The mercury will dip to minus 17 today so the juju men tell us.  Brisk indeed. Just the day of a stroll up to the castle (or ‘Grad’  in local parlance – these are Slavic tribes after all.)

Ljubljana is a find. Admittedly 300000 residents and quite a number of others discovered it before our party of explorers,  but that doesn’t reduce the thrill.   Why has no one told me about this place? The old town sits between the Grad and the river.  There are a string of bridges across to the new town – by ‘new’, read 1500’s.

Much of Ljubljana was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1890’s,  so the entire rebuild was put in the hands of a single architect. This man had never been a student of the Clive Palmer Institute Good Taste, instead he belonged to the ‘beautiful city winding along both banks of a river,  with open spaces for pedestians’ school.  Not a dinosaur to be seen, no replicas of the Titanic anywhere – just parks,  promenades,  pubs and people.

Slovenia generally was untouched by the breakup of Yugoslavia. Their war with Belgrade lasted  just 10 days.  Slovenia was the first of the states to declare independence,  followed by Croatia and Bosnia the next day. The Yugoslav Army decided to attack Slovenia,  but to do so they had to cross Croatia.  Because the army consisted of troops from every state, including Slovenia and Croatia, there were massive defections along the way.  What was left of the Yugoslav army had a shocking time as soon as they crossed the Slovenian border. After 10 days they gave up and went home. The nation of Slovenia officially existed.

Our days have been spent wandering around this beautiful city and eating.  No Mr Ed sausages or foal fillets in green pepper sauce for us,  but there are game meat dishes and hearty stews aplenty,  along with everything Italian, Turkish and Slavic influenced. This is the part of the world where the Habsbergs,  the Ottomans and the Russian empires all collided for centuries.  The Austrians brought wine and wonderful pastries and the Turks brought coffee and seafood.  The Russians? They brought pickled cabbages to the Slovenian gastronomic table.

Can’t win ’em all.

When Rosewood State School restarted after the Christmas holidays in 1967 our class had swimming lessons on  Friday.  To the surprise of the entire boys cohort,  Kenny K got changed in a cubicle.  Two Fridays in a row in fact. Then the truth came out. To our amazement Kenny had grown pubic hairs over the holidays.

Kenny became famous in a Rosewood kind of way after that.  Subsequently we deferred to Kenny on all important matters  – girls,  really accurate information about sex,  even footy – such was his standing with the Year 6 boys.   He was,  of course,  the first to shave,  the first to have a girlfriend for more than a school week,  he even got an electric guitar for his birthday.  Kenny was a hairy, Rosewood God.  Slovenia is a bit like Rosewood in that respect..

When I researched famous Slovenians – this is my list:

1
2
3
4
5

There’s not much to go on.  Josef Broz Tito’s mother was probably Slovenian. Weird Al Yankovich has forebears that are Slovenian. And the Kransky sausage is Slovenian. That was pretty much it.   THEN in the Sochii Winter Olympics something amazing happened,  Slovenians got a dual gold medalist named Tina Maze  – gold medals in the Super G and the Women’s Downhill!

So my list of famous Slovenians now reads:

1  Tina Maze
2  Tina Maze
3  Tina Maze
4  Tina Maze
5  Tina Maze

Kenny was shaving up to his eyelids in Yr 9, but his bright flame of notoriety rapidly dimmed.  In fact very few people outside of Rosewood would have ever heard of him.  Slovenians have their own Kenny. And they didn’t  have to spy on her in the changing room to find themselves a hero. She achieved fame with her pants up and skis on.  Good on you Tina Maze,  I say.

The first snow.  And my goodness gracious me Remington ,  it has snowed.  We don’t get weather like this in the Antipodean isles.

Today we went by train from Zagreb to Ljubljana –  a trip very few from the Commonwealth deign to travel.   The trip takes 3hrs and is some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen.   It follows the River Mary (or some such) for most of the journey,  through the foothills of the Austrian Alps. I think this scenery compares more than favourably to that observed on the rattler between Rosewood and Grandchester, such is the majesty of the view!

Ljubljana is small, beautiful and cold. We dined out – but passed on the house specially (fillet of foal) out of deference to Meg.

I’m sure the foal fillet would have been tender,  but we all must draw the gastronomic line somewhere – mine I think is horse – even if it is served with a green pepper sauce.

To bed after a day of wonders

Farley

It doesn’t matter how you say it,  it isn’t correct.   The lady selling tickets won’t have a clue what town you’re talking about.   People on the street won’t have heard of the place.   But we got there,  and it was really quite beautiful.

Varazdin is a little town one and a half hours by bus from Zagreb. Driving into town it looked more like the headquarters for a number of concrete manufacturing businesses than somewhere to spend the day,  however the centre of the town is a pearl – baroque architecture no cars for 3 or 4 blocks in the centre.  Simply stunning.

Apart from the Webers’s home cooked meals,  lunch was one of the best meals I’ve had in Europe.  I had duck breast with barley,  Linda goulash and both dishes were exceptional.  The service throughout was excellent.   To finish we had coffee, and it was shit. The meal including the shit coffee,  sides etc – about $25 each. 

God bless you Varazdin,  or whatever your name is.

Went to mass today in the Zagreb Cathedral.  The music was great – but I didn’t think much of the sermon.

Though the party after was a jolly good show.  My goodness the Cunnington-Smythes can throw a party, if I do say so myself.

Merry Christmas all

Kinder
I know how much you love my riddles:
“What do you get when you pour root beer into a square glass.  Beer”

If only you signed up to follow my blog there would be jokes like this every day! And photos of your dear Father in party mode.  How good would that be?!!!!!!!

Neither Linda nor I do guided tours particularly well.  The first time we travelled together overseas it was to Singapore and the package included a tour to some attraction each day.  We lasted one day then quit the group -much to the disgust of the tour leader. 

When we returned to Auschwitz in 2009 we thought we thought we had booked a driver for the day so that we could wander around that place alone with our thoughts.  The van that was to be our transport arrived and when the door opened we we were greeted by a dozen faces – we had booked a guided tour by mistake.  It was awful.  Our tour guide – Reich Fuhrer Christina – just wanted to get the tour over and done with so she could get back in time to pick up little Adolphus from school.  A place that usually inspires the deepest of silences and thoughts was rushed and unpleasant.

Last year we made the pilgrimage to ANZAC Cove – somewhere we could only go to as part of a tour.  The guide spoke some language.  The Dutchman on the bus said it wasn’t Dutch, The Germans said it wasn’t German and the people from Normandy said it wasn’t French.  I don’t think it was English.  Most people had surrendered before we even left the beaches – they just stayed on the bus or wandered aimlessly.  One Turk had single handedly defeated a bus load of foreigners.  That same man later got a gig signing at Nelson Mandela’s funeral.

There was some trepidation (for you Lindsay) therefore when we accepted the offer of a tour around Zagreb.  It was wonderful.  Ivana was a professor of English and Russian before she and her husband started their own business.  The 3 hour tour lasted around 5 hours and we loved every minute. Ivana was obviously passionate about Zagreb and that shone through.  She liked the quirky bits – for example the magnificent chandeliers in the cathedral had come from a failed Las Vegas casino – and she loved the history.  It was a wonderful way to get a feel for her Croatia.

The country has had such an unsettling recent past – the communist era, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the war with Serbia and massacres shown on TV screens to bring an end to the 20th Century -something most Europeans could not even imagine happening again after Nuremberg.  They have been forced to face some of their own demons as a condition of joining the EU – the jailing of politicians and war criminals and more recently the need to somehow manage their attitudes towards the influx of Romanians, particularly Gypsies.  But in so many ways it reminds me of Poland today.  Somewhere that is now proud to be its own country after centuries of being just a part of somewhere else

Zagreb is a gem. Ivana is a gem.  Most people just land here and head off to other parts of Croatia.  Me? I just want to come back.

I’ll let you go now Farquar

Rossjnici of Zagreb

I rate Zagreb.  It is, without doubt,  one of the cleanest cities I have ever visited.   There is a friendliness to the people that is almost universal.  Plus Croatian words are so ridiculously difficult to pronounce that you don’t feel obliged to even attempt learning anything more than the most basic terms (The word for Square is ‘trg’  I only come close to getting it right if I have a mouthful of food and try to make bird noises)

As a city/culture there are a few obvious gaps. There is no such thing as a breakfast menu – that meal is almost always eaten at home by Croats. Supermarkets don’t exist (a good thing)  but it is difficult to buy bits and pieces (glue for example) . People are encouraged to smoke near any Australian they see, and they do.  (Smoking is the national past time –  even the Three Wise Men at the nativity play outside the cathedral were having a quick smoke before they took their gifts into the stable. I guess you need a smoke after following that star all the way to Croatia. Particularly if they flew in with Air Serbia )  Coffee shops don’t sell any food at all,  just coffee. The coffee however has been fantastic.

We have been each morning to Eli’s. The owner has won a number of international barista competitions and he is a perfectionist. This morning one of his customers was pouring champagne or pear brandy for everyone and handing out pieces of cheese. Because you can.

The food markets are probably even better than the IGA in Rosewood,  which obviously gives you an idea of the quality!  Even if breakfast is a non-event, we have certainly eaten well in the latter part of the day.   We spent the day today getting the ingredients for Christmas lunch – pork fillets with an orange sauce,  baked vegetables and a pear dessert to follow.

Anyway time to cook dinner – a stew made with pjrzcij ,  csztnija,  dbrvnkija,  and vino.   Should be good.

  Hey Nat and Mitch,

Schrödinger walks into a bar and asks, ‘Has anyone seen my cat?’
The bartender says,  ‘I had a look. It’s dead.’

(Just imagine kids,  if you became disciples this fine humour would appear as if by magic every time I post a blog.   How good would that be?l

)

Bloggers gauge their success by the number of followers.
In just two years of blogging I have already passed the three followers mark. 😄
I was hoping for 12 disciples by year’s end- this is the season of miracles after all……

(Mind you, neither of my children are followers. Is that the cock I just heard crowing Ms and Master Judas-Evans?
In an attempt to get you to follow I’ll even give you both another nerd joke:

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother)

I don’t know if any of my four disciples have ever flown Air Serbia.  I suspect not.  It tends to be an experience that is shared by retelling, perhaps as a means to afford healing, so I would have heard. The flight to Belgrade from Rome was with Air Italia; smooth, efficient, great service -just as you would expect from a major airline. It didn’t quite ready us for the next leg.

Linda and I were amongst the first commercial passengers to fly Belgrade to Zagreb as the route had only just been opened.  The last planes to navigate their way from Belgrade to Zagreb were Mig fighter jets and Serbian bombers.  In the war of the ’90s approximately 25% of the Zagreb economy and infrastructure was destroyed by Serbs and their allies.  The war only finished when Croatia launched the biggest ground offensive in Europe since the fall of Berlin and took back all its territory, thereby forcing an end to hostilities. Croatia launched itself into the EU, prosecuted most of its war criminals and zoomed ahead, Serbia sulked and stagnated.

The plane we were on predated that conflict.  People had carved graffiti into the wooden seats (Sjlobidan loves Krsnina I’m guessing.) The hostie told everyone to stack their baggage in the overhead lockers – this would have worked if your entire baggage consisted of just a wallet and a handkerchief.  She then suggested putting it under the seat in front of you as she had heard that was what some airlines allow.  No chance of anything fitting there.  “Can you squeeze it down near that space where you legs might just fit when there’s no luggage?”. Nope.  ‘Perhaps nurse it or leave it in the aisle,’ was her final suggestion.

She and the male purser didn’t have much time to organise the cabin as a fight had broken out behind us and they felt obliged to help sort it out.  The fight was made more vicious as it was between father and daughter.  They were screaming at each other over who got the aisle seat and who’d had to have luggage where their legs were meant to go.

I could sense the male purser’s frustration.  He’d done everything needed to make it into the airline business as part of the cabin crew on an international airline.  He could speak a number of languages including English.  He’d done well at school and done well at the training college. He took enormous care with his uniform, always having matching accessories. And he cared deeply about his bodily hygiene.   Despite all this he ends up on Air Serbia flying back and forth between Belgrade and Zageb on a plane that should have lost its airworthiness certificate in 1979. In his heart of hearts he knew his Mother was right.  There is no future in air travel in Serbia,  a young man is better off becoming a bus driver.  Or a pig farmer like his father.

As my friend Remmington would say – ‘Life can be funny like that sometimes’

Better let you go Farquar
Ross of the Balkans

The problem with attempting to speak Croatian to the locals is that the whole language was invented in 1256 by some bloke with a really shit scrabble set.  King Krjckic (Croatian for Peter) lost most of the decent consonants and quite a few vowels over the years but made up a new language anyway with what he had left. Impossible.
Thankfully smiles and laughter seem to be a language that is universal – with the possible exception of Hungarians and US Border Control.

Apart from language difficulties we are just loving the locals and the chance to spend some time exploring this place .

Ross

Mitch – promised a joke just for you if you become a disciple:

Schroedinger’s cat walked into a bar and didn’t.