Piran is a resort town on the Adriatic, basically across from Venice, about 2.5 hours south by bus from Ljubljana. At least, it was supposed to be.
Neither lauren nor I have ever driven in a foreign country and we don't want to, even though my friend Keren said it's really easy to drive around Slovenia. I'm a big user of the website Rome2rio, which tells you all of transportation options from one place to another, and it seemed to think it was pretty easy to take buses everywhere.
What Rome2rio also tells you, which i didn't really pay attention to, is that most of these buses don't run terribly often.
So we get a bus to Piran, and about halfway through, the bus breaks down. Luckily, the bus company sent another bus pretty quickly. Success! We already had a situation with the airline that we almost didn't make it to our destination.
Piran is so quaint. Sleepy and sweet, boats everywhere. Lots of restaurants, not too many souvenir-y type places for all of the tourists, which keeps it charming.
Lauren and I go to an uncrowded restaurant water and get a couple of drinks and some seafood. There's not much to do but eat and drink and watch the world go by in this cute little town, and that's basically all we did.
We're at a cafe, watching the sunset, and some good looking, tall long-haired Australian guy, probably in his 20s, starts adjusting his clothes and shoes at the lamppost and the two teen Slovenian teen girls next to us start harassing him. "Hey! The homeless shelter is down the street!" They totally bullied this poor grown man. He looked like he didn't know what to do. They're cackling as he walks away, and we turn to them and said "oh my god, you're like the 'mean girls' of Slovenia! And the girl turns to me and proclaims "I am! I am a mean girl! I am completely crazy!"
She was the only person we met on this trip who wasn't nice. And she was nice to us, so I'm not sure it even counts.
We go out for dinner at a recommended place called Park. It's a basic looking cafe restaurant and Lauren and I are really excited to eat fresh seafood. A lot of it.
So the guy comes by and we order the "grilled platter for 2," and lauren orders a liter of wine. He says "a liter?" And I concur... "you really want to have a LITER lauren?" Yes. Ok.
The guy comes by with a liter of wine and I start cracking up. The couple next to us looks at us in a combination of horror and surprise. I said "she has problems with the metric system,” and they shrugged as though we had completely confirmed every American stereotype in that moment: stupid AND greedy. We assured them we would finish it anyway.
The seafood platter was another story. Two WHOLE grilled trout, a couple of langoustines, sardines, mussels, squid, and potatoes and Swiss shard cooked in the juices. A lot of fucking seafood, for 40€. We didn't finish it, but we did finish the wine. And then a tiramisu after, just to really give our internal organs a run for their money.
We'd basically seen and done the whole town in a day, so we decide to bus it to Trieste, Italy for the day. It's a couple of hours away, but there's only one departure in the morning. We'd be there by lunch.
We get to the station early, and ask a bus driver in one of the buses if that was the bus to Trieste. He not only didn’t answer the question, but he closed the door in our faces. Rude person #2 in Slovenia, but still, not so bad. The bus that was ours was broken down, though, so we had to take a bus that left about 15 minutes later to a town called Koper and transfer to the Trieste bus. The Koper bus is a local, and is slow as hell, and we can actually see the connecting bus pulling out of the spot as we pull in. So for the second time on this trip, we book it across the parking lot to get on this bus. Can believe we made that one, either.
Trieste is a pleasant, not too exciting port city that is nestled between Slovenia and Croatia. We walk to the first cafe, we're greeted in English by an Asian woman before we even open our mouths.
Now, I'm not about to claim that I don't have stereotypes and free from racists thoughts. And had the lady greeted us in Italian, I wouldn't have thought too much of it. But that combination, along with being pretty close to the bus terminal and the fact that the menu was in comic sans font and all stuck together with some unknown sticky substance.. that should have been our sign to get out of there.
Lauren orders a double espresso, and I order a double macchiato, which is the same as a double espresso with a tiny splash of milk. She expresses some confusion, and comes back with a tall glass of milk and tells me I ordered a latte. I hate to be that person, but a macchiato is really fucking different from a latte, and I ordered it in Italian. She said "but this is what I thought you really wanted."
She relented, brought me what I actually ordered, and tipped herself with the change she should've given me.
Two days later I realized I said “macchiato doble” (spanish) instead of “macchiato doppio” (italian), and maybe I was the complete dick in that scenario. Whatever… a macchiato still isn’t a latte.
We looked at the port, wandered around the town, looked for the former Jewish ghetto and didn't find it, peed at eataly (yes, Italy has a number of eatalys and I think they're very popular. I pee at my neighborhood eataly often, too.)
Lauren finds this cute cafe for lunch and they have one unreserved table so we snag it. It's full of an attractive, well dressed, business people. The staff only talk to us mostly in Italian even though we respond in English. They bring us some complimentary fritters on the house, tasty even though served cold, which was a little odd. We look around- no one else seemed to get appetizers. I got the rabbit and lauren got prosciutto/mozzarella and some more grilled seafood. A lot of squid gave their lives for Lauren on this trip. Really nice food. They brought us the check with a small sliver of some complimentary apple torte; more classically Austrian than Italian, and delicious. No one else looked like they got the torte. We can't figure out if they treated us specially because we were American and Trieste doesn't get a lot of American tourists or if it's because they know we tip. Either way, a great meal and a nice way to pass the day, even if it took 3 hours each way to get there.
Back to Slovenia for another, yet slightly less interesting seafood meal. No platter for two, no liter of wine, but a lot of food for a little price.
We were awake and ready to party, so we go to the “Jazz club” in town. It’s packed, no jazz. I made Lauren drink some digestif against her will, and called it a night.
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