As we wound our way towards Sofia, stopping in little towns in the outskirts, I saw that none of the train station signs (the train stations that actually had signs) matched the town listed on my map... then the realization.... I would be dealing with cyrillic for the next few days. My first cyrillic country! It is definitely a bit disconcerting to arrive in a foreign place and not know what any of the signs mean... Luckily Stefan was at the station waiting for me.

I spent a few days in Sofia with Stefan and his grandmother, Marina. It was a quick trip, as I didn’t want to short change my time in Istanbul, so I hung out in Bulgaria for a few days. It was nice to spend some time in a house with real people. There was no coming and going, no dirty mattresses and indifferent staff, it was real people from Bulgaria! I met Stefan in a hostel in Budapest. He is a programmer, born in Bulgaria but grew up in Philadelphia. We got to chatting while in Hungary. I mentioned that I might be passing through Sofia, and he mentioned that he might have a place for me to stay if I did... how can you turn down an offer like that!

Stefan toured me around the sites of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, and a relatively new city... relatively... The days have gotten short and cold, so the walks around town were typically accompanied by detours into bars and restaurants. During dinner one night I discovered that I really like tripe soup! Yeas, tripe... animal stomach... it was delicious. The tripe soup is a Bulgarian specialty... the tripe is slow cooked in a broth, then paprika and a little bit of milk is added. so good. Walking down the street one day there was a guy selling a skinny, barren tree branch. I asked Stefan id that was a Bulgarian christmas tree... he told me it was a willow branch, then he just sat there and laughed as he tried to explain the significance of it... the branch is held in a loop and ties together with string, to look a little like a tennis racquet. This paddle type thing is used by little children to beat their grandparents with at Christmas time. The grandparents give the kids money after they are beaten.... go figure. Another time we went for some dinner. We were informed there was no menu, therefor we could not see any prices. So Stefan communicated with the proprietor and got us a little bit of food... neither of us were very hungry. But the guy just kept talking... and selling... We were pretty much done after the first course, but then he sold us up on a second. When we told him we were full after that, he said “two course is for health, but three, three courses is for memories...”... so we got another course that we didn’t need.

On the last night we went to a sort of bar I had read about called Hambara. It was a secret hangout for artists and intellectuals during the communist regime. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware that they were still trying to play up that whole speakeasy type thing, and as we walked up, I just thought the door was jammed, so I gave it a little kick and it opened... to the dismay and obvious dissatisfaction of the doorman. After having my hand slapped, but sidled up to the bar for a drink. Everyone was looking past the two piece piano and stand up bass band to give me funny looks... unknowingly I had taken one of the old regular’s seats... this guy had probably been coming here since the heavy communist days, and I just went and plopped down right in his seat. We were making friends left and right! But now everyone was hating on us, because when I came back from the bathroom, a couple of gents had engaged Sefan in conversation, one of whom introduced himself as ‘the dandy’... the origin of his name was very obvious... On that note, we decided to call it a night and head on home. I was leaving for Plovdiv in the morning, and Stefan and Marina were leaving for Philly and had a lot of work to do around the house the next day.Many many thanks to Stefan and Marina for putting me up for a few nights! I left Sofia at noon, getting into Plovdiv at 2:30. I booked an overnight bus for Istanbul leaving at 12:30... so I had 10 hours to kill... which it turns out was not nearly enough. I probably could have spent another few days there. No offense to Sofia, but Plovdiv had a lot more going on... I stopped in Plovdiv because I had read a great article in the NY Times on it’s rich history. It is one of Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, from its beginnings as a neolithic settlement, a Thracian hub and and a Roman cultural and economic center. Plovdiv remained under Ottoman control after 1878 when the rest of Bulgaria gained its independence... probably why it was not named the capital. I could go on and recite it for you, but since Al Gore invented the internet and all, I will just provide you a link to the article and you can read it for yourself:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/travel/in-plovdiv-bulgaria-roman-grandeur-east-of-italy.html

Cheers! Off to Istanbul!