Archives for April 30th, 2004

A picture from the Gallery Kranj. Used with permission.

EU membership is now just a few hours away, so I thought I’d put together some links about Slovenia. Glorious ones, of course.

First up is the Gallery Kranj, which knocks me out even more than Ukraine girls.

The pictures are beautiful but not in a traditional postcard-ish, wish-you-were-here kinda way. In fact, it’s often impossible to clearly recognize Slovenia in many of them. Some are wonderfully surreal. Don’t forget to check the three submenus: the city, the country and the Alps. And definitely don’t miss the insect photos if, like me, you have a weakness for insect photos.

At any rate: kudos to Nathalie Lawhead and company. (And for more Nathalie-related goodness, don’t miss her exquisite BlueSuburbia. It’s flashtastic.) I’d also like to thank the wonderful taz for pointing my nose in their direction.

If traditional photos are more your thing, then the German magazine Stern has recently put up a very nice collection of pictures of Slovenia. It’s part of their “New Europe” series. If you can read German, I recommend checking out their story on Slovenia. It’s nicely done, with the exception of this horrendous map, which manages to misspell four out of 12 Slovenian cities.

Note to Stern: Nothing says sloppy like messing up a simple map.¹

Stern has been running stories on all the new EU members lately. The collected articles are conveniently located here. You might notice that the Baltic States are unfairly jammed together into one article, as are Slovakia and the Czech Republic, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.

If you feel confident about your knowledge of incoming EU states, then the BBC has put together a series of quizzes to make you feel like a total idiot. Their Slovenia Quiz is extremely hard. I scored a shameful 8 out of 10. (Thanks to Arellanes for pointing them out!)

Give the quiz a try and let me know how you did.²

The BBC site also has two videos about Ljubljana. (Part one, part two) You’ll need RealPlayer to see them.

That’s all for now… See you in the EU!

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1) It’s Murska Sobota not Muska Sobota, Rogaska Slatina not Rogasca Slatina, Novo Mesto not Novo Mestro, and Nova Gorica not Nova Gorcia. Also, the river is more commonly called Sava, not Save. And Drau is the German word for the river Drava. Not that there’s anything wrong with calling it the Drau… it’s just that everything else on the map is in Slovene.

2) The ones I got wrong: The one about Deseti Brat and the question about the rare species. Oddly enough I got the same score (8/10) on the Czech Republic quiz, despite having been there only once… and briefly.