Balance worklife: May 2007

Monday, 28 May 2007

Ljubljana - 20/05/07

castle

night view of old town

map in the town hall

I woke up a bit too late in the morning. So instead of going to train station, I walked around my hostel for a while. That is a Sunday morning. So everywhere is quiet except those churches. I climbed up a small hill to visit Ljubljana castle. Well there is really nothing much special. However, the whole place still relatively clean. I could only see some beer bottles left by few people who stay out last night(there were some performance in squares and road side previous night). The whole place is warm and I could remember that the highway sign here is same as our Malaysian highways. So it is quite like Malaysia in certain aspects. The only things I do not like are the drivers' attitude on overtaking other cars(no signal at all) and too much graffiti around(even on monuments).

Slovenia- Italy trip

19/05/07 Home-Heathrow-Stansted-Ljubljana

This is pretty a long trip I did alone. Quite a number of place may or may not have chinese name. So I decide to use English for this series of posts.

Why I chose this route to fly to Slovenia(Ljubljana is the capital)? Well, I am carrying clothes and other stuff for a whole week. So I just want to make my life easier in moving around. There is less transfers and physical works in moving between London rail stations to tube stations. However, I woke up too early that morning. So it is really not very efficient and cost effective.

Slovenia is the first of former Yugoslavian( 南斯拉夫 ) member countries that become independent. It is very green by viewing on the plane. Well ther population density also very low, 90 per km square. I was really surprise that Ljubljana is just a 'town' like Ipoh only.

Upon checking into hostel, I went directly to rail station to buy tickets for trips to two places in my following days. It is a bit hard to communicate with the staff there in English. So after getting the ticket I want, I went to tourist info office next door(does not make sense right?). Luckily the office still open(almost 7pm). The staff there is called David. He is very helpful in helping me to clear my doubts in the use of train tickets, even spend a bit of time chatting with me. Too bad I bought train ticket already. Otherwise I would heed for his advice in buying bus tickets. The reason is : train station is still too far away to the place I want to go. This took me a few days to understand. Well, talk about this guy again, he is really a bona fide backpacker. He has been to many Asian countries including Malaysia. Quite a fun loving guy. He ever invited me for ' home surfing', a kind of party where I wouldn't dare to accept in normal case. But I took a while to think about it and accept(dunno why either). But eventually he did not call up my hostel at night. I guess he might think that is too late for me....

Return to normal life

I reached home on last Saturday night. There were a lot of things need to be tidied up. I was not in good mood because I missed the £1 express coach from London back to Slough. Maybe I should have waited 1 hour again for the final bus service instead of travelling by tube and train just to buy detergent. Sometimes, a decision is not easily made on the spot. That's especially true during my journey to Italy and Slovenia. However, in any case, we should accept the consequence. Sometimes, whatever seems to be good may turn out to be bad at the end. So, no more regret.

The loss of my YHA membership card gives me another alarm. I should not continue to be multitasking all the time. Otherwise I will forget what I do and where I put something again. Another lesson is, I should not keep accumulating 'rubbish' again. Once I get a task done, just throw away whatever clutter that may get into my way of searching impoortant documents.