the eastern bloc
Friday, August 29th, 2008By the time I arrived in Sofia I as pretty shattered from my crazy day, I was still kind if laughing to myself that I had actually made it and I was still alive!
The hostel I was in was nice and small with a lovely old man who spoke no english, it was kind of like being in someones house. He made me coffee and there was free juice, excellent.
I had a shower and a quick walk around the city, I wasn’t planning on staying long as had heard the city wasn’t too interesting. It was a nice place, but not huge amounts to do. I walked through the parks and streets, everything in Cyrillic, which is pretty much impossible to understand. Being a sunday afternoon things were quite. it was very eastern European, lots of grey concrete but also some beautiful historic buildings which if you read up on were all used by the communist party and KGB. There was a big river with no water through the city and the place did have a bit of a neglected feel but it was a nice place to wander. i stopped at a market and grabbed some veges to cook back at the hostel where I settled down for a night of watching the olympics and chatting with other people who were around. Last time I was in Eastern Europe 2 years ago I figured that the area had good backpackers, more people traveling for longer and a bit more adventurous people, also a good hostel scene so easy to meet people.
The next day I had another wander round seeing this massive beautiful church with domed roof and outside lots of people selling antiques from the soviets, very cool old stuff which was all probably real. I wandered down to a park with possibly the ugliest monument of time in it, the whole park really needed a bit of tidying up, all around the buildings were massive “coke”, “McDonalds” and other signs, communism is well and truly out. I often wonder how all the older people feel about the huge changes that have happened in places like Bulgaria since the fall of communism. Every city has had some revolution and crazy history, its pretty interesting.
I also stopped by the presidential building where on the hour is the changing of the guards, which the LP suggests you watch while making “ministry of silly walks” jokes….true to its word, a bizarre display of slightly off timed guards walked very stupidly around and switched places. it was entertaining save for the Japanese tour group who rushed out of nowhere falling over themselves to get photos as close as possibly without touching the guards.
Before my bus I went down to a market with some people from the hostel and brought a big bag of raspberries and some more fruit for the journey. Bulgaria is very very cheap, which is most excellent after Turkey, I need to get back onto budget.
I caught a tram down to the most confusing bus station ever, apparently there is an english speaking info centre there but obviously for the LP to include the location of this would be too sensible. Instead I wandered aimlessly amongst the 100 different bus offices, all in cyrillic and eventually just walked into one and somehow ended up with a ticket for a bus leaving now.
The ride was uneventful other than the bus driver chain smoking the whole way with the window down. We arrived in Veliko Tarnovo after about 3 hours. Bulgaria has a crazy thing of shaking their head to say yes and nodding to say no, so when I tried to check if we were actually in Veliko, it was kind of confusing. But eventually I worked it out, rung the hostel and a kiwi guy who worked for them came down and picked me up.
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