Ljubljana

Things I have learned so far today:
1) How to pronounce Ljubljana. (Loob-YA-na)
2) Where exactly Slovenia is on the map.
3) How nice the Ljubljanian (?) airport is – brand new, clean, inexpensive, modern (free wifi-although it’s a pretty weak signal where I’m sitting)
4) How pretty Slovenia looks from the air. It reminds me of Austria. The airport is ringed with mountains in the distance and mixed coniferous and deciduous forests in the near ground. Red roofed houses make up small villages in the hillsides and from above the highway system that followed along the river valley looked tidy and well maintained. From the airplane magazine I learned that in Slovenia the people speak Slovene which when written looks like Hungarian to me, mainly because of the similarity of the accent marks.

There’s a radio playing in the snack bar nearby and it’s been playing old familiar tunes that remind me of different travels. Earlier it played “the Living Years” by some band whose name I forget. But whenever I hear it, I see the big Domino sugar sign in Baltimore, lit up at night as we drive by, down to Daytona Beach and spring break with Campus Crusade. Right now from the radio waft the strains from the song The Winds of Change by the German band the Scorpions. It’s the one with a whistling solo and a line about “down to Gorky Park” that came out sometime around 1990. I remember listening to it a lot that year in Geneva when the Wall came down and so much of Eastern Europe changed its government. It feels very apropos, what with thinking that twenty years ago Slovenia didn’t exist in this form, and the name I learned for this part of the world was Yugoslavia.

Considering all the beautiful small churches I saw in the hills flying over I wonder what worship was like here under the communist government all those years. It seems that whatever it was like before, Slovenia has worked to present a clean, sleek, modern image to the world. The Euro is used here as currency, and at 1.5 € for a coffee, it’s much less expensive than last week in France where the same cup was around 2.5-3 €.