Clue 1: a bird’s-eye view. Okay, looks pretty European. That doesn’t narrow it down much.
Clue 2: There’s a funicular to the high place from which the previous photo was taken. Ring a bell?
Clue 3: A monument to a poet. Now that’s not something you see in too many places.
Clue 4. If you can see this and still not guess, you’re like me: you know nothing at all about this city.

And the answer is: Ljubljana, Slovenia, a city I had never heard of until we started planning this trip. The sum total of what I knew about Slovenia, in fact, was that it was in central Europe, was not Slovakia, and was the home country of Melania Trump. A friend of Joy’s has recently moved here, and from him and others we heard good things about the country. Our first stop today, as R. showed us the center city, was the Dragon Bridge, one of whose dragons you see here.

Joy, Munchkin and I took the funicular up to Ljubljana Castle late this afternoon, not just to see the almost millennium-old castle, though it is interesting and offers a great view of the city; the restored archers’ tower also houses an exquisite restaurant, Strelec (https://www.restavracija-strelec.si/). Joy’s co-workers knew we were coming to Ljubljana, and for a retirement present, gave us a gift card for a meal there, and what a meal. A seven-course tasting menu, with a couple of “greetings” to start and a third dessert to finish, so that we have just returned from what was effectively a ten-course meal. Everything was a work of art: beautiful visually as well as in taste, smell, and texture.

To round out the senses, our ears were treated to a concert of traditional Slovenian music, since that was the big event elsewhere in the castle. It was hilarious. The band was good, but so incongruous. This food was classical chamber music and in the courtyard below, it was oom-pah, oom-pah, all the way. Truly the icing on the cake for probably the best meal any of us has ever had.