Leaving Venice, we headed to Ljubljana and the landscape changed so quickly to some beautiful mountains! And SNOW! The girls were so excited to see snow. And with the snow, comes some much colder weather!
Unfortunately once we got to Ljubljana, Robyn pulled her back and we had to adapt our plans a bit for her to be able to rest and recover. Luckily our accommodation was a stone’s throw away from the old city centre, so it was an easy walk into town. There we got to explore a few things:
- The Castle, and within it is a puppet museum. Whilst the castle was not very big, it had charm. It was even used as a prison and then a POW camp during WW1. The puppet museum also made it a great attraction, as the kids got to see and play with different puppets. It is surprising how complex some of the puppet can get, arms, legs, heads all being controlled at once. Mish tried his hands at trying to control one, but soon ran out of hands…
- The Slovenia Museum taught us a bit about Slovenia’s very colourful history. From the roman times all the way to its modern state.
- The railway museum. Mish took the girls to the railway museum. It was great, as they had a few cut outs of the steam system, and the girls learnt how steam powers the wheels. They also learnt why there are different wheel configurations for freight trains vs passenger trains.
- We got to see two historic bridges, that conned the north-west of Europe to the south-east of Europe and the Balkans. The first one is the Triple Bridge, which really is like three bridges side by side, from 1842 (that replaced the wood bridge from around 1280). The second bridge, is the Dragon bridge with its dragons guarding both sides of the bridge. This plays to the legend of how Ljubljana was found when Jason and his men killed the local dragon (represented by one of the dragons on the bridge). There is definitely a dragon theme in the city.
- And as we are nearing Christmas, we had our first Christmas market of the our road trip. It was a great atmosphere with people gathering and socialising over drinks and food. We of course had our fair share, with the adults trying their first WHITE gluhwein, it was delicious!
We were surprised to learn that for the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana only has a population of around 280,000. But on reflection it definitely has a small city feel to it! Our next destination is definitely a lot bigger - Zagreb, Croatia
Comments
Post a Comment