Saturday, May 31, 2025
Our last full day in Slovenia. We got ready for the day after sleeping in until 7 (!), and headed out the door to the same French breakfast place. As we stepped out the door of the hotel, we bumped into the fellow that checked us in on Thursday. We asked him about getting to the airport by bus, and he suggested we walk down to the station to pick up our tickets today. The other alternative was to buy the tickets online and email them to the front desk to print out, and I tried to, but I could not figure it out.
After breakfast, we walked down to the Joze Pleznik house. The museum opened at 10 am, and I purchased our tickets online for the 10 am tour. That I was able to figure out.
As we waited for the museum to open, we sat outside on a bench looking directly at the house. It’s very nondescript and rather plain-looking.
The museum staff opened the door promptly at 10, and we started the tour. Joze Pleznik was an architect who was born in 1872 in Ljubljana, and is credited for much of Ljubljana’s architectural style. The two most notable things we learned about him was that he bought the house next door because he didn’t want to be bothered by noisy neighbors, and he designed his bed to be smaller than his body on purpose so that he would not be inclined to spend excess time resting or sleeping instead of working. Crazy old man.
He also allowed his neighbors to grow food in his garden, a tradition that continues to this day, so he wasn’t a total curmudgeon.
After the Joze Pleznik house, we went to the City Museum to see the exhibition on Ljubljana during WWII. The exhibition was for adults, but it was filled with hands-on exhibits you might find at a children’s museum. You could bang out a felt red star with a hammer, examine a jacket to find the hidden pockets, and smell the alternative roots and spices that ‘coffee’ was made from.
Once done at the museum, we were hungry and tired of being on our feet, so we went to our hotel courtyard to have our lunch sandwiches and our leftover cherries from the market. I also tried in vain to figure out the bus ticket thing while we were sitting there, but had no luck.
After lunch, we walked down to the bus station and bought our bus tickets for the airport. We scoped out the area, gate, and also noticed there is a 24-hour bakery nearby that we can pick up breakfast from.
The remainder of the day was spent sitting at a cafe near the river, before we strolled around the city center taking the last of it in. We bought a small souvenir for the young neighbor girl minding our garden, and then we went back to our hotel to finish off our bottle of Malvazija.
Dinner was pizza from a very busy pizza shop, and we topped it off with ice cream from the same seller as the two previous days.
The remainder of the night was spent packing and getting ready for bed. It’s an early day tomorrow.