Without a Traceroute

I spent the first couple nights in Ljubljana at the “#1 hippest hostel in the world” as determined by Lonely Planet. Since I’ve been stubbornly avoiding carrying any tourist guidebooks on this trip, I was unaware of this when I checked in. I just picked the closest hostel to the train station marked on the map I got from the tourist office. The place actually was pretty cool. It’s located inside a renovated military prison; local artists decorated many of the rooms, and there’s a small art gallery on the ground floor. They offered a daily tour, which I never got around to taking. I imagine in high-season it would be quite the place the be, but in November it was mostly empty. However, the lack of guests didn’t cause them to lower their prices, or stop them nickle-and-diming you with €4/hour internet access and overpriced drinks at the bar. These are the things you can do when you’re the hippest hostel on the face of the Earth, I suppose.

I did meet another guest, an American from Hollywood. He works for Jerry Bruckheimer’s production company, scouting new scripts, or books that can be made into scripts and then finding “punch-up” writers to improve the scripts or rework the books into scripts. Shockingly, despite this description he was not at all intolerable! Going to school in LA for 4 years, I’ve run into my share of “Hollywood people” before, and usually despise them within minutes. This guy seemed genuinely open, curious and friendly; he wasn’t arrogant or trying to impress me, and didn’t even tell me what he did until I asked. We went to the Slovenian National Gallery together (it’s free on Sundays) and he seemed genuinely interested in my (admittedly minimal) knowledge of different art styles, and the classical mythology / Christian iconography depicted therein.

Monday, I went to the opening event of the Hack, Act, Interact, Progress (HAIP) festival at an art gallery. It was very busy, with a variety of international artists and interested onlookers. There was free wine and little cracker/bread snacks. The local media was also out in force with photographers and television cameramen wandering around. The TV cameras were particularly intrusive. I was pleased that the media thought a tech-art event was worth covering, but I got kind of sick of the camera guy with a bright light following me around, apparently trying to get footage of somebody “experiencing” the art or something. Every time I turned to look at him, he gestured at me to keep looking at whatever I was looking at before. Finally, I pulled out my own camera and snapped a photo of him.

Observing the observer

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Immediately after the Ubuntu release party, I took an overnight train from Berlin to Munich with a transfer to Ljubljana, Slovenia (I pronounce it “Loob-lee-yana” and nobody ever corrected me) very early the next morning. I had wanted to spend longer in Berlin. For some reason, in my mind, this festival was always at the end of November, but when I checked the day after arriving in Berlin, I realized it actually started on the 3rd.

Somewhere between Munich and Ljubljana

It’s interesting how the the incidental vagaries of how you feel at a particular moment can affect your decision-making. Because I was booking the train to Ljubljana just after my lengthy train/train/bus/airport floor/plane trip to Berlin, I sprang for the extra €20 to have a fold-out bed instead of just a seat thinking “At least I’ll get a good night’s sleep”, not really factoring in that I’d have about a week’s worth of perfectly good nights in Berlin and feel much less burnt-out by the time I was getting on the train. Had I booked the train the night before I was leaving, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the bed. Nevertheless, I appreciated me-from-one-week-ago’s generosity. German trains are quite nice, and mine was very comfortable. It even had an electrical plug so I could use my laptop without running down the battery.

The only problem with this plan was a little boy in the compartment across from mine who was way, way too interested in watching me playing little games and watching movies on my computer. I tried to say ‘hi’ but he seemed only to speak German. His wide-eyed staring was starting to creep me out, so I tried to dissuade his interest by opening up the most boring program I could think of: a text editor. I tried to work on composing my first quarterly report to the Watson Foundation. But when he maintained his rapt interest in the face of a screen of text, I put the computer away and switched to a book.

The Munich train station seemed nice enough. This was actually the third time in my life I’ve transited through Munich without ever seeing anything of the city. Since it was about 6:30 am, I avoided sampling the beer Munich is famous for and instead bought a bottle of “still” water for the five-hour train ride to Ljubljana.

I put “still” in quotes because true non-carbonated bottled water doesn’t really exist in Germany. The water “mit gas” is quite bubbly, while even the “still” water is very lightly carbonated. I remember once a few years ago asking a German woman why they don’t have actual still water, you know, like tap water? Her reaction was one of disgust, “Eww, to drink such flat water, it would be like…well, do you have in English, the expression ‘like licking the sweat from the balls of a dog’?” I assured her that while no such colloquial phrase existed in English, the meaning was exceedingly clear.

The ride to Ljubljana was very scenic, passing through sections of the Austrian alps. I got most of the way through “Marching Powder” a totally insane true story about the craziest prison in the world, and a great read I was given in a Berlin hostel. My first impression upon arriving in Slovenia was how clean, developed and modern it seemed. I knew basically nothing about Slovenia prior to arriving, but I suppose I had sort of been expecting it to conform to some composite stereotype of a post-communist Balkan state. If anything, the opposite is true. Ljubljana is a charming, modern capital city (and actually slightly more expensive than Berlin). Budapest has fantastic architecture and history, but also a kind of eastern greyness that wore on me over time; none of that is present in “the LJ” as some of the younger residents refer to it.