My Trip to Slovenia

I was invited by some colleagues on my program to travel to Slovenia last weekend, and I gladly accepted. As my overpriced and underwhelming "Rough Guide to Europe" puts it

Slovenia is the most stable, prosperous and welcoming of all Europe's erstwhile Communist countries. The landscape is as varied as it is beautiful: along the Austrian border the Julian Alps provide stunning mountain scenery; further south, the brittle karst scenery is riddled with spectacular caves. Slovenia's capital, Ljubljana, is a vital, youthful place, manageably small and cluttered with Baroque and Hapsburg buildings.

Sounds pretty nice, huh? My journey started out well enough, with a six-hour train ride to Bratislava to meet the gang for the trip across the border. Everything was going swimmingly until I was about two hours away from B'lava, when it dawned on me that perhaps I should have brought my passport.

On realizing this, I uttered this word very loudly towards the lady sitting next to me.

I don't know what I was thinking, perhaps it was the fact that Slovakia and Slovenia are almost the same word, and therefore I wouldn't need a passport. The people on the program were very sympathetic, and even took it upon themselves to concoct a series of increasingly more illegal schemes to smuggle me across Austria and into Slovenia. In the end, it didn't seem worth it, and I decided to just spend the day in Bratislava and then head home.

The benefit of this is that I was able to take some nice pictures of Slovak advertisements. Here is one for the "Hot-Cat", which is like a hot dog but has hot mustard instead of ketchup and is made from cat instead of pig:



Here is a woman making a baby out of dough, which I think is supposed to make us hungry. It succeeded, at least with me:



This woman is offering to simulate oral sex on a banana, in an attempt to dislodge her friend from his T-Mobile phone. The message: T-Mobile is addictive:



Last but not clearly not least is this ad for a Czech religious group, the "Universe People":






In case this isn't already common sense to you, the billboard clearly illustrates the structure of our world, neatly proving the connection between the founder of the group Ashtar Sheeran, J. Christ, and Ptaah, the cosmic squadron commander.

The website is superb, offering a number of highly convincing videos showing previous visits to our planet by Ptaah and his people. Also, there is an audio section that offers some great tunes which you can sing in the shower or have played at your wedding/funeral. Have a look, and enjoy your enlightment.