Day of Wandering

Today was a perfect day here in Ljubljana (we have been really blessed with the weather here this spring) and we made the most of it by doing a lot but very little.  It was a combination of going to the market, buying sandwiches and sitting on a bench by the river for lunch, getting a few things in preparation for our trip to Croatia on Saturday, and wandering through parts of the city we haven't seen on our way to Tivoli Park to get ice cream cones and let the crew run off some steam on the playground.  The kiddos thought the fact that we had lunch, an afternoon snack, and ice creams cones outside was the bee knees (not to mention that they got to go down the big slide at Tivoli "lots of times").

On the way to Tivoli, we came across a small museum that is dedicated to Roman stone work, much of which is from the first and second centuries.  The exhibit had gravestones, pillars, columns, statues, caskets, altars...pretty much everything they would have made out of stone.  Unfortunately, only a small fraction of the original Roman stonework around Ljubljana has been preserved, as most was used to build the Ljubljana castle.  The caskets looked like something we found in our hotel room in Ptuj, which is a little creepy. 

At the museum, we learned our useless bit of knowledge for the day:  the terms milestone and itinerary originated in the Roman era.  The Romans placed stone pillars along their roads with inscriptions indicating the ruler at the time that section of road was built and how many miles the pillar was from the road's origin (Get it? Mile "stones"?).  They also made maps of the milestones and inns along the roads, which were called itineraries (Latin for "it's in the area").  And, they had the original Trip Advisor, in which people etched reviews of roads and inns on itinerary stones.  Actually, we weren't able to verify all of this at the museum, but we're pretty sure some of it is true.   

On the way home, we walked through the literature festival taking place in old town (Slovenia is big on reading and has received a lot of international recognition for this...in fact, there is at least one bookstore on every block).  It's a big deal...there are a lot of vendor stands selling books (in Slovenian, of course), a stage where people do readings of children's books (in Slovenian, of course), and lots of music (also in Slovenian).  It's very cool.

By the time we got home, we had three exhausted kids and two exhausted parents on our hands.  We took showers, ate dinner, and it was bedtime.  Sy was asleep before we even shut his door (actually, he sleeps on the floor with us, so technically it's "our door").

It was a good day.