In da Cljub

Getting to Ljubljana was something that was actually more difficult than I had initially anticipated, almost exclusively because I refused to pay any money to get there.  Unfortunately for me, countries that think they are part of Western Europe do not have group taxis that regularly go right to the border crossings.  How old ladies are supposed to carry their plastic burlap sacks full of cheap cigarettes and ugly plastic shoes across the line is beyond me, and this ugly reality affected me in ways I never though possible.  I took a public bus from Nagykanizsa to Letenye, and walked out of the EU, out of the Magyar Köztarsaság, and into the Respublika Hrvatska, back into the Ex-oslavia and the temperamental Balkans for more unpredictability and Enlightenment-deprived antics.  

Across whatever river separates Hungary and Croatia (not the Sava, Wikipedia is currently insisting) I indeed found what may easily sum up the corrosive effects of the backwardness endemic to the Balkan Peninsula: I stopped at the border to have a pizza and it had egg on it.  I had arrived.  For some inexplicable reason there was a major highway going right up to the border, but not into Hungary, and there was an unsurprisingly scant amount of traffic on it.  Of the Mercedes SUVs and other indicators of the nouveau riche that opted to whiz past me at an unhealthy speed, my experience hitchhiking on it brought back memories of why I had only spend a maximum of 3 hours in Croatia in the past: people are not keen on hitchhiking.  In fact, if I can make one argument against Croatia joining the EU, it’s that not enough people offered me free rides. 

One argument for accession, however, is that one man in a tow-truck did stop for me, earning another gold star of my appreciation for the Croatian working class especially on this the day of the workers’ struggle.  He deposited me at a fork in the road where I could choose Zagreb, or the Slovene border.  I had every reason to assume that a random crossing on the Slovene border would be more fruitful than the transportation hub of Croatia, so I headed in that direction.  I hastily Sharpie’d a sign that roughly indicated “Ljubljana” and within a few steps out of the city limits, a car stopped.  A woman and her brother stopped to pick me up and were headed in the right direction.  Like every Slovene, evidently, they had both travelled extensively. The woman, who had studied in Montreal in the early 2000s, told me that if I had a blog, it’s important to keep it up.  I am sure you will be the first to admit that I have not followed their advice as I am only getting to this part in my travels almost two years later. 

They took me right to the Železniška stanica (explaining, with a wry smile and more than hint of irony, the important difference between the Serbian Železnička and the Croatian Željeznički) where I met my Harvard-educated chauffeur and British host.  After apologising for being more than fashionably late, we then went out on the town, which included a visit to some sort of Yugoslav former prison-cum-bar where I ate more than my fair share of vegan bean stew and listened to some death metal or whatever Northern Europeans seem to be into.