Ouvrez La Voie

Dominik got invited to give a talk at the University of Ljubljana so we packed up our Halloween costumes and spent Halloween week in Slovenia. A colleague of Dominik’s hosted us and put us up in a visiting professor’s apartment on campus. We got savvy with the Ljubljana city bus system and found probably the bessssst playground we’ve been to in these 7 years of playground hopping and spent three afternoons there. (Parents: it’s worth a trip to Ljubljana just for this playground). Here’s a pic of the girls with new friends they met there. We were all inspired by these sisters who speak FIVE languages fluently (English, Slovene, French, Russian and Hebrew). 

We spent time in cafes and restaurants in the old town and along the river, saw a few great shows at the Ljubljana Puppet Theater, visited the UNESCO Skocjan Cave (where Kamila had to be carried for two hours because she was so taken by the massiveness of it!), spent a rainy day at the Ljubljana Climbing Gym, and improvised a Halloween celebration. The Slovenes carve pumpkins but they don’t trick or treat so we got dressed up and trick or treated with the six doors inside our apartment. The girls both declared it was the best Halloween ever! The next day we went to Zale Cemetery, Ljubljana’s largest one, for Day of the Remembrance of the Dead, a national holiday in Slovenia when all Slovenes visit the cemeteries. Hoards of people were streaming through that morning. The sidewalks leading to the cemetery were packed with flower vendors and nearly every tombstone was covered with fresh flowers. The girls placed flowers on some of the few that didn’t have any.

One of the highlights of the trip was a climbing expedition to Crni Kal in the west of Slovenia, about 20 minutes from the Italian border. From the top of the climbs we saw beautiful views of the Adriatic Sea. When the climbing day was wrapping up, Dominik suggested one final climb up the wall of an authentic old castle. As adventures go, there were unexpected elements and we finished the climb hungry, tired, and under pitch black skies, lit by the one headlight we brought. It was too dark to take any pictures at the top, but here’s what the castle looks like in the daytime. The climb started way at the bottom of the gulley (a mote to be precise) and went to the tippy top of the castle! Being a neighbor of Italy, Slovenia is known for good pizza, so we had some celebratory pizza after making it down!