For the weekend, 10 of us decided to take a nice relaxing trip to СОФИЯ (Sophia), Bulgaria. We grabbed the overnight train out of Istanbul on Thursday. After another harrowing experience on the international trains, we arrived in Sophia at about 11:30 A.M. Friday. Since my family is reading this blog, I won't be going into too much detail about the events of the night on the train. That being said, despite lingering effects of the train I was immediately aware of how polluted the city was in comparison to Istanbul. I had to ask Aaron if what I thought was a blanket of fog covering the city was actually covering my eyes. It was the city. It was gross.
It's a typical, depressing looking eastern European city. And, yes, I realize how ignorant that statement sounds, but it was honestly my first opinion of Sophia. I should point out, however, that it was better than my first impression of Bucharest! We probably walked two miles from the train station into the heart of the city, which was a very sobering experience. But despite the overwhelming amount of graffiti and homeless and dirt, there are some really nice parts of Sophia (they have a yellow-bricked road!).
We then checked into our hostel near the center of the city. The hostel was extremely nice. They offered free breakfast, laundry, dinner, inter
net, etc. We were lucky that they had open beds for 10 of us. Also, there were 3 other Ameri
cans also studying with us at Bogaz
ici that were staying in the hostel, so we hung out with them too. After relaxing a bit, we got together to see some of the famous churches of the city. I didn't take my camera, so I missed out on pictures of that, but we did see some really beautiful Eastern Orthodox churches. We also walked through a bazaar of old Soviet and Nazi stuff. I didn't buy anything. Aaron bought a marmot.
On Saturday a group from the hostel assembled and traveled to the Rila
Mountains to see the famous Rila
Monastery.
It was my first visit to a monastery, and it was nice. The monastery itself was pretty huge, and the chapel had some really cool mosaics covering the walls on the outside. I was more excited, however, just to be getting out of the city. It was nice to get some fresh(er) air. It was a 3 hour ride there by car, and we stayed for a couple hours. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to do hiking (I heard there were nice trails nearby), but I did eat at a cool restaurant. Saturday night the group got together again and went to the student section of town where we heard there was a decent nightlife, and they were right.
Sunday everyone decided to do different things. A group of people stayed in Sophia, A group (including me) went to Plovd
iv, and one person went to the Old Capitol. 7 of us arrived in Plovd
iv (we acquired one extra member in the Hostel, a young man from Whales). Plovd
iv was another polut
ed Bulgarian city, and I was definitely unimpressed by what I saw near the train station. However, my experiences have shown that train stations aren't typically located in the nicest part of town.
We met a nice man in the train station and we walked to the center of town with us, where we ate at something not entirely that different from Apple
bee's. A little more inspection of the city yielded some really neat things. We saw a Roman Amphitheatre,
a church, a mosque, and other neat things. We didn't really spend enough time to really explore the city. I'm sure there were a lot of good things going on in Plovd
iv, but we only had the day because we were planning to take the night train to Istanbul).
Well we went to buy a train ticket and we found out that you cannot buy an international train ticket out of Plovd
iv on Sundays. The ticket lady told us that we had to "buy" it on the train. Sound fishy? It was. Luckily one of us was turki
sh and thus speaks turki
sh and could communicate with the conductor. It was a really complicated situation which involved us buying a ticket from Plovd
iv to the border then buying another ticket from the border to Istanbul. Well, i could only buy the first ticket because the only currency I had was Bulgarian Leva
(I was told that was all I would need). and it was only 5 leva
(3.5 dollars). I had to have someone else pay for my bed (16 turki
sh Lira), then we had to buy the other ticket to Istanbul (30 $US i think). On top of all this, when we got to the turki
sh border, the conductor gave us 60 Euros and made us buy him as many cartons of cigarettes at the duty-free shop as we could afford. I'm sure none of this was legal, but we were tired and did not want to be left at the Turkish Border in the middle of no-where. Luckily we were travelling first class, so I got a decent night's sleep. Now I'm stuck with 50 bulga
rian Leva.
I think that there is a girl that will buy it off me because she is planning to go to bulga
ria sometime.
