How to get from Berlin to Ljubljana

There are undoubtedly many ways to get from Berlin to Ljubljana as well as many reasons to do so. Maybe you go by plane, maybe by horse, or maybe by train. Maybe you have a meeting there, a dying grandmother there or just enjoy peeing there. I, personally, went the following way for the following reasons, maybe you will too! Here is how to do it just like me.

The first thing is you really have to want to go to Ljubljana. If you don't want to go there I suggest you go somewhere else. I stumbled upon wanting to go to Ljubljana with the help of a friend whose last name must be said with his first name, Micah Buckley-Farlee. Micah Buckley-Farlee and I have been friends for almost 8 years now. We met doing high school theater. We've never had the opportunity to be incredibly close but we've made up for that by doing a lot of the same things at different times. We've worked at the same coffee shop, shared some of the same friends, went to the same schools, studied the same language and both received a scholarship for a student exchange year in Berlin. In order to increase this list I've tried to enjoy techno and he's tried to bleed once a month. We can already add something very important, though, a trip to Ljubljana.

At first I wasn't conscious of my want to go to Ljubljana. I may or may not have known it existed at all, it's hard to say. But when Micah Buckley-Farlee asked me, "Do you want to go to Ljubljana?" I knew immediately that yes, yes I did want that.

The next question was how? How can this dream become reality? There we were in Berlin and in Berlin it's really fairly easy to see that you are not in Ljubljana. That was something I noticed right away. Maybe it will take you longer, have patience. Knowing this we knew we had to leave Berlin or there was no chance we were going to be anywhere else.

First we did what we knew. We took a regional train with our Berlin transportation tickets almost as far out as we could and ended up somewhere near Potsdam. We were not fooled, that was also clearly not Ljubljana. After a little walk around the area we decided to buy a map to give us a better idea of where Ljubljana might actually be. This helped tremendously, I can only recommend it.

(Right: "Every wall has a gate!" We spent a long time trying to find this particular one which led to this particular gas station)

Being at a gas station we saw cars and some of them were going in the direction we wanted to go. We made a sign (or rather Micah Buckley-Farlee made a sign because he could make letters of the same size, unlike others) and after one good talking to by an experienced Ukrainian hitchhiker, kindness of a man from Jordan, and three hours later we were at a different gas station also reachable by Berlin public transportation. Two hours after that we were dropped off by a Danish stove engineer (both he and the stoves are Danish) "near Dresden" or not near Dresden as the case may be.

It was just after sun down when we realized, hey, we're still here at this gas station. We thought it was perhaps soccer related because during the World Cup most everything is. So we waited for the Dutch to kick someone's butt before asking for a ride again only to be laughed at by big burly men about to go to bed at 10:30pm in their trucks.

After no sympathy from the gas station crew and a back up taxi number we started our walk to Bautzen. Micah Buckley-Farlee recognized this town as a place that makes mustard, so you can imagine we were pretty excited.

(Bautzen)

We looked for a hostel or a Pension or anything that wasn't a Holiday Inn, but all we could find was, yes, a Holiday Inn. And it was expensive. BUT we could exchange our pillows for slightly different pillows if we wanted.

The next day we decided to train it.

(This may look similar to standing at a gas station, but it's very different)

We spent the whole day on the train ending up in Munich in time for the Germany game. We had a beer and a sausage and tried not to throw up from the billions of 18 year old Americans glued to the bar at our hostel which wasn't much cheaper than the Holiday Inn but did include two free shots. We stuck it to the man and didn't order anything else there.

(And whoa, they had beer in the vending machine)

After a nice breakfast at the hostel we started hitchhiking again. We got as far as Rosenheim with a man from Georgia.

(It was HOT and my skin is still a little bubbly and peel-y from standing in this exact spot even though I had already applied sunscreen three times)

A couple hours later we got a ride to Salzburg from an Austrian man whose brand new car Micah BF ruined within one minute of being in the car. Then we got a ride from a woman from Ulm who missed her exit by a LOT and took us much farther than she intended. Good for us, sad for her.

We arrived in beautiful...

(I was there.)

(Get it? It's like the sign.)

And took a train to Villach and spent the night in yeah, a Holiday Inn. A more expensive one, but it had a red light in it and you could see through the glass walls into the shower and toilet. Micah BF and I are now very close.

The next day we had really had it with not being in Ljubljana. That was really enough of that. So we hopped on the train again and there we were!

(We chose pizza Burek over Human Fish. I regret it every day.)

(Traditional Slovenian, which seems like traditional all of this part of Europe)

Phone Bubble.

(We went out at night and found this cool place. Sadly we were too tired and didn't like the music enough to stay, but it was cool.)

And that was that. It is a nice, comparatively rich, modern, chic city. The people were nice and we were able to talk to everyone in either English or German. The next day we took the train back to Berlin because Micah BF had to hurry up and DJ and go back to the states. To get the best deal we had to spend four hours in Vienna which was partially and well spent eating cheese Spätzle and apple strudel.

(That picture on the right is a church, not the Strudel)

Then we took the night train to Berlin. Weighing the cost of a bed instead of a seat on the night train against drinking most of the night we went for the beer. One was bought by a man at one of the stops for a euro less than the people on the train were selling it for, smart man. It had a goat on it, maybe we were in Hungary at the time? I don't know, who cares, we were busy chatting up some young Germans and going to the bathroom.

Eventually we did fall asleep and we were in Berlin an hour after waking up.

So apparently it's easier to get from Ljubljana to Berlin. Just do that.