A Goodbye to the Slavic States… for now

After a quick trip to see the Insta Famous Lake Bled (the town itself is worth a visit, lake aside! Cute wee outdoorsy, adventurous town which has catapulted to the top of my list of places to return to), it’s on to Austria.

I share the train carriage with Jamja, a retired maths teacher from Slovenia. She’s direct and blunt and was presumably an extremely strict teacher who took no nonsense in the classroom (or any where else for that matter). She asks me about Scotland and we get onto the subject of independence. ‘Always with independence comes war’ she states gravely before she discusses Slovenian independence with me. She notes that they got off relatively lightly but ‘Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia? Chaos’. She tells me she grew up close to the Yugoslavian Italian border and so she had a better idea of how things were in the west than most Yugoslavians at the time. ‘Technical things were better in the west, but we always had food. If you needed dentist or doctor there was no problem. Now you wait two years.’ It’s a nostalgia for the communist era that I’ve become familiar with on this trip and it has me reflecting deeply on life in the West and my
route through the Slavic states. Slovenia was another newer member of the EU and once again, the promises made of a better more western life never quite seem to have come to fruition. And while I’m under no illusions that communism was all sunshine and rainbows, I find myself reflecting on the fact that I felt safer alone in Sofia or Skopje than in Dundee or London and I’m realising that perhaps our western world view is still very much shaped by Cold War thinking and is perhaps more of a reflection of how we feel at home than by the reality of other countries. If we don’t feel completely safe in our own cities, and we assume that the east is worse in most respects, then we expect eastern cities to be worse than our own and yet the reality isn’t quite so cut and dry. It once again has me questioning the lens through which our ideas and preconceptions of abroad are shaped. In many ways my travels through the Slavic states have opened my eyes and I’m a little sad to be leaving them behind for the moment as I start to journey into Western Europe.

Despite Jamja’s tough exterior she seems to take a shine to me and before long she takes out her ipad to start showing me things to see and do if I make it back to Slovenia. We’re adding things to the list as we cross the border, and just as we hit the Austrian side an announcement comes over the tannoy that our train will be terminating here- almost 200km south of where it’s supposed to end. An English voice in our carriage states that our new terminal point ‘is a joke’ to which a German accent replies that it’s the Austrian sense of humour.
With that I say goodbye to Jamja and head off to chart a new route.

3 trains and a bus journey later I finally reach Bad Goisern in Upper Austria. The journey’s been a bit of an epic but with the alpine scenery as entertainment I really can’t complain.Read more