The Allisons

Slovenia!

We drove to Slovenia this weekend. We left at about 10:30 and drove across the border into Slovenia. We were pretty nervous going across the border being that we don't have actual tourist passports, but Mike's military ID and my military passport seemed to be acceptable. It's an open border, but they still have stopping points where they check ID. Similar to the US/Mexico border. We drove into the first little border town Gorizia to find something to eat. While we are kind of getting used to reading signs in Italian, signs in Slovenian (I guess that's what they speak) were vastly different. The language uses most of the same letters, but in every combination thinkable. It almost similar to Russian. How did we get around you may wonder. Mostly, we just try to find signs that say the name of the town we want to go to and then go that direction. Admittedly, not an exact science, but we made it to where we wanted to go and back without major incident, so I guess it works. Oh, and we had a map so we knew vaguely which direction to travel. Granted the map only shows major roads and we weren't always on major roads so that's when reading signs becomes necessary.
We were getting very hungry and it was way past lunch time so we drove to what appeared to be the center of town to eat. We got out and walked into the plaza which much to our dismay was mostly closed. The stores close at 1:00 on Saturdays. The only places open were bars/coffee shops and ice cream shops. So we went into a casino and had ham (prosciutto) and cheese sandwiches. (Gross!)

Because our trip was very badly organized, we forgot all of our tourist information and had no idea what we should go and see. But I wanted at least to drive through part of the country and not just go back across the border only seeing 2 miles into Slovenia. So we decided to make a loop back into Italy. We drove through the extreme west to south in Slovenia. So here we are driving through the little towns. It's pretty and mountainous. There are vineyards everywhere. Much more than in our area of Italy. Finally we come to a town called Stanjel and overlooking the town is a glorious castle. We drove up to it, and it was closed. It is open April through September. We all know that this is one of the main reasons I wanted to come to Europe. It was amazing. My first castle experience. I love it! (The light gray color of the words is the color of the stones in the castle.)
The second sight of interest was city on a hill so to speak. Down the road into another town, there was a medieval, walled city. There was a stone wall all the way around with a gated entrance, and a couple of half turrets at a points along the wall. There were cars parked along the street at the bottom of the hill so we assumed it was open. We parked and walked up the hill to the city. When we walked through the entrance we found that someone was holding a wedding there. What a great place to have a wedding! There were a couple of ladies in traditional Slovenian dress. We ate the food, danced and sent the bride and groom on there way. Just kidding! We felt awkward but there appeared to be other tourists milling about as well, so we just tried to stay out of the way and walked around the city. It was weird because while it really felt like we were stepping back in time, there were people living in the city. The streets were just barely wide enough for 1 very tiny car. I guess there's one way in, the streets are all one way, and eventually you get to the other end which leads out of the city because there's no way 2 cars could pass each other. Mike stepped in dog poo on the way back to the car. Ha!

The picture on the left below is the walled city. The picture on the right below is inside the city.
So those two places were very cool and definitely made the trip for us. We spent about 7 hours driving around, but it really didn't seem that bad. We got out and walked here and there. It was very pretty and the people seemed nice. (Except for in the medieval town--they looked annoyed that we were walking up and down their streets) .
Tune in next week for more adventures. Maybe Milan or Florence?

Out of necessity, we got a digital camera. So thanks anyway Laney--we just couldn't wait. These are authentic pictures. However, I don't claim to be a photographer so....