenched in their oral and written history.
Beautiful church in main square of Ljubljana.
View of the "3 bridges" area of Ljubljana, a stunningly picturesque section of town with beautiful architecture, a waterway, and outdoor cafes.
Another view down the canal in Ljubljana.
A view of Ljubljana Castle from below.
The next day was my 32nd birthday (whoop!), so we drove to Lake Bled on recommendation from our friend Bjorn and every person who has ever been to or heard of this incredible little forested country.
View from atop the Lake Bled Castle.
One the way back to Ljubljana we stopped in the adorable small town of Radovljica to visit a museum about apiology, the art/science of beekeeping. Beekeeping was revolutionized in Slovenia, and a few passionate individuals led the field for a while, publishing books on the subject. It was incredibly interesting and informative; the highlight was watching the live bee colonies where you could follow individual bees as they went about their highly structured and role oriented hive business.
My second favorite part of the exhibit was the collection of decorated hive panels dating back from the Middle Ages to the present. For something that was mostly practical in nature, they sure did expend a lot of energy (and money, often they hired professional artists to do it) painting these intricate scenes depicting religious, historical, or secular scenes. The picture above was in the section on "Mythology".
I have no idea what in the world this depicts, but the giant snail was awesome.
1 comment:
Autogrill also conveniently leaves out leftover food trays on a cart instead of dumping them into a trash can...
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