A week or so ago 100+ Erasmus students converged at Bologna autostazione at the ungodly hour of 6am. We were dispatched to various coaches and settled in for the morning's journey to Ljubljana. The trip was organised by Aegee, one of the eramsus societies here, and involved a weekend away visting Ljubljana and Trieste. Despite the horrifically early start (I am definately not a morning person!) it was worth it as we arrived in central Ljubljana by 11am and had lots of time to explore. The city is so pretty, especially down by the river. When we arrived we discovered a huge outdoor market, which on closer inspection turned out to be a wine festival! As I'm sure you can imagine, this news was met with great joy by us students. We quickly dashed into a bookshop initially, to pick up a dictionary and taught ourselves some basic Slovenian ("thanks", "wine", and "beer" seemed the most appropriate to learn!) then headed back to the wine stalls. They did a great deal whereby you bought a glass for 5euro, and then took this around all the stalls and tried as much wine as you liked. There were also stalls selling food, jewellery, souvenirs and general tourist tack. There was a great atmosphere, it seemed the whole city was out and about, and along with the blaring of numerous oom-pah bands who were wandering the streets the whole thing was pretty special.We attempted to go on the city tour later that afternoon which had been organised by Aegee, but as there was one guide and hundreds of students we couldn't hear a thing and it seemed somewhat pointless - so we soon ditched the group and headed back to the river, constructing our own "city tour" as we went. At one point we were befriended by a group of Slovenians who were hilarious and so lovely - conversation was somewhat stilted as it had to be conducted in a mix of italian, english and our very poor attempts at Slovenian, but still we got by. They invited us to a festa that night, so we left with plans to meet them at a square in town later that night.
In the evening we were bussed out to the hostel to dump our bags. I can safely say that was the weirdest hostel I've ever stayed in... it was in the middle of nowhere, in a basement of a gym! Soo strange. There were 10 of us in our room, which for some reason was called Blacksmith (we were just glad we didn't get the one called Bicycle Shed!), and had been decorated to look as if it had blood spattered all over the walls. Delighful stuff. Still it was warm and clean which was the most important thing. Later we headed into town and attempted to find a Slovenian restaurant...and failed miserably 
Alas, no goulash for us, but instead pizza at an Irish bar. Ach well! We were so tired by this point it was more a question of finding fuel rather than Michelin starred food! There was an erasmus party for us at one of the clubs in Ljubljana - we started off there and it was pretty cool, but not hugely exciting so we left in the hope of finding the randomers who we'd met at the wine festival and getting ourselves to a real live Slovenian party. Sadly we then got very very lost and couldn't find the meeting point Despite this we wandered for a while and had a nice chilled time, even if we didn't actually manage to get to a proper party!
The next day we piled back onto the bus and were shipped back over the border to Trieste. It's a gorgeous city, and bizarrely doesn't feel at all Italian. Unfortunately as it was Sunday it was slightly erm...dead, but we didn't let this stop our fun! We found a great restaurant down by the marina and had a really long lunch, then in typical student fashion, ran around taking lots of daft photos. We've developed quite an affection for "jumping" photos, and are hoping to have a whole album of us "Jumping around Europe" by the end of the year. So here's the Trieste chapter... 
As we meandered around the city, we then found to our great excitement, a chocolate festival! Great news, I'm sure you'd agree. 
A few hours later, after far too much chocolate and having taken far too many pictures we bade Trieste farewell and headed home to Bologna, tired but very happy. A great weekend all round!
