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Each one of you that is reading right now...start saving up your pennies and your holiday time, and book a trip to Slovenia as SOON as humanly possible. This place is absolutely amazing!

Last night I was really tired after a long day, so Chris and I planned to just go for a quick bite to eat, and have one beer at a quiet jazz club we had heard about. Well...didnt quite work out that way. The jazz club was closed, so we went to another pub, and met some people from our hostel there (an irishman who could NOT hold his liquor, thats a first) and ended up going to 2 clubs and finally making it home around 4 am. GREAT idea when you have got to get up early to pack and make an early bus to bled. Ah well, as they say, I will sleep when I am dead.

So today has been a little rough. Buses to Bled leave every hour on the hour, so we had breakfast, checked out of our hostel, and made it to the station to catch the 11 am bus. Oops, the buses go every hour EXCEPT 11 am. What luck! So we hung around the station, I looked into the train times to Bratislava, and we caught the noon bus.

Bled is absolutely the most stunning place on earth. Its a teeny town in the mountains, on a gorgeous lake with a small island in the centre with a church on it. We are staying in more a Pension than a hostel, and its quite posh compared to what Ive gotten used to. Its still a dorm room, but with fancy bunkbeds instead of the standard Ikea ones.

I did a solo walk around the lake this afternoon, and let the relief set in that I am out of the city. Tomorrow Im going to do some hiking and swimming and suntanning by the lake, if the weather holds out that is. There arent a lot of sights to see in Bled, it is seriously tiny, but there is a castle up on the mountain near our hostel, so I will check that out.

I am very sorry, but for anyone I was promising phone calls to, it just isnt going to happen. We went to tourist information yesterday and asked how to go about making an international phone call. The surprising answer was that it was nearly impossible on a Saturday afternoon. We were directed to the one place that we could do it in Ljubljana, at the train station, but when we went there it was going to be about 3500 tolars for 10 minutes of talking. Thats about what a night in a hostel costs. And that would pay for approximately 7 hours of internet time. So emailing it is!

And I dont think Ill even get another chance to send an email from Bled. There is ONE computer with internet in town, and its in a cocktail bar and there is a big line of people waiting after me. So I think it will be back in Ljubljana or maybe in Portoroz before I get to post again.

Big hugs to all...mom, glad to hear Im still the favourite child! A trip to Toronto is most definitely called for!

Hugs to all! (by the way, sorry for the typos and weird punctuation...Slovenian keyboards have the Z and Y reversed, and dont have anything like apostrophes, quote marks, or even question marks. Dear me.