Europe's largest synagogue just got served

 

While we were at Bled yesterday taking the boat ride to the inlet, we befriended a fellow American and NYU student Ashley after teasing her for hogging the front seat and ruining all our photos. We would then find out that she was staying just across the street from our hostel at City Hotel and after a series of other run-ins including one where our driver had to rescue her tour bus after another tour bus crashed into them (no joke, that probably was the biggest news story in Slovenia that day), she would join us later that night for drinks in Ljubljana at the counter-culture neighborhood district of Metelkova (which bears resemblance to Freetown Christiania neighborhood in Copenhagen). 

There we crashed a local’s birthday party, got free cake, and then hung out with fellow hostelmate Eric Stonehill back at Hadouta Lounge for more beer, hookah, and jokes that made Mihaela laugh so hard she woke the whole neighborhood up (not an exaggeration).

We eventually turned in at 2am, waking up at 9:30am to a rainy and stormy Ljubljana morning. We decided to rent a car (thanks to Nathaniel who woke up early and picked up our car at the airport) and take a quick roadtrip to nearby Trieste, Italy, because why not. Probably due to a mild form of Stockholm Syndrome, Ashley even joined us for round two.

The trip from Ljubljana only took an hour and by 11am we were at Trieste’s Synagogue, which is one of the largest in Europe and built in 1912.

 

 

A few blocks over is Piazza Unità, which is Europe’s largest sea-front square.

 

 

At this point it started to pour extremely heavily here as well, which we were not prepared for. Grabbing quick gelatos and ducking back into the car, we opted out of a leisurely walk around town and headed north from Trieste, passing by the Roman Theater that was built in 33-32 BC.

 

 

About a 10 minute drive up north from Trieste is Miramare Castle, which we checked out for about 20-30 minutes. Inside is a museum about how rich Italian people used to live, which we didn’t find really interesting.

 

 

The rest of the property, however, is pretty.

 

 

At this point, Mihaela tried to take a selfie of our group.

 

Close enough.

 

We then got back into our car and drove back across the Italian-Slovenian border towards Slovenia’s Skocjan Caves.

 

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- At time of posting in Trieste, Italy, it was 14 °C - Humidity: 81% | Wind Speed: 21km/hr | Cloud Cover: thunderstorms

 

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