Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - Slovenia Guide: Traveling to Ljubljana, Lake Bled, and Beyond

Episode Date: December 8, 2017

Have you ever seen a photo so beautiful, you thought, “I’m going here.” I feel that way about Lake Bled in Slovenia, which is one of the six former socialist republics of Yugoslavia.   This summer I traveled through a few of those other countries: Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montegro, but I ran out of time to see Slovenia. Now I’m kicking myself because, increasingly, stunning photos of this hidden gem are cropping up everywhere. That’s it. In 2018, I’m making a trip happen! So I called up Slovenian expert Noah Charney for a little background research.    Noah is an American writer and art history professor who has lived in Slovenia since 2006. He’s written several books, including The Art Thief, which was an international success. Most recently, he wrote Slovenology: Living and Traveling in the World’s Best Country.    In this episode, we chat about Noah’s life in Slovenia, and come up with some great ideas on what to eat, drink, and do when traveling through its capital, Ljubljana, and Beyond.    If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and forward this show to a friend. If you’re feeling especially kind, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This helps people discover us. 🤗   For more insider travel tips, visit postcardacademy.co     Instagram, Twitter, FacebookDo you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to the Postcard Academy. I'm your host, Sarah Mikital. Have you ever seen a photo so beautiful you thought, I am going here? I feel that way about Lake Bled in Slovenia, which is one of the six socialist republics of former Yugoslavia. This summer, I traveled through a few of those other countries, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro. Side note, I am so in love with Sarajevo, and we'll definitely have to do a Bosnia episode. But I ran out of time to see Slovenia, and now I am kicking myself because I keep seeing these stunning photos of this country. I will definitely go in 2018, and so I called up Slovenian expert Noah Charnie for a little background research. Noah is an American writer and art history professor who has lived in Slovenia since 2006. He's written several books, including The Art Thief, which was an international success, and most recently he wrote Slovanology, living and traveling in the world's best country. In this episode, we chat about Noah's life in Slovenia, and we call up with some great ideas on what to eat, drink, and do when traveling in this country.

I hope you enjoy this episode and now on to my interview with Noah. Welcome, Noah. Thank you for joining me today. Thanks so much for having me. So, Slovenia is just starting to come on a lot of people's radars, but you have been there for years. So could you just tell us where you're from and how did you end up in Slovenia? I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. I studied at Colby College for my undergraduate. And then I did my postgraduate studies in England at the Kortho Institute and at Cambridge. And then at some point along the way, I think it was in 2000.

I was studying in London, studying theater. And I was going to do a uraling trip, which lots of American university students like to do. And before I went, I got a Lonely Planet guidebook, Europe on a shoestring that I'm going to travel cheaply. And I lent it to five friends of mine who had already been on a urailing trip. and I asked them to annotate it. And independently, all five of them said that the most beautiful place that they had been when they traveled was Lake Bled in Slovenia. So I remember one night I was Euraling and I was in Budapest,

and I was trying to figure out, should I go to Slovakia or Slovenia? And I flipped through the book and so many people had said I had to see Lake Bid that I chose Slovenia. It was the first time I visited it. And then eventually if we fast forward while I was doing my PhD, I sort of had ants in my pants. I was trying to finish the PhD in Cambridge, but I was feeling a little small for me,

so I wound up doing a lot of traveling. And I was auditioning European cities as a place I might like to live. So I wound up living in, I think, 12 different cities in eight different countries, each for at least a month. So I was more than a tourist, but it was less of a commitment

than fully moving there indefinitely. And one of the places that I was, I was intrigued with with Lubbana. And so I moved there in 2006, and a series of coincidences, including meeting the future Mrs. Charny, wound up happening just at the same time in the fall of 2006. And then eventually I wound up settling there full time. I love that you were auditioning cities of where you want to live instead of just going somewhere just for a job or just because, you know, some sort of super adult reason,

I guess. So what are you doing in Slovenia now? Well, I get to wear a lot of hats here because here I'm an exotic sort of bird. I'm a medium, well-known American writer and professor and sort of pop professor with more of a, I guess, a popular profile. And because of that, you know, if I was in London, if I was frankly in place like Paris, or Rome, there's lots of people like me running around. Well, maybe not lots of them, but I would not be the least exotic. Here, I'm pretty much the only American writer in the country that I know of, and certainly the only one who has a modest, more popular public profile. And so because of that, I get to do all sorts of crazy fun stuff, but I wouldn't get to do in a more competitive context or context that had more people with my profile running around. So, okay, mostly I'm writing in my pajamas at home. That's the main occupation. I live off of writing books. I've published 12 books so far. The first one was a novel. All the others have been what's called trade nonfiction, which are nonfiction books, but the sort

that you're supposed to read for fun as opposed to strictly academic books. And I write for magazines a lot. This year I'm doing about eight to ten articles a month. I also teach art history. I teach art crime, which is an academic specialization. But because I'm here, I'm also teaching writing, which is fun for me and relatively new. But I also do other things. I host TV shows sometimes, a couple of shows a year. I do some screenwriting.

I do some hosting of events and public speaking and lecture series. basically lots of different things, some editing. I help some Slovenian writers who want to be published in English, find publishers and edit their books. So lots of different things, all of them in the writing, art, and culture spheres. But I'm able to do that because I've managed to find a place in which I'm exotic, which I think is the main interesting point here. Yeah, you are quite the exotic bird.

And your first novel, The Art Thief, was a vague success. You write primarily it looks like on art crime. When did you realize you wanted to focus on art history and art crimes? There are a particular experience that sticks with you? When I was 16, I was on a broad program through my boarding school. And I lived in Paris. And it was a great program. A lot of students go abroad, but they usually went to their university age.

and I was very lucky to go so young. Then from two to four each day, we would meet with our art history professor, Madame Pupac, I remember her name, and she spoke only French to us, but she took us to see art in situ, so in museums, in churches, in castles, and it's much easier to fall in love with it in person

than if you're in a classroom looking at slides. And from that point on, I knew I really enjoyed the feeling of living in a European city, preferably in one where English is not the main language. And also that I really like this art stuff. But I wasn't 100% sure. I thought I might want to do archaeology. But that was really where it got the ball rolling.

And then when I was at Colby, I was writing plays. That was my primary extracurricular. I was playing squash and writing plays, as you do. And I was studying art history. And that was my major. And I wound up applying, because I thought I wanted to be back in Europe, I want to try to do postgraduate stuff in Europe. And I applied to three places.

I applied to Goldsmith's College in London for a playwriting program. I applied to the Corte Institute in London for Art History. And I applied to University of Cambridge for Art History. And I got into all three, which was a big surprise. And I was trying to think, okay, what am I going to do? And I took a poll from some professors. They basically all said, if you get a chance to go to the Cordo Institute, which is considered the best place in the world for art history by a long margin.

Then you should really do that. And you need people to teach you art history, but you can immerse yourself in theater and playwriting on your own. You can sort of do your own course. So I started doing a master's at the Courtaille. I also said yes to Cambridge to do what is called a Master of Philosophy there, which is their name for an MA. But I deferred a year.

And I wound up doing an impromptu sort of, teach yourself program in playwriting by just attending lots of plays in the evenings. I saw about two plays a week for the whole year while in London, which London allows you to do as a student because they usually have these 10-pound student return tickets if you just show up just before the curtain goes up. And it's reasonable enough that you can really do that, which is very lucky. I love that you pull other people. You're not just working off your gut. You're asking friends where you should travel, you're asking professors where you should study. I think it's nice trying to get other opinions and, you know, incorporate other experiences into your decision.

And you're definitely a storyteller. I mean, I can tell that all that play watching paid off. And you're not just writing about art. You recently wrote Slovenology, living and traveling in the world's best country. Why do you love Slovenia so much? Yeah, I'm, it's biggest cheerleader, certainly among foreigners, but probably among Slovenes too, because I think I'm way more into it than most Slovians are. Well, the easy answer is, of all the places that I've auditioned as home, this is the one that is the best complete package. And this is not just because I married a Slovene and I'm trying to endear myself to my

to my fellow residents of the country. But this is quite a bit of research and analysis. Because with my wife, we lived in lots of different places. We lived for several years in Italy. My family has a house in Italy, so it actually would have been logistically easier to remain there. We lived in the Netherlands. We lived in Spain.

We lived in England. We lived in the U.S. And so it's quite a smorgasbord of locations that I auditioned. And if you take the complete package, the quality of life and considering the cost of living, things that probably weren't important to me when I was single or just with my wife, but now that I have kids are things like safety, cleanliness, early childhood education, health systems, insurance, reasonable taxes based on what you get in return, friendliness of locals, opportunities, location in terms of getting elsewhere.

The complete package, you might be able to find another country that is just different but offers as much, but I can't imagine finding one that's better. This is just everywhere at turn I see things that are wonderful, that work well here, that you can't find elsewhere or you find elsewhere at much greater expense, or you find elsework, but they don't have other things that this place does well. And last year you wrote a Washington Post article titled Six Great Things about Slovenia that have nothing to do with Melania Trump, probably the most famous export. What were some of those reasons?

Well, that's a funny story. So when I pitched this to the editor, I said I got an article that should be called 20 things the U.S. could learn from Slovenia. And then he told me I only had 600 words of space. It quickly became six things. And then, as you may know, writers never, ever get to choose the title of their article. So they stuck the Malania Trump thing in because they thought more people would click on it, which was probably the case.

So I had this much longer list of things that were reasons. But the shorter version is that Slovenia during socialism was considered to have been by far the most. successful and user-friendly version of socialism of any experience of any country in the world. And it was the least oppressive, the least depressing, the most open and the most friendly to the citizens. And when they switched to democracy in 1991 and seceded from Yugoslavia, the government retained a lot of the best things about a social government. So they do a very good job of taking care of citizens.

And I'll just give you some examples. And they may or may not apply to you as an individual as you're listening to this podcast, but you can quite quickly see why they're impressive. So if you are a pregnant mom and you're going to go on maternity leave, in the US you get three weeks of unpaid maternity leave. In Slovenia, you get 18 months of paid leave. So that's quite a difference. Plus, the dad gets three months of paid paternity leave.

Other examples, this doesn't apply to most people, but if you have trouble conceiving and you want to have an IVF, which is an artificial way the doctors can help you try to have a child, in most countries, it's not part of the health care system. You have to pay for each IVF, and there's no guarantee it works, and it costs $10,000 to $15,000 each. In Slovenia, you get up to six for free. Then there are other things like they have absolutely incredible early childhood education here that is heavily subsidized by the government. So I have a colleague in the Netherlands and they have excellent early childhood education there,

but it costs a thousand euros per child per month. And most people my friend knows can't afford that. and prefer to have one parent stay at home because if they were going to work, then all their money would be going directly to kindergarten. In Slovenia, my kids go to this amazing Montessori kindergarten, five-minute walk from our house, and I really am so impressed by it, and it costs, I think it's around 100 a month for both of my daughters, and they get three meals there. They can be there from 6 p.m. to 6 p.m.

it's hugely impressive to me. How does Slovenia afford this? And how expensive is Slovenia compared to a city like, say, London? Slovenia affords it. They have what I would say are quite high tax rates if you're looking at from an American perspective, but you get a huge amount for it. So in Slovenia, the income levels are going to sound quite low compared to other countries, but it's all relative.

So in Slovenia, a good income would be about a thousand euros per month, and a very good income would be about 1,500 euros per month. And that will sound quite low from, say, an American perspective, but comparing it to other countries like Serbia, where a good salary is 400 euros a month, or Romania where a good salary is about the same thing, then it sounds very good. So that's all relative.

Very quickly, if you earn a few thousand a month, you're in the highest tax bracket, and you're paying a tax around 40%. But we get a huge amount for this. And so that's how Slovenia affords it. They're just, you know, when it was Yugoslavia, everything was taken care of by the government. Here it's not quite everything and you have to subsidize things but the subsidies that you have to pay are very reasonable like, you know, 50 euros a month per child at a kindergarten.

And the cost of living here is very reasonable. So people live very, very comfortably for a salary of a thousand euros a month. It's one of these rare spots where, you know, like expats in Paris in the 1930s and I don't know, Prague. in the 1980s. It's an inexpensive place to live very comfortably. I'm on my way, Noah. Yeah, you know, everybody I talked to about, especially after the last election, I had lots of friends back in the U.S. saying, how do I move over there again? Because it is as rosy as the picture I painted of it.

Yeah, well, Slovenia has been on my list for a long time, and for whatever reason I haven't got there. And then for whatever reason this summer, I have been seeing photos of Lakeblood everywhere. And now it's all I can think about. And I'm like, oh, I really should have gone there this summer. Well, for the last two years, you know, Slovenia is really delighted if foreigners compliment it. This is much more exciting than if locals do. And so it's often on the nightly news if there's an article in a well-known magazine or newsmanent complimenting Slovenia. And just about every major news source has had an article about how great it is. and it's called a hidden gem with exactly those words so often that a certain point it won't be hidden anymore.

But actually I do some consulting for Luglana tourists of Ljubljana is the capital. And they actually have as many tourists by number as they would like. They don't want more in quantity. They'd like them to stay longer and to do more things than just visit Lugliana and go to Lake Bled. But it's interesting because it's a wonderfully tourist-friendly city. The country is very tourist friendly. Just about everybody speaks very good. So it's very easy to travel here.

It's one of the safest countries in the world in terms of lowest crime rates. So lots of reasons to come on over. Why do you think that, or why has Slovenia fared better than the other former Yugoslavian countries? Yeah, that's a very good question. it has a short answer and then a more complicated answer. The short answer is that Slovenia is incredibly homogenous ethnically. It's about 90-something percent, or rather it was when it seceded. Now it's more diverse.

It was about 90-something percent Caucasian Roman Catholic ethnic Slovenes, which meant, I mean, on the one hand, it's a little bit monotonous if you're walking around and everybody looks the same. But on the other hand, it meant that there were essentially no other ethnicities to result in ethnic issues of the sort that happened, particularly in places like Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Croatia. It has essentially no Muslim population. This has changed since it's gotten independent. It's much more diverse now than it was. But that's the main reason.

The other reason is that a lot of the leading lights of the Yugoslav army were Slovenian and weren't going to. attack their own country. And Slovenia has always been the most independent of the former Yugoslav states. They always use their own language, which is similar to Serber Croatian, but not that similar. It's similar to Serber Croatian the way, say, French and Italian are similar. They have always been the most economically and culturally advanced of the former Yugoslav states. And so it's almost logical that they would function independently. So it was not really a surprise when they seceded. And so how many people are in the country today? There are a little more than 2 million people in the country. And Ljubljana has around 300,000

people, about 50,000 of which are students. It's a very student university city. And if you haven't been, the easiest parallels probably Zurich, which is a similar size. It has maybe a similar feel to it. most of Lubiana, it has some Baroque, winding, charming, Habsburg, Austrian, Swiss-looking sections to it. But it really bears the imprint of a specific architect named Yosep Fitchnik, who I wound up doing my PhD on, and my PhD turned into a book that came out this summer about his life. He lived in the time of modernism.

He was working basically the first half. of the 20th century, but he has a very unique style that combines aspects of historical art, some Catholic mysticism, with aspects of secessionism. And he's the darling of architectural historians who all think he's just amazing. But if you haven't been to Lugiano or to Prague Castle, which he also renovated, it's probably his most prominent work, then you might not have heard of him. but he really designed most of the major public structures in Ljubljana, and it really does be like his city much more than, for example,

Gaudius is the Genius Loki of Barcelona, because he only made a few buildings there. Kletchnik is much more so the Genius Loki of Lublana. And is that where you live? Are you in Lubliana? I live in a town called Kamnik, which is about 25 minutes north of Lugliana. But I go to Lugliana. I live there too, and I live there too, I go there probably once or twice a week to see France and for various meetings.

And by American standards, 25 minutes, you don't think twice about. Slovenes thing that this is like the other end of the world and we're thinking, oh, my goodness, I have to go all the way to Lugdana. But for us Americans, 25 minutes, is a piece of cake. Absolutely nothing. Yeah. So where do people live in Slovenia? Are they primarily in flats, in houses?

Are they more urban? Lubliana is probably the only place where people are in flats. Most of the country are houses. That dates back to a specific policy during Yugoslavia when the government was essentially playing with inflation and the real estate market. and they made it intentionally very easy for citizens to buy land that they could build on. And this was on purpose to try to encourage people to live in houses and to feel that they own their own property. And it was a very citizen-friendly act. As a result, most Slovenes, I would say, who are an older generation, say,

over 50 years old, own their own house. Most houses in the country look almost identical, which is a surprise, especially if you come from the U.S., for example, where you can go on one street and houses are in like six or seven different styles. Here, most of them are breeze block architecture. They're perfectly nice. They change in the color of the facade, but otherwise they look quite homogenous. And that's because these are relatively easy to build by yourself. without a contractor and relatively inexpensive. And that's the main reason. But when you drive around, I'm often surprised by the homogeneity of the houses that you see.

So if I'm going to travel there, do I need a car? Or is there public transportation? There is good public transportation, but you definitely want a car. Everything is much easier by car here. It's very easy to drive. Even in the center of the capital, it's a piece of cake. and the country is small enough that you can't really drive more than about two and a half hours, otherwise you're out of the country.

So you definitely want a car to explore. It's going to be much more fun, and you don't want to have to rely on schedules. So it'll be an extra fun place to drive around. I would love to talk about some Slovenian traditions. Could you tell me about your wedding day and the test of manliness that you had to go through? Yeah, this is always a popular story. I had to do something called the shronga, which just sounds scary. And it is traditional feats of manliness that, if you imagine a couple hundred years ago,

if someone came to your village and wanted to marry one of the local women and essentially take her out of the village, you would need to have some way to prove that this person was capable of taking care of her. And the way they did this was they asked them to perform these tests that were essentially tests of whether you were a capable hunter and woodsman. And this is still a tradition today that some people do for fun, usually planned ahead by friends of the wife's family. But yes, on my wedding morning, I was blocked by a bunch of villagers who I actually haven't met before. And I knew this was coming, but I didn't know what format would take. and they required me with my best man to perform these tests of manliness. So first I had to chop up a tree stump with an axe.

Then I had to saw a log in half with one of those long, bendy saws. I had to shave bark off a pine tree. I had to sharpen a side with a hammer and anvil. And I had to load hay onto a wooden cart with a pitchfork. and then afterwards I had to barter with the villagers and buy my wife from them and it's a tradition where you have to basically try to get her for as cheap as possible so she's supposed to argue that she's not really that great and that the village is really kind of run down and there are potholes everywhere and blah blah blah and i used a strategy to try to confuse the locals

i had to do this all in slovenian too and um i brought my slovenia guidebook and i i thought the best offense is a no the best defense is a good offense So I went right in before they could say anything. I said, I've been reading about this tradition, and I understand that the villagers are supposed to pay the groom to take the bride off their hands. So I'm not going into the church unless you give me 500 euros. And this confused the seeds of confusion successfully

because this is the opposite of what's supposed to happen. But I had two Slovenian friends back me up and say, yeah, everywhere else in Slovenia, the villagers pay the groom. have had it backwards for the last few hundred years. And they were sufficiently confused that it worked for a little while. But in the end, I bought her for 312 euros, which I thought was a very reasonable price. A bargain, I would say. The villagers take, you know, a few hundred years ago, this is probably sort of like a dowry or a tax.

But these days the villagers take the money, and then the week after the wedding, they use it to throw a party for you at a local restaurant. So it all goes to a good cause. Oh, that's really sweet. Did your wife have to do anything? She was watching. No, she didn't have to do anything in this part. This is all the foreigner, or rather the non-villager coming to town has to be put to the test. So she was making sure you could chop wood.

And so, I mean, she was mostly worried I was going to chop off the limb because I'm not the least bit woodsman-like, but it all worked out. How did you guys meet? We met back in fall of 2006 when I was auditioning European cities and I was just trying out various ones that I had been intrigued by when I was doing the Urailing trip or other travels and Lugnano was one of them. So I came to Lugnana totally by myself. I rented an apartment. I wanted to write. And while I was here, I got an interest in the architecture. of Yose-Plechnik, and I wound up transferring from Cambridge to University of

Dubliana, where I finished my PhD in the architecture of Plechnik. At the same time, I met my wife, and at the same time, my first book sold, the art thief, which you mentioned. And all these things happened within a few weeks of each other in the fall of 2006, and I very quickly made the decision to transfer from Cambridge to University of Boulana, to stay in Nubliana to try out being with the future wife, and also to commit myself to being a writer full-time as much as that was possible. And in general, was it easy to meet people in Slovenia when you first moved there?

Yes, it's very easy. In fact, now it's much easier. This was before social media was, it existed, but it wasn't like the thing that it is today. So now it would be super easy. And now there's an expats in Slovenia Facebook group with over a thousand members to it. And now it's much easier. Then it was too. I knew maybe three or four people total.

I had one buddy from the criminology world who I would go out to dinner with and he would introduce me to some people. But very quickly, you meet one person and you meet a lot of them. And this is particularly true if you're going to remain here. here for a long period of time. It's going to sound funny, but there's probably about 200 celebrities in the whole country. And when I say that, I mean people who you see in the media who are like actors, musicians, writers, people with a public persona, and everybody knows everybody else. And you meet one, two, three people. Then all of a sudden, you're one step away from everybody else. And I literally can't turn on the TV without seeing somebody that I know on like a

talk show or a game show or you know being interviewed or playing a concert on TV and it feels like a very surreal, very cozy little family and that's one of the benefits of it. I can imagine if you're

live here your whole life you might feel like it's too small but from a four it's very like cute and endearing that the size of it is so small that you wind up meeting anybody you would like to meet very easily. And how about learning the language? Was that tough? How did you go about doing that?

Yeah. I never actually studied. It would probably be good if I studied. So I speak fluently, but just about every sentence has grammatical errors in it. And the hard part is the endings. Slovenian has declensions like in Latin, but they have seven declensions and lots of irregulars. And you basically just have to memorize it. And I still don't really know what the correct declension endings are. I wind up guessing. And if I speak quickly enough and sort of mumble, I hope that people think that I have the right ending.

But they can also understand me. I just don't sound correct. But people are so pleasantly surprised that someone would try, that they're incredibly forgiving. Yeah, and I think that's really the best way to learn a language is to move there and just start making friends with the people and watching TV. Because that's how I learned Italian as well, pretty much,

was just from the streets. Because if you have a passion for it, it's going to stick in your mind much better than if you're forced to learn it at school. Yeah, it's much more fun. It's much richer. It doesn't feel like work. Immersion is really the only way to do it well.

And as an American, how are you able to live in Slovenia? There's a bunch of different options. The easiest is to marry a slogan. That's the easiest route to it. You can also come as a cultural worker, and if you can demonstrate that you're bringing something that is a cultural benefit to the country, if you have permission to reside anywhere in the EU,

then you can come here. You could come here as a student, although to be fair, they really aren't set up to cater to foreign students. You have to do a lot of the busy work and admin on your own and get a native slogan speaker to do paperwork for you. They should do more of that, but they're not really set up for it. You can retire here.

You can, if you're an athlete, you can come here and play on a sports team. I think that the usual ways, but the easiest is if you want to marrying the Slovene, I think that's probably the most great for, which I highly recommend. Okay. If I were going to come visit you for a long weekend and I've never been to Slovenia, where would you take me? Well, I have very specific answers to this because in this Slovenology book of mine that just came out that you mentioned, I actually have a section where I recommend what to see if you're here for one day, three days, five days, or seven days. Let's do three days. Well, the three days, okay, the obvious thing that everybody would think,

of and that you should do if you haven't been is see Lubliana, and be based in Nublana and go to Lake Bled as a day trip. Bled is about 40 minutes north of Ljubljana. So that's a no brain. The question is what else are you going to do? And I think some people would go to Piran, which is a very beautiful seaside town. They used to be a Venetian colony. And that's a nice choice. And while you're going there, you can stop at one of the two amazing caves that are UNESCO World Heritage sites. One is called Postoina, which is absolutely amazing. It's five kilometers of hugely elaborate vaulting underground caves, but it's a little bit Disney in that you go through it on a train, which makes it easier to do. But it's more like a

sort of like a ride. The place I like going to is called Skotsyan Cave, which is also close to by and it's like walking through the mines of Mordor from Lord of the Rings and you have to do hiking through it and it's very dramatic and you can see human fish or olm which is this amazing blind amphibian that has translucent skin that for centuries people thought were baby dragons that live in these caves and you can also go to rastolia which is a tiny village with a four or five church with an amazing dance of death fresco psychos. there that's worth the journey. I would also send you to Khamnik, which is the town I live in, which is a very beautiful, tiny little Baroque town that you can spend an hour walking through.

And near to it is this amazing place called Belica Plamina, which is a plateau where shepherds would graze their cows, and they would spend the summer living there in these specially designed houses that look either from Iceland or from Middle Earth. It's a very beautiful, surreal place that looks like some sort of fantasy world. And it's actually very close to Bugana. So that's probably the first batch of things I would recommend. And of course, there's much more if you stay longer.

But one of the good things about visiting Slovenia is in a relatively short stay, you actually have a sense that you have really seen a lot of it. And if you can give yourself a week, you can really do the whole country justice. I think in about two weeks you can see everything that's of particular interest. But in a long weekend, three or four days, you get a sense that you've done it well as opposed to some other countries where, you know, it's hard to feel like you can check off

that box because it's just so big. Logistics are harder to see it in a reasonable amount of time. And going back to the caves for a second, are they attached to, a castle, did I read something about, I'm not going to pronounce this right, but Predyama Castle? Yes, very good. Postona, which is the more tourist enabled of the two, is about a five-minute drive from Predyamsky Grad or Predyama Castle, which means in front of the cave castle. and this is one of the most photogenic castles in the world. It's literally built on a sheer clifffront with a cave underneath it,

and it's very dramatic. And the cave systems are, I'm sure, linked if you could go far enough in them. You can't literally do that as a tourist. But yeah, it's a very dramatic castle. The country is full of fairy tale castles. It really looks like the backdrop for Grimm's fairy fairytale. tales wherever you go. That sounds so lovely.

What is your favorite neighborhood to walk around in? I guess in Lugliana. Lugliana is small enough that the old center is basically one neighborhood. And if you go beyond it, you get into residential areas that are of varying degrees of tourist interest. So the short answer is all of the old town, you can walk around in half a day. And that's the thing to do. And it extends along the Lugianica River.

But if you look at a map of the center of Lugliana, all of that is an easy half-day walk. And so that's really the thing to do. And I know that you have children now and you're a family man. But if you were going out with friends for a Friday night, where would we find you? Oh, my goodness. If we had a babysitter, you mean? Yes. Well, I'm going to keep this as an answer.

I spent much of this summer helping out Slovenia's most famous chef who was listed as the 10th best in Europe. His name is Janice Bratoj, and he's got a restaurant that's been around for 25 years called J.B. in New Ghana, which is among the top restaurants in Europe. And I'm helping him with his next cookbook, which has been great fun. And we spent the summer driving around Slovenia looking for what he considers the best ingredients in the country and also the best producers of them. And I did interviews with the producers and wrote profiles for the chapters of the cookbook that are based on the ingredients that he then makes recipes out of. And so I got to see all different parts

of the country. But I think if there's one thing that you're going to do out in the evening on a Friday night, it would be to have an epic 11-course tasting menu at the restaurant J.B., which is incredibly reasonably priced considering the level of quality. I think it's 85 euros or something for the 11-course meal. And if it was in any other country, it would be, you know, 185 right away. And it is, if you're into food and you're into food and you're into the 11-course meal, and if it's, to this slow food and giving your evening over to this, this is something that you will always remember. Sticking with food for a bit, so what are some Slovenian foods that we need to try?

There's a lot of them. Much of the cuisine is reminiscent of what you'd find in Austria is basically Alpine food. That's their everyday food. They like wiener-Schintzel, they like sausages and sauerkraut. or the local variation of just sour turnip, which I've never heard of before I came here, but it's very good. In terms of specialties, there's something called crown sausage,

which has UNESCO geographic protection as a local specialty that's a very good sausage. But the uniquely sloving things, potiza is the national dessert. It's a bun cake that, is a swirl of caramelized walnuts is the centerpiece of it. And that's eaten at the holidays. There's also a very interesting dessert called Gibonica,

which is a layered cake with poppies, poppy seeds, baked apple, Scuta, which is sort of like a cottage cheese, but it's not exactly like cod cheese. It's a curd-based cheese. and that's very good. Then there's a lot of homemade schnapps consumed here, which is really good. Everybody's relative has, everybody has a relative who makes homemade schnapps.

And this is the first thing you'll be offered if you go to someone's house. What was your first experience with snuffs? Well, the best experience, the first experience is everywhere you go, you get invited to somebody's house. they offer you a schnapp when you walk in the door, which is great fun. But my grandmother-in-law is the village schnapps champion, and I'm the guest judge at the annual village schnapps competition, which is lots of fun. And a schnapps I've never really had before I came here, but it's really good. It can be really bad, too, but the people here know how to make it.

It's usually made with fermented apples, which are distilled twice, and then it can be flavored with all sorts of things from walnut, to lemon, to Williams' pair, which is the local favorite, blueberries, you name it. And it's got medicinal properties. If your tummy hurts, you take one, a shot. Even if your shoe is too small, you're supposed to rub schnapps in the sole and the heel of it, and it expands it. So it cures what ails you.

Is this Raikia in Bosnia? It's basically the same thing as Rakeya. Rakea is what they would call schnops in. in Croatia. It's actually, schnapps is the German word. Here they called jannia, but colloquially they use the word shnops.

And what about markets? Has like the hipster artisanal markets come to Slovenia yet, farmers markets? Where do people do their shopping? Yes, it has, but the things that hipsters abroad try to reproduce was already here

and never went away. So Terjnizza is the big central market in Nubliana, also designed by my architect, Ketchnik, and it's totally wonderful. It has a covered market section with artisanal things, and then it has little old ladies who bring in produce from the countryside. In most towns, there's a Saturday morning market, like in my town. There are also hipster pop-ups things, but you basically don't need that if you've got the original authentic thing. easily to hand. So there is that, but it's not to the same degree that you have in a place like I don't know, London, because there's little old ladies doing what hipsters would be trying to

reproduce in a modern form anyway. That's beautiful. So if I wanted to get something to remember Slovenia from one of those little old ladies, what's a typical product that I could bring back with me? I would probably send you to get the following shopping list. I think you should get Piran salt, which is from salt flats on the coast in Piran that have been mined since ancient Rome and are just dried in the sun.

It's literally seawater with the water evaporated by the sun and is very special. If you can smuggle some homemade schnapps, that's always good. You should bring a puttica home with you. And in the market, I think one of the best things to do is you go to one of the sourcrow ladies.

Now, there's several sauerkraut stands in the market, but there's only one that ever has a line in front of it. And that's Marietka's stand, because Marietka's family are the last keepers of an indigenous type of cabbage called Lubliana cabbage, and they have a pillowcase full of its seeds, and these are the last examples of the seeds that exist. And they grow Lubliana cabbage,

cabbage that is otherwise extinct. And it's supposed to be the best one for making sauerkraut. And just the story behind it, Mariet is totally charming. Everybody likes her. And I feel a little bit bad for the other ladies who sell periodically, but they never have a line in front of their stand, but she always does. So you buy a bag of sauerkraut, and you can eat it raw, or you cook with it and maybe you get some dried sausages to make with it when you get back home.

Where would you go if you were in the mood for some culture? After a day of shopping around, well, there's lots of theaters, but the theaters are all in Slovene. So unless you have the language, that's not going to be so much fun. The National Gallery is very good. There's a modern art gallery. There's quite a good, edgy contemporary art scene. There are lots of good concerts. I think maybe the best thing is to go to a concert at Krijanke, which is a medieval monastery.

that was converted by this architect Kajnik into a concert venue. And it's one of my favorite concert venues. I saw the pixies there this summer. Most of the big bands come through Lubejana, but when they play, they play in a reasonably sized venue. I saw Green Day at the stadium in Lubez. But the stadium only fits about 10,000 people so you can actually see the acts.

You can see their facial expressions from just about any seat in the house. So going to a concert, going to an art gallery. A lot of the best times are hanging out at a cafe along the Lugnansa River, especially in the summer, and watching the world go by. It's a city with plenty going on, but it has a very chilled atmosphere where you don't feel this sort of frantic sensation you do in a place like London or Madrid that you have to constantly engage with stuff. You can kind of just take it easy and hang out.

Gosh, I was thinking I had to wait until the summer to come so I could enjoy a nice weather, but you've got me tempted to come a bit earlier. What is it like now during the holiday season? The holiday season is nice Christmas lights. You get a reasonable number of tourists, but you never get so many that it feels oppressive. It's really a special kind of tourist who comes here. It's a sort of person who has probably already seen the more touristy cities in Europe, countries in Europe. and is thoughtful enough and worldly enough to know that this is a place worth visiting.

So you get the good kind of tourists, I would say, the kind that don't feel oppressive. There's a Christmas market and whatnot. It feels maybe a little bit like a miniature version of Salzburg or Vienna around Christmas. And it's a lovely place to be just about any time of year. I think the best is probably the early fall or the early spring in terms of the weather. But, you know, as long as you make it here, it'll be worth the journey. Before I let you go, can we do a quick lightning round of some of your Slovenian favorites? Sure, sure. And I guess we'll focus on Ljubljana.

Bakery. My favorite bakery. Hmm. I'm going to cheat because I'm going to say my favorite cake shop is a place called Zvezda, and it has a couple venues in Ljubljana, but it has these. best cakes I've ever had by far, and anyone I've ever brought there has said likewise. So that's the place to be. And how about coffee shop? Favorite coffee shop, I like exotic coffees. And so I'm going to say, this is not particularly authentic, but I'm friendly with a Colombian guy who married a Slovene and set up a tiny little booth on the loveliest, oldest street in Ljubljana, Gourniturg. It's called Charno Zerno, which means the black bean, as in coffee, bean. And he makes amazing

coffees in lots of different varieties. And I think he's expanding the way Slovenes think about coffee. So it's not traditional. Traditional Slovenes drink Turkish coffee every morning. In fact, they drink the second most coffee in terms of quantity of anyone in Europe behind Italy. But what they're usually drinking is the Turkish style. So this is bringing. various aeropresses and whatnot to the masses. That's really interesting. I was actually just going to ask you about what the coffee culture was like because it seems like this term was just introduced to me,

but like third wave coffee is sort of sweeping the world everywhere from Paris to Istanbul and I guess Slovenia as well. Yeah, absolutely. In the recent years, there have been lots of very good microbreweries with beers and now very good micro-roasters doing coffee as well. And so where would you head to go to lunch? What I like to do if I have guests is to do a chavapi crawl. And if you've been to the Balkans, you'll know what Chavap Chichy are.

But if you haven't, this is the thing that I'm most surprised is not taken off as an international trend. Chavapi is like the hamburger of the Balkans. It's by far the most popular fast food. It's ground meat, rolled into little, they're like oblong meatballs. The one translation is meat fingers, but that's a really repulsive translation. But they're really good. And you find it all over the Balkans, Serbia, Bosnia, in particular. And it's probably the most popular food in Slovene, even though it is in Slovene.

And I like to take people to try out lots of different chibachi chibati places. And so I would order one portion at four or five different places around town and use it as an excuse to walk through the old town. And where would you take your vegetarian friends? Uh-huh. There are good vegetarian restaurants. I think maybe the best, well, no, that's cheating. I was about to say I just went to this absolutely amazing Japanese restaurant, but I feel like that's cheating because Slovenian food. food itself is not vegetarian friendly. There are vegetarian places that you can find now,

but they're not serving Slovenian food. So there's a really good Nepali restaurant and a really good Japanese restaurant, and I think that's probably your best bet if you're a vegetarian. Sounds good. Sorry, what were the names of those places? Do you know? The Nepali place is called Shambala, and the Japanese restaurant is called Maru, and it's extremely high-end, very sophisticated, and super good. And I just take it. on my birthday just the other day. Happy birthday. Thank you.

Okay, and so if we wanted to get an after-dinner drink, is there a good bar? There are lots of great bars. I think it's fun, you know, if you're a tourist, to go up to the castle on the hill, and there's a bar inside there that's very cool. So I think for location-wise, that's great. There's also one that I used to love, because it's so weird, called pre-skelette or at the skeleton. And it's in a basement in the old town.

You go down the stairs and it's decorated very tackily in fake skeletons in lots of weird positions. And they have really cheap cocktails. And it's kitschy but in a fun way. And I think that that's, yeah, that would be a fun one. Sounds good. Is there any etiquette rules we should know as foreigners visiting Slovenia? Any tips to not embarrass ourselves?

I think the main thing that I had to get used to as an American, we are used to walking around the house without our shoes on. And in Slovenia, that's the world's biggest bopop. You take off your shoes anytime you go into somebody's house and you wear sopaki or slippers that they provide you with. And at every school, including high school, all the kids take off their shoes when they walk in and say you go into high school

and everybody's in these little slippers. And so slippers, these are very inexpensive. It costs about two euros for a pair of them, but they also make a good souvenir because they're quite quirky. In fact, when my wife and I had a wedding party in the U.S., after getting married in Slovenia, we shipped 50 pairs of these super cheap, very basic slippers as wedding gifts to the guests, and the guest's This was totally amazing and great fun. I love that. So how does that work? Are there guest slippers?

Or do people bring, if you're going to a friend, do you bring your own slipper? People keep a bucket full of slippers by the door, a basket full of slippers so they can offer them to guests. Cool. What's keeping you busy these days? No, it sounds like you're doing a little bit of everything. Lots of stuff. I guess the latest projects that are fun, I was just in the U.S. promoting my latest book called Collector of Lives,

Georgia Vazari, and the Invention of Art, which I was delighted to learn recently is been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. So that's the world's biggest long shot, but it was nice to be nominated. Congratulations. That's amazing. And I'm going to be helping Janice Bratoz with his cookbook, which I mentioned before.

And I'm also doing screenwriting with the most famous actor of the former Yugoslavia, Branko Jurych. We're writing a new TV series for HBO Europe. That's fun. So we have to write the first three episodes between now and February. So those are the latest exciting projects. That is so exciting. Oh my God.

Congratulations. That sounds like you've gotten busy a few months ahead of you. Where can people find more about you, Noah? You can join me at noacharni.com or the easiest way is maybe if you want to follow me on Facebook because I wanted to putting all the various activities and whatnot on the Facebook page. And how can we get our hands on your Slovenology book? That's trickier because it's published by a Slovenian publisher. At the moment, it's only for sale in Slovenia. At some point,

it'll be available on Amazon, but it isn't yet. So the best way is if you contact me or if you fly over here. You can also order it on Slovenian bookstore websites, but all the websites are in Slovenia, which I was complaining to the hookup. And so I don't know how many foreigners are going to try to navigate it to order books. So best ways to get in touch with me and I'll see what I can do. Perfect. All right. Thank you so much for making the time today, Noah. Thank you very much for having me. What do you think? Do you agree with Noah that Slovenia sounds like the world's best country? It sounds pretty great to me. For a roundup of Noah's Slovenian travel tips,

go to postcardacademy.co slash Slovenia. Next week, I'm talking to Amelia Seha. When Amelia was 12, she moved from Mexico to California, where she helped her father do backbreaking work picking grapes. Today, she owns a multimillion dollar vineyard and was named Woman of the Year by the California State Legislature. Subscribe to the Postcard Academy so you don't miss it. If you like today's episode, please share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you'd like to reach me, you can email me at Sarah at postcardacademy.co, or find me on Instagram at Postcard Academy. That's all for now. Thanks for listening.

I have a beautiful week wherever you are. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmygatel.com slash blank no more.