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A lovely start this morning with breakfast Hotel Mrak. Nice buffet with fruit, juices, breads, and more, plus I ordered a ham and cheese omelet, which was excellent.

Note: This is the fifth post in this series. Go HERE to start from the beginning.

After that, we met as a group with Minka, our Slovenian guide (and Elvis, her sidekick, who’s from Cuba). She explained what we’d be doing this morning and we took off on our walk around the city. First, here’s what the hotel looks like from the street. Just as I found in many places in Italy and other countries I’ve been in (not a lot, admittedly!), the entrance is very unassuming. You could miss it if you weren’t looking for it. We gathered across the street to ensure everyone was there, then we began.

Too many facts to recount! As always with this blog, it’s not about recounting lots of facts. It’s my memory jogger about my impressions.

The city started as a Roman settlement. When they were gone, another portion of the city was built in what was considered a more favorable location.

Much, like very much, of the architecture was designed by one architect, Dr. Ivan Priiateli (sp?). His structures are found all over the city. One interesting fact is that he believed people were too focused on getting where they were going when they were walking on the sidewalks. He designed raised areas with benches so people could/would sit on those and look out over the people walking. Changes the whole feeling of the street.

We passed the library again, finding out that those upper windows were designed to resemble books, Who would have guessed? Then we stopped by the university (white building with portico) and the mall and park area in front of it. Then a square with lots of street vendors. Very busy!

At one of our stops, I noticed one of many birds in a tree. Caught it just right for this pic:

Minka explained that there are over 1,000 dragons in the city. She said we wouldn’t see most of them, though. They’re considered a good thing here in the city, part of the mythology of the place. And they tell the story of St. George slaying the dragon, too. They’re quite creatively included on lots of things. This first one is outside a store entrance, not obvious unless you’re looking for it. Then on most of the manhole covers is a dragon above a castle. And then there’s the obvious top-of-a-column statue, of course!

The Lipizaner horses were big here. (That pic’s for you, Denise!) And Minka folded her shirt to show how the name of the city can be “Love” in Slovenian. The flag shows how LOVE is in the name SLOVEenia. And notice the heart-shaped plastic cup I’m holding under the flag? Minka had just given us a taste of some traditional Slovenian dessert in those. I thought the shape was quite creative. 😉

We passed a milk vending machine. The un-pasturized, un-processed milk is stocked in these machines daily and they tend to empty daily (you can get eggs there, too, apparently). And we walked though a couple of block-long flower market. Smelled wonderful, as well as being pretty).

Next we stopped to see the main door on a Catholic church that had amazing carvings on it. Minka is standing at the right side of the door in the first picture. From the bottom up, it tells Slovenian history. At the top is Pope John Paul. The door was commissioned and carved in honor of him.

Finally it was time for our last stop on this tour–the castle! Now, this was scheduled to be a 2-hour tour but went almost twice that long. Minka had lots to share and it’s obvious she loves and appreciates her country; so we did, too!

There are a couple of ways to get up to the castle: the funicular and walking. Several of us chose the funicular and it was such fun! Here’s what that looked like. (For the first ten seconds or so you can see me in the lower-left recording the video.)

Up at the castle I had an opportunity to get my dragon wings. 🙂 (Thank you, Jamie for taking a great picture!) Then we reached a point where we could look down on the castle courtyard. After climbing lots of stairs to get to the top of the tower, we were rewarded with fabulous views! If you look closely at the last picture, you can see that library building in the top middle.

Coming back down, we took time to watch a 3-D movie that told the history of the castle, actually starting with the settlements that came before the walls were built (then re-built). It was great. When it rained on the screen, we were surprised with a light rain shower in the audience. Everyone’s surprised reaction at that was fun. 🙂 Seats rumbled at appropriate times, too.

At one point while walking around, there was a view port down into the depths of the castle. Pretty cool! And there were also prison cells and a chapel. (The chapel has the amazing ceiling).

From there, it was time to head back to the hotel. I walked with Ellen since she was going directly there. Everyone else walked back through the market to have lunch. On the way down, Ellen looked at her step count and said she’d get 18,000 steps in today. Whew! I am NOT used to this much walking. I was glad to get back to be able to rest up a bit.

The evening’s activities were a meeting with Alinka (green dress on right), who we’ll be staying with at our next destination, and her boss’s boss (if I got that correctly; she hadn’t made it to the meeting yet when I took this picture). They work for a ministry that is doing space planning and advising. We had a discussion that went beyond just that, though, finding out more about them personally, and sharing some of our personal stories, too. That was nice.

The evening’s activities were basically to go to something that happens every Friday evening called Open Kitchen. It’s food vendors serving up all types of food from all around the world, and it was very crowded. I lost touch with the other folks who had come, so ate something and headed back towards the hotel.

Minka had done a good job of orienting us to the layout of the city, so I was able to navigate very well. Didn’t ever feel lost, and even found my chocolate ice cream for the night! On the way back, I got a couple of pictures of a lovely fountain. Then, to finish off the night, I got a lovely picture of the library all lit up for the evening. Beautiful.

Tomorrow some of us are going on a boat ride in the river that goes through the city, then we’ll have an opportunity to see the Roman Wall and City Museum. By 3 PM we should be on the way to our next stop, Celje, a 90-minute drive away.

I feel full up with all the sights, sounds, and tastes of the city. It’s hard to imagine taking in more, but we’re still early in this trip. So, I’m headed to bed, hopefully to mentally process the events of this very full day!