Aaaaah, spending the night in somebody else's bed... And not in a social sense either, simply geographical. It feels a little bit like hitchhiking: curious about how other people sleep - what mattresses and pillows and bedside lamps they use... In this case none. It is not as easy going to the bathroom in a new pitch black apartment, quietly. Then again I didn't have to climb down a pain-in-the-butt ladder to get off it, like I have to do at home, so it was a change in any case :)) What I probably should do, though, is record my street noise and play it in the ambience app on the iPaddy. It takes me ages to fall asleep if nobody is singing and puking under my window…
Friday afternoon and I hop on a train (otherwise known as an excellent opportunity to play Plants Vs Zombies for an hour without feeling guilty), calling the General four times, because I am in that stage of the marriage when every step willingly taken away from him is physically painful.... T—T
I docked at about 6 and as always, beelined straight towards a bookstore, where one doesn't mind waiting for an hour. But downtown Ljubljana is so very pretty lately........! In the middle of all this crisis the Major Jankovič created a sort of Rabat - a sort of artificially flawless capital to a magnificent country - only the only thing anyone ever sees is the capital and the actual state if the country is actually not quite so shiny. But Ljubljana will fool you.
The center is now completely free of motorized traffic (the idiots on pushbikes are something left to be desired) and is stage to hordes of tourists and street performers.
There are several new bridges, the most extraordinary of all the 'meatpacking bridge', where a couple can come and padlock their love onto a railing. Add the glass sidewalk and spiders, bathing in the light; it is the most interesting bridge I have ever seen. And those locked loves really seem to last eternal.
Although as we only have one such shop in Celje, every shop in LJ seems to be heute couture for super thin and tall people - and walking the streets of this town makes you feel there's a fashion show going on just around the corner, because all the women are so very beautiful and classy and all the men are like cool hunters. More importantly yet, all the cafés feel like French meets Japanese, with a touch of Brazilian. Everything looks clean and artistic - and the food is so costly one has to share a Coke three ways. But nonetheless, no matter how many other grand patisseries there are around, one always need to start the visit at Zvezda and treat themselves to a ridiculously fattening piece of cake - and I recommend the rice vanilla ice-cream with raspberry jam.
You may go bankrupt, but then again you won't have to eat anything else for the night - your needs will be met. :p
Talking girl stuff, such as politics (people will never really fetch their pitchforks and march against the parliament as long as the sleazy politicians keep showering us with cheap Chinese products and saying - but look at everything you've got! The new stove, the new drapes, the new garden gnome! Not to mention Apple products! You are so fortunate - there are people who have nothing!.... It's the 21st century, dude. Everybody's got everything. Frikkin’ goat hoarders in Botswana have iPhones. It doesn't mean you hadn't fucked up all our factories and sold our land and businesses to foreigners and priests.), ... books... (pretty much anything befitting a musky, warm Indian summer night in a bright lights city....), ... Tv shows.... (how it pisses me off when writers insult our intelligence in order to achieve cheap drama .. Example, the first five minutes of watching Lost ( I ran out of Torchwood), this sexy yet troubled alcoholic doctor guy asks a super pretty yet slightly reluctant and withdrawn early twenties lady to help him sew a nasty cut on his back (they both just survived a plane crash) and they talk about fear and he starts telling her how during his first solo surgery he had to fix a spinal damage on a little girl and cut a nasty nerve.... Hello, seriously? Your first solo surgery wasn't an appy or a severed toe, it was spinal reconstruction on a child?!?), ...sex toys (I SO want/need a goody drawer....) ... and food. We would walk, talk, take hundreds of pickies and then sit down, have a break, a snack and more Coke (hey, it was creepy warm, alright? There has been snow at a time like this in previous years, not 28'C!) We figured that when the air is the same temperature as the body, the body can no longer cool itself and the blood, jobbed with shipping oxygen to the brain cell no longer flows any faster than pudding, the brain cell starts to wanna curl up and die. So stuff like Coke helps. It makes the blood run a little less slow. Coffee would help, too, but most people already have high blood pressure in the heat without diuretics, so Coke, which is so synthetic even the caffeine in it is probably just artificial caramel flavor and mock heroin does the job way better. Also the sugar makes you wanna climb a bridge fence and recite a poem.)
We made two circles around the old town, mingling with the unyielding crowds, strolling and laughing, chatting hours on end while drooling over all the oh so pretty things in shop windows that we don't really need. But some things really are oh so pretty. We found Japanese tea pots, so lovingly described in the episode of Sherlock: The Blind Banker, that really make you want to start drinking tea...
I remember having good dreams. We may have been in a strategy game, because there were many green knolls and opposing armies with vector-painted banners, but it was also a little bit Pearl Harbor, because there was an encampment made solely of nurses which I convinced to invite over the camp of soldiers opposite the army that was closest to my family for a dance. Long story short, sex sells :D
The second part of the trip around town was in sunlight, on another perfect day. We had coffee to begin the route - although we managed to find a garden of a place that was a) dirty, b) poorly served, c) had no locks or toilet paper in the restrooms, expensive and didn't bring us what we asked for. Ah, well. Fuck 'em. Art Market down the bank (river boats with cafés on deck speeding up and down the channel) offered some super pretty handmade thingies, and in the middle of the town Cosmopolitan magazine had a race of women running in high heels... You would be amazed is all I have to say.
Woohoo! Go, ladies! :)))
Even more belief defying were some of the photographers shooting them… Seriously, I can understand why someone would have two cameras for sports reportage – you need one with a tele-lens and one with the wider closer angle, but why someone would sport two huge tele-lens cameras and two bags, a belt with multiple lens tubes and a jacket with shit you wouldn’t believe (In fact a few looked like they just happened to stop here to shoot a bunch of babes in tight pink t-shirts running, on their way from a Milan fashion week to Beirut.) I am beginning to worry my customers are disappointed when I show up with just a camera and a small lens. Marky doesn’t even have a side handle. It’s only after I pop out the reflection disk that they real – oh, good, I really do seem to be a professional, I have at least one gadget…
We went around to the same bridge, that amazing creation with some butt fugly statues that, again, serve the memory of Torchwood Children of Earth right back into the first line of nightmares, thank you very much. We skipped home to have some heavy lunch (and then it was off to a firemen fair!) We made the sort of pancakes she would make: Nutella, coconut powder, a banana and whipped cream. (a.k.a "The Mayans".) I would never speak to myself again if I only managed to eat two, because they were just too damn yummy, but after two and a half the sugar rush was so intense, we were both kind of hyper and stned at the same time. She had to take the photos of sponsorship banners at firemen fair and that was quite a lot of very sweaty and very poorly dressed firemen walking around, and a lot of women jumping up and down cheering while the representatives of the contesting groups raced down a polygon, doing rescue stuff (pulling buckets up four stories, dragging heavy dolls, aiming hoses, breaking through wooden doors…)
Oddly enough, even though this would be the logical place to run into an ex husband (because it doesn’t matter where you go, one can’t be fucking up a perfect day without running into an ex husband), nay. I saw him earlier, when we were still in town, strolling and debating vehemently on all the other girly viewpoints on the world :)) Apart from the icky toilet earlier in the morning, that was the only marginally negative bit of the overall experience. Perhaps my still emotional response to seeing him is simply that of any rape victim – even if it was the soul he raped not the body. As we passed, he made sure I met his eye, staring at me and then looked away as if he saw something ugly, old and fat, something from his past that he was ashamed of and disgusted by... in short, his usual husband look of me, even when we were married… LoL. Can't remember why he would be thus cross with me, tho, last contact we had he wrote me a long 'I'm happy you're happy' letter (not sure what it said as I never read such stuff, just delete it, but he likely wrote it under the influence of something he clearly overpaid.) He hasn't changed any, he is still the small, middle aged man who can't make anyone happy, still the "look at me, look at me, I'm the sophisticated gay wannabe!" vibe and, as an old friend would guess once – he was still there eating alone.
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