slovenia

slovenia :: Ljubljana

slovenia is slovenia but it is also something that it is not. which means: a complete lack of the usual beautiful cities of Europe tourist headaches like traffic jams and excessive souveneir shoppage and city squares packed with more tourists than residents. the country's airport reminds us more of a friendly bus station, secluded in the woods and innocent. It is lacking in traffic and hassle and excessive security strip searches. People leave enormous suitcased snowboards unattended and crossing the taxi lane to get to the bus isn't life-endangering.

when we board the bus the old driver is absentmindedly listening to first a Laibach then a Rammstein song.

everywhere you go you can see the mountain peaks in the background. after living such a long time in flatlands, the old childhood memories of seeing mountains come back. just as living near an ocean has a strange calming effect, so do living near mountains. like the sky, they are always changing. from the city and the observation deck of the modern art museum i can see the mountains, and a few days later i can see the mountains all around me, pushing through and three dimensional. even around the small towns around the train there are small clouds that float at human head level.

The countryside is eerily familiar to anyone who has lived in Germany or Austria. The buildings are the same, the street signs are the same, it's just that the names have a Slavic tinge, but the churches and roadside Virgin mary shrines are pronouncedly Bavarian almost. The streets are clean and well-repaired, and there is an atmosphere of extreme calmness and order everywhere we go.

At the train station a few days later, I notice the enormous piles of rave flyers. This is a young city. In the oldtown the shops feature expensive trendy labels from Italy and the U.K. We keep making jokes and obsessing over a beauty product store called EXTRAVAGANJA. Walking around the pretty bridges you walk past people who look like they have stepped out of your neighborhood in Berlin or Vienna or Munich. They are clear-skinned, long-legged, tall and young.

At Tivoli Park, full of forests and pathways and a grand Italian mansion, I like to pretend that I am one of them, and that this is my weekend walk with my friends. The couples and children scramble up and down the snowy hillside, and I make my way ot the top and gaze down at the city, ah, so now I know why there are no scenic postcards of Ljubljana in all of its entirety. The concrete outskirts and skyscrapers are not so alluring. All the same, I don't mind and it all looks fine to me.



At a café (which is actually a really kitschy concept of a French café and would be offensive anywhere else but since i'm on vacation it's ok) the waiters look like hunky fashion models, and they serve excellent espressos and macchiatos to intellectual families. I bet the mommies are film directors and the papas are art professors. The children sneak in programs like PIMP MY RIDE, but the parents drag them to modern theater performances.

The whole city was rejuvenated architecturally by national architect hero Josef Plecnik, although at the end of his life he wasn't fashionable and lost his sphere of influence. People only get hero-fied when they die. He was a Sim City real life player who went crazy and transformed Ljubljana into something special with all of his clever bridge makeovers and market constructions. Maybe todays modern architects should take a listen and stop constructing buildings that look like vector explosions or Frank Gehry copycats.

at the hotel there were machines that we could polish our shoes at, fine and rough. The old men with the canes and the fedoras did that, and I tried to copy them but was not so successful at making my sneakers more presentable. The silkscreen dye stain is still there.

the town hall was beautiful, with a stylized map of the city against a wall, but the three huge murals of the Slovenians being enslaved first by the romans, then the turks, then the Austrians unnerved me. Is it healthy to have a national identity that goes back so far? Is it really healthy to construct a culture? Well if not, so they say, it will all be English and McDonald's. By the cathedral in the main square, men in 1940s Italian fascist uniforms zip around in sputtering mopeds as chic filmmaker crews push people away behind the line. It's a film about the Italian takeover of Slovenia in the forties, and a woman is running around looking like Betty Page in a brown suit trying to protect a young boy with flowers.



At the bus station the middle-aged people strike us as different, smaller and humbler with more old-fashioned 1980s haircuts that aren't ironic. Little did they know, they would give birth in the 1970s and 1980s to a Eurovision generation of leggy supermodels who would listen to techno trance music and dance naked in the woods. They listened to Rod Steward songs and drank beers and twirled their moustaches at 6 a.m., wondering how time had passed on so quickly.