Day 104: Ljubljana - Maribor

JULY 16 - Property owner must be worried as to how I’m going to rate our stay, as he shows up first thing in the morning to find out how we are and smile a lot. I take the rental back and hand over the keys by 8:00, just to make sure they don’t try to charge me an extra day. Out the door by 11:00 and hang out at the train station, where a table full of people at the cafe get roaring drunk.

The train is almost empty as we move eastward, through corn fields and hilly terrain. I use the very weak train wifi to get some trip scheduling done. Pass a lot of farms, and as with yesterday, they are notably ordered, and lack piles of used farming equipment and other junk that I often see in such settings elsewhere.

Today’s route: (A) Ljubljana, (B) Maribor.

It is easy to be impressed with the clear organization that goes on in Slovenia, and easy to see why it was this region that wanted so badly to separate from the other parts of Yugoslavia. I saw a statistic the other day stating that the average earnings of a Slovenian in 1991 were eight times that of a person from Kosovo.

It is also easy to see why the remainder of Yugoslavia would not want Slovenia to go, since wealth was ideally shared equally across all parts of the federation. To this end, the day after Slovenia declared independence (25 June 1991), the Yugoslav People’s Army (JPA) was sent in to stop it from happening. This force was countered by an army created of Slovenes (the Slovenian Territorial Defense), and the war went on for 10 days. Not many people died in the fighting, but the JPA lost a lot of military hardware and a peace treaty was signed, freeing Slovenia to do what they wanted.

So, if Tito was already dead by eleven years at this point, what Yugoslavian power center was sending armies to quell independence movements? That would be the Serbian leader Slobodan Miloševič, who ran Yugoslavia after Tito’s death, and generally sided with ethnic Serbian interests. Discussion of this will become much more relevant later on in the trip.

Upon exiting the train, we spend some time trying to figure out the public transport, but end up walking to the hotel instead. It is next to a building of the University of Maribor and a park.

A monument to the plague, or rather, for thanks that it ended, in the town square. Though Maribor suffered through three notable plagues, this one refers to 1680, when a third of the population died.

A turret on the corner of a building near our hotel.

Maribor had a quiet feel to it, but with a historic district that is quite well maintained. While not in the famous mountainous part of the country, it is the second largest city and is considered a center of the arts. The surrounding countryside is noted for its vineyards.

On Stari Bridge, looking north into the old town.

I’ve been hassling Odette to eat soup served in a bowl of bread for weeks, and tonight she finally ordered one. It was garlic soup.

The National Liberation Monument, next to the history museum.

The action on the streets this evening is exclusively bachelor group parties. This one has coordinated t-shirts, while the bachelor himself is burdened with a cross made of beer cans. They stroll around, drinking and singing. Another group I saw has a tuba and accordion.

Slovenia