Ljubljana. (ɴᴏᴛ ʟᴀɪвᴀᴄʜ; ᴛʜᴀᴛ’s ᴀ вᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇsᴇ ᴅᴀʏs) … Klagenfurt. 21st of August, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 06:31

I got back Tuesday evening from three days in Ljubljana,, hanging out with Zocky, a friend from IRC. The weather behaved admirably—I had been worried about ridiculous heat, which is reasonably normal in the Balkans in August, and the few days beforehand had been rainy—Zocky and B. were excellent hosts, only breaking out the rifle a couple of times to prevent me for paying for dinner and coffee, and in general it was really fun.

It’s a small city, 270,000 people, a bit run-down, and was a regional capital in Austria-Hungary, so there’s not an astonishing amount to see. Zocky had time to show me around, and I ended up meeting lots of cool, mulilingual, smart people—the place seems younger than Berlin to me, but maybe that has something to do with who goes on holiday when.

On the way there and on the way back, I passed through Klagenfurt, capital of Carinthia, Jörg Haider’s stronghold. Despite the constitutionally-guaranteed rights of the Slovenian minority there, superficially the place seems just like any provincial German town, except that I was saying »Wie bitte?« much more than normal.

Word of the day: hvala, pronounced [xˈvala] (with reduction of unstressed vowels in Ljubljana, though not in Maribor) is Slovenian for “thank you.”