Hello everyone and happy holidays! In this post, i will continue my travel journey to Slovenia one of the most underrated European countries out there. In order to have a better picture of my trip let me share a few info before we dive in!
So my travel itinerary was to visit Slovenia from Greece. When we arrived we took the bus to Lake Bled where we stayed for 1 night. In order to learn more about what we did in Lake Bled and see more photos click here. After we ate our breakfast in Lake Bled and walked for around 40 minutes around the Lake then we got to the bus station which was 5 minutes from our hotel and headed to Ljubljana.
From Lake Bled Ljubljana by bus was around an hour or less i think which is pretty close, to be honest. Also, as i mentioned in my previous post no need to book tickets online. You simply need cash, you get on the bus and pay the driver directly and due to being Sunday i think we pay around 1.5 euros per person which is nothing!
Now the Bus reaches the Central let's say bus station in Ljubljana where all the buses are and you can go and take them to basically go everywhere outside of Ljubljana, like Lake Bled, the Airport, heck even Croatia and Italy. From there i had an Airbnb booked which was 15 minutes on foot from the Bus station and another 15 minutes from the center of Ljubljana. Thus it was perfect for us!
I won't bore you with details on the Airbnb but the only thing that i will tell you is that it was amazing, the owner even came to take us by car from the bus station! Now the day we arrived it was quite a foggy day and the AirBnb owner explained to us that this is Ljubljana during the winter and also provided some recommendations. So we left our bags and decided to go explore the city and visit the main castle which lies in the center of the town!
Before we arrived at the castle we had to cross the famous Dragon Bridge. So apparently there once stood an oak bridge but due to the renovation plan
of the mayor, around 100+ years ago they created that one. Note that it is considered to be the first bridge to be paved with asphalt, the first reinforced concrete bridge in Ljubljana and one of the earliest reinforced concrete bridges in Europe. At its time of opening, it was also the third-largest arch in Europe.
As soon as we crossed the beautiful bridge we headed straight to the castle as it was like 5 minutes from the bridge. Note that there are different ways to get to the castle. One is simply by foot through a park and the other we did through the funicular which was pretty awesome, to be honest, but due to foggy weather, we couldn't see a lot. The price was 19 euros but it could be around 13 i think if you just go on foot.
Now the castle was quite interesting and had a lot of different things to do and see. You could go all the way up to the watch tower but sadly due to the foggy weather, we couldn't see a thing. Now besides that, the castle had a lot of different let's say rooms for the people to see which was quite interesting.
There was an interactive room where we would wear 3D glasses and sit in a small room that resembled a cinema and could watch a movie let's say about the history of the castle. This was quite interesting and fun. Interesting as we learned that the castle was first used as a settlement in 1200 BC. Since then the French and Austrian empires took over the castle which even won against the Ottomans. In 1905 it was passed to the municipality of Ljubljana and the mayor started the first renovations in order to make it a museum that people could visit.
The fun element that i talked about was that besides the whole 3D interaction the seats were moving so depending on the narrative and story you would move as well. Also when it was raining in the movie there was a spray of water towards us!
After we learned more about the history we headed to the other rooms. Some of them were cells as the castle used to be a prison for some time. There was a small room filled with findings and weapons. Another room with interactive paintings. Basically, you would sit in the middle of the room and with the help of the projects you could see all around you some famous paintings taking life.
Finally, an interesting room which i enjoyed was the room of Puppets. There we could learn about Slovenia's rich history with puppets, see a lot of old and new ones, heck even watch some Puppet "cartoons" that played back in the day!
After we saw everything that the castle had to offer we headed back to the city and headed to a restaurant that according to the locals had some traditional dishes but in a more gourmet way let's say. Can't say i got excited, some dishes were okish, some bad and some decent but hey they got their own Coca-Cola, which reminded me of a medicine that i used to take when i was a kid!
In my next post, i will show you what Ljubljana looks like with sunny weather! Let me know if you have visited Ljubljana and whether you liked my post! Note that all the pictures have been taken by me and thus all the rights are reserved.
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Hiya, @ybanezkim26 here, just swinging by to let you know that this post made it into our Honorable Mentions in Travel Digest #2424.
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