My Travels: Cologne to Ljubljana

Yesterday was a long day. I got up a little after 5:00 AM in Cologne, walked to the station, and boarded a 6:19AM train to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I had time for a quick breakfast before getting another train to Ljubljana with many stops - including Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg, and a bunch of little mountain towns in Austria. I finally made it to Ljubljana on time at just after 6:30PM.

I started reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, which intermittently had me convulsed with laughter. I'm kind of glad that people could not see what I was reading that was so funny. I sat in the same seat for almost 10 hours on that train and there were a lot of comings and goings around me. A blonde, very thin girl who looked like she might have been anorexic got on in Munich and sat across the aisle from me. I discreetly observed her eating four avocados, one right after the other, an apple, and something that looked like a fennel bulb over a period of about two hours. She got off at some little town in the mountains in Austria.

The mountains in Austria were impressive. As we kept going through Austria, we must have been going higher and higher because I saw more and more frost, frozen ponds, and eventually snow. My the time the train got to the Slovenian border the snow was all gone.

In Austria, starting to get close to the mountains. It was a challenge taking these pictures through a dirty window.

A castle in Austria.

One of the little stations in Austria where we did not stop. It seemed like we stopped at most of them.

When I arrived at the station in Ljubljana I immediately checked for a WiFi network. There was one and I saw that to get a user name and password, I would have had to go to the information desk. I chose to just head for the place I booked on Airbnb without checking email first. I should have checked email because although I found the address with no problem, I could not find the a bell on the apartment building with my host's name. There is a big hotel right next door so I connected to their WiFi network, but it also needed a code. I tried in vain to make up a couple of codes (guessing likely room numbers and hoping that those would double as a code) but it didn't work. So I walked back to the station, got a user name and password, and got my email. That's when I saw the email telling me which bell to press on the apartment building. So I made my way back and got in.

After having a glass of wine with my host and his friends, we went down the street to a Bosnian restaurant called Sarajevo 84. I was pretty hungry by then. I had something called ćevapčići which is sausage inside a bread like thing. It was pretty good. I washed it down with a Bosnian beer. Then I came back to the apartment and did laundry. I am learning to do laundry whenever I get a chance.

And, when I asked about the WiFi network for the apartment, I discovered that they do not have their own WiFi. They are stealing it from the hotel next door, whose network I was trying to get onto. So now I have a code for the hotel's WiFi network that I was trying to guess yesterday!

Today it is rainy in Ljubljana. But I have been walking around the city having a look.