while not null: Europe Trip 2025

Slovenia is sometimes confused with Slovakia by non-Europeans. Both are small, mountainous, Slavic countries, with similar white-blue-red flags (Slovenian with three little stars, Slovak with a double-cross), predominantly Catholic, and only relatively recently independent (1991 and 1993). They both used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918. Their country names mean "land of the Slavs". Both are in the EU and NATO. Both use the Euro currency. Both have high HDI and low Gini and are relatively well-off in terms of GDP per capita in PPP.

But, in terms of nominal GDP per capita, Slovenia is significantly richer: 37k Euro vs 28k. Slovakia is about twice as big in terms of area and population: 49k km2 and 5.4m people vs 20k km2 and 2.1m people. Slovakia was the eastern part of Czechoslovakia and is a landlocked country that borders Czechia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and Austria. Slovenia was the northern part of Yugoslavia, has access to the Adriatic sea and borders Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. The mountains in Slovakia are Carpathians. The mountains in Slovenia are Alps. The shortest distance between the two countries is about 150 km along the Hungary-Austria border.

During my short stay - just two nights in Ljubljana - I witnessed two strange incidents with the locals. The first one was in a shop in Koper where I stopped to quickly buy something to eat before my bus trip back to Ljubljana. I wanted to pay by cash because I had a lot of coins and I didn't want to carry them. The line to the manned register was not moving, so I switched to a line for self-service check-outs. There were kiosks on two sides, both designed to accept cash. When my turn came I got to the kiosk, scanned everything, but I could not find a button to pay cash. I looked around, and asked the attendant in English - kiosks on the left side were card only. When I picked my things and started moving to a kiosk on the right side, which just became available, a guy from the queue pushed in front of me. I stood there not sure what to do. Should I go back to end of the queue? His wife noticed the awkwardness of the situation and told him: we can use the card-only kiosk, to which he replied - I don't have a card.

The second situation was much worse. It happened in a shop near the train station in Ljubljana. Some tourist wanted to buy a bun, but didn't know how to do it, and was verbally assaulted by the security guard. It was really ugly. When I was leaving, the security guard was shouting in English to the tourist "I will kill you". Really unhinged. The tourist left his suitcases in front of the shop when he entered. He just wanted to buy a bun, but instead was accused by the guard of theft and worse. How could that happen? Well, the process to buy a bun in that shop looks like this: you take a basket when you enter, then get a disposable glove and a plastic bag, put the bun in the bag, note the number (code) printed on the shelf near the bun, use a label printing machine placed low on one side of the pastry shelves to enter the number and the quantity (all buttons are in Slovenian, I had to try a few times before getting it right), attach the label to the plastic bag, proceed to the other side of the shop to pay. I think what triggered the guard was that the tourist just picked the bun in his bare hand and started walking with it.

For a person knowing another Slavic language, like Polish, Slovenian has that strange quality that sometimes you can understand a word or sentence, and sometimes it is a complete mystery. The weirdest situation is when the word or phrase sounds exactly the same as in your language and you think you met a compatriot. That happened to me a long time ago in Czechia, at a Rolling Stones concert, when based on something I heard I thought the girls sitting in front of me were Polish. They weren't. In Slovenia, I sneezed on a bus, and the person next to me said the equivalent of "bless you" in perfect Polish. This was a trap, and I did not fall into it. I replied "thank you" in Slovenian ("hvala").

An older grandpa fell for it in Slovakia though. When he asked in Slovak if there was a free seat in the compartment I was travelling in (on a train from Budapest to Warsaw) and I replied something, he assumed I was Slovak and proceeded to tell me, in Slovak, about his trip, family, life and finally politics. I got the gist of what he was saying and replied a few times in Polish, which caused him to frown a bit, but he didn't stop :-). He was an ethnic Hungarian btw, about 8% of the population of Slovakia is.

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Photos from the train and bus only. Ljubljana and Koper will have their own blogs.

I got on a train to Ljubljana in Villach, Austria. Unless I misremember things, shortly after emerging from the 8 km long Karawanks tunnel I saw a small cylindrical bunker next to the train tracks... cannot find it online.