Lesson 3: Talk to the Locals
Whilst in Ljubljana we stayed in a converted prison. Sounds a bit creepy, but it was actually really well done. Apparently it used to be where the military prisoners were kept around the time of the end of Slovenia’s time as a part of Yugoslavia, or something like that. And out the back of the hostel is Ljubljana’s student quarter. There are two or three night-clubs in the area, all of which are converted houses with (I’m assuming) dubious liquor licenses. It seems the students hang out and do crazy art during the day, and then party and drink on converted playgrounds all night. Sounds like the life eh?
Anyway, we were minding our own business and having a local Slovenian brew at the hostel when someone came up and started talking to us and telling us how he wanted to go to New Zealand. He was a local and had seen the whole Yugoslav revolution first-hand, I think he may have even seen the hostel when it was a prison, but I’m not so sure about that one. So we all got to talking and this local and his friend were telling us all about the changes that had gone through Slovenia once it had extracted itself from Yugoslavia, and how the Slovenians had reacted to becoming part of the European Union. Even what school had been like in Slovenia 30-odd years ago. All this was stuff that definitely wasn’t in our Lonely Planet, and it just hit home how much of a skewed perspective we get in the West (well, out here in the Antipodes) about all these things like EU membership and throwing off the shackles of communism. It looks so easy on the news when people just renounce their communist dictatorship, but very rarely do we see the full impact of such a drastic civil change
