Day 5: More touristing

Today started out well.  Most things don't open until about 10 am, so we got a coffee about 9 and then went on our boat ride down the river.  It was pretty cool!  It took almost an hour going down and back.

Afterwards, we walked over to the National Museum, and the Museum of Natural History.  The National Museum was okay.  It had some cool artifacts from the Roman and pre-Roman times, and some videos to watch.  Lots of coins, and jewelry and weapons. But the Natural History Museum was really cool.

The museums are together in a 2-story building.  The bottom floor has stone works in the hallways, but the exhibits are on the 2nd floor.  Half of the floor is National Museum, half is Natural History.  So it's not very big.

The Natural History section starts off with fossils and has a ton of them!  All sorts of plants, fish, crinoids, shells, a mammoth and a cave bear.  There's a section on early animals and Darwin.  There's a huge section with bones of various types of fish.

Further on there's stuffed animals for the region, including a ton of birds and fish, and a selection of mammals. Next was a huge selection of insects, including beetles and a giant butterfly collection.  There was also a great mineral collection, and tables with different mineral panels you could touch.

I know I'm forgetting some stuff, but this area was really good.  Bear in mind, I haven't been to the Smithsonian, or anything like that.  But this museum had so much, all crammed into half a floor.  It was amazing!  Even better, every section had an electronic game for kids to play - like putting the bones in a dinosaur back together.  And more, like puzzles, matching games, stamps that showed different animal tracks.  Every section had several things for kids to do, and models of bones and things for them to hold.  It was great!

My feet were really beginning to hurt by now, but I kept moving.  I needed food, so we kept looking, while we headed to our next place.  We decided to skip the Museum of Modern Art, after what we'd seen so far.  I really wanted to see the City Gallery, but when we got there, it was roped off and had a sign on the door.  It looked like they had just finished putting new concrete all in front.

We kept on, just looking for food now. We tried a few places but they just had coffee or alcohol.  I was getting really sore feet by now, and not paying attention, when Frank said "Isn't this the skyscraper you were talking about?"  Yes!

The skyscraper is 12 stories high, with a cafe on top.  Floor 11 is a lounge, and lucky for me, Floor 10 is the restaurant.

This restaurant was probably the fanciest we've been in, in Ljubljana.  It had tablecloths and wine glasses and the napkins were sort of in-between fabric and paper.  The waiter was dressed all in black.  We got a table near a window, and the waiter opened it for us.  Frank got a kick out of that - the windows open on the 10th floor of a restaurant.

The special of the day was soup, turkey schnitzel with potatoes, and a dessert.  For 8 Euros!  Woohoo!  It was delicious!  And I actually have the pictures ready now:


The pea soup was made from fresh green peas, not dried split-peas.  It was really good!

Turkey schnitzel with a side salad (balsamic) and grilled potato wedges.  Also yummy!

I had to forgo eating all the potatoes, to leave room for the dessert.  We still ended up waddling out of there!  This is what I'm calling an "apple streusel tart."

So, we barely survived lunch.  After that, we headed up to the top floor.  There are tables all around the edge, with little dividers to keep you from falling off the skyscraper.  The cafe section is in the middle.  See below:

I keep thinking, in the US there would be a giant wall of chain to keep you from jumping off the top.

We sat for about 15 minutes but they didn't realize we were there, so we got up and left.  We were feeling better.

Now we had a huge walk back towards out apartment, to find a gallery and the City Museum.  I kept having to stop and rest my feet.

We finally made the museum.  The gallery escaped us.  It must have been hidden in an apartment complex that we passed.  The museum was okay.  It was 3 stories but a lot of it was their temporary exhibit on Stalinist rule.  They did give us tickets to the archeological parks though, so hopefully we'll get there later in the week.

We went home after this and I soaked my feet and refused to leave the apartment again that night.  Frank went to the grocery and got some sausage and sandwich meats and bread.  The cheesy, crappy sliced white bread, was a french loaf that cost 1.5 Euros and tastes amazing!  The sausage was really good too.  It's a dried salami and we just cut off hunks and eat it.  So that was supper.