Plovdiv and the Balkan Express

Waiting...in Plovdiv
(One of My Favorite Pictures I've Ever Taken)

Yesterday was our last day in Bulgaria.  Seeing as we had seen just about everything in Sofia, we decided to head south to Plovdiv, famous for its decorative houses and ancient ruins.  We were still a bit exhausted from the miserable train trip from Belgrade, so when our alarm went off in the morning we decided to put off waking up and catch a later train.  The train ride to Plovdiv was about 2.5 hours and it was right on the path to Istanbul, so it shortened our night train trip for that evening.

Plovdiv was a pretty neat city, although there is almost a complete lack of any English comprehension among the locals.  Plovdiv presented the most intense language barrier we've faced since Hungary.  It was especially trying when we tried to get information from the train station employees, but somehow we managed.  The part of the city near the train station is kind of crummy, but after walking to the main pedestrian street, we stumbled upon a great old town.

Kati at an Old Bulgarian House
(Now the Ethnography Museum)

We arrived in Plovdiv around 1:30 and were only spending the afternoon there, so we didn't have too much time.  First we saw the ruins of an old Roman ampitheater that's still used for cultural performances in the city. Then we saw some of the traditional Bulgarian "painted" houses.  They were really cool.  The outsides were brightly painted with some subtle designs on them, but the insides were absolutely stunning.  Each room was assigned a color and everything in the room played off of the color.  The intricate ceilings and the wall paintings were unbelievable.  We finished our tour of Plovdiv by seeing the ruins of the ancient Thracian city and making a quick stop in the oldest mosque in the Balkans.

By 5:00 we were exhausted.  Yesterday marks the first (and only) time that we've legitimately been ready to go home.  But don't worry, we're both totally enthusiastic again today, I think that after finishing 1/2 of our longest traveling section and staring straight into the other half just seemed a bit too daunting when coupled with the language barrier that unexpectedly hit us.  We quelled our temporary anti-Europe sentiments with some McDonald's.

Our night train was scheduled to leave Plovdiv at 9:08 pm.  We were at the train station, exhausted, by 7:00, passing the time reading our books.  9:08 rolled around and there was no train.  9:30...no train.  9:50...no train.  I went to check the boards to make sure we hadn't missed it.  It was still listed and, after some nifty translation work and the help of a Gypsy woman that took an uncomfortable liking to us, I realized that the board said our train was 150 minutes late!  We settled in for the long haul and broke out some cards and a bottle of Bulgarian wine.  That night we had a bottle of a Mavrud Rose, a Bulgarian specialty.  The night before we had tried Melnik, a Bulgarian grape that was supposedly Winston Churchill's favorite wine.  At 10:30 I decided to check the board again, just to make sure it wasn't delayed further.  My quest eventually led me to the information booth where the Bulgarian women flat out laughed at me...the board wasn't wrong...our train was running 300 minutes late!  5 HOURS LATE!  I felt an awful lot like Vladimir, waiting for a train carrying Godot that was never going to show up.  We just sat there, waiting, all night, unable to depart.

Our train finally arrived around 2:00 am.  Luckily, this train was much better than the one we took from Belgrade to Sofia; it had couchettes--cabins with six cots (3 on each wall).  We got a compartment to ourselves.  The conductor brought us sheets and pillows, I was so happy/exhausted that I almost cried!  The Turkish border was relatively painless, just unnecessarily long.  We bought our visas (nothing more than stickers), got our passports stamped, and after having our passports/tickets checked at least 5 times, we were on our way again.  Unfortunately, the delay hurt.  We were supposed to get into Istanbul at 8:30 and have a full day, but we finally arrived at 1:30 in the afternoon.  Luckily the couchettes were surprisingly comfortable and, despite the interruptions, having a private cabin allowed both of us to catch up on some much needed sleep.

Rila Monastery

Kati and I in Front of the Monastery Church

Yesterday we took a day trip into the nearby Rila Mountains with one of the owners of our hostel.  I've been looking forward to this trip for a long time, but I'll get to that later.  The Rila Monastery was founded by St. Ivan in the 10th century.  Additionally, St. Ivan lived in a cave above the current monastery for 12 years before founding it.  We got to go to both the cave and the monastery.  Originally Kati and I had planned to sleep at the monastery, but the logistics of getting there and back by public transportation were going to be a nightmare, so we settled for a day trip.

Our group consisted of Kati, myself, Nadia (our tour guide), and a young Slovenian kid named Eric.  When we met Eric and he told us he was from Slovenia I couldn't believe it.  Yet he couldn't believe I knew where Slovenia was, much less that it was my favorite country in the world.  He kept asking me things like, "You know there's a difference between Slovenia and Slovakia, right?"  Finally I think I sufficiently proved my knowledge of Slovenia to satisfy him.  Later he told us a pretty funny Slovenian joke:

One day the Slovenians got tired of their bad economic situation.  They got tired of not having any jobs, so they made a plan.  They decided to build a nuclear bomb.  After building the bomb, they sent it to the US and requested that the US fire it at the country and erase it from the map.  A few days later Obama called the Slovenian President and said, "We'd be happy to destroy your country, there's just one problem, we don't know where it is."

He was a pretty strange guy, but it was very interesting listening to Nadia and himself comparing cultures and traditions on the drive up to the monastery.

First we went to the cave.  It was about a 15-20 minute hike from where we parked.  The cave was tiny!  It's pretty unbelievable that somebody lived there at all, much less for 12 years.  There is a belief in Bulgaria that if you write a wish on a piece of paper, leave it in the rocks at the bottom of the cave, and then squeeze up through the cave's top entrance, your wish will come true.  Seeing all of the folded pieces of paper wedged into the rocks was pretty neat.  Coming out of the top entrance of the cave was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated.  It was a very narrow and wavy vertical path through the rocks, yet we made it through.

Afterwards we went to the monastery itself.  It was incredible!  The architecture and the colors are unlike anything I've seen before.  The church has paintings covering the porticoed  terrace that surrounds it and the inside is breathtakingly beautiful.  After visiting the church, I was a little confused because I hadn't been able to find what I went there to see.  Hoping for some guidance, I walked outside and asked Nadia, "Isn't there supposed to be a wooden cross here somewhere?"  She responded in sheer amazement and kept asking me how I knew about the cross.

Rafael's Cross

The wooden cross I'm talking about is called Rafael's Cross and it's the story that makes it so cool.  A monk at the Rila Monastery spent 14 years carving this cross out of boxwood.  Both sides of the cross are covered with intricate biblical scenes that include over 600 individual figures!  It took Rafael 14 years to finish the cross, and the day after he finished it, he went blind.  Nadia said she didn't know where the cross was, but that she didn't think it was at the monastery...my heart sunk.  Yet she got on the phone, made some calls, and found out it was in fact at the monastery, in the back museum.  Excited, Kati and I practically ran over to the museum to check it out.  It was everything I'd hoped for, although much smaller than I thought.  Kati and I had both envisioned a pretty large cross, but it was only about two feet tall, making all of the intricate carvings even more impressive!  You're not allowed to take pictures in the museum, but we had to make an exception for this.  Kati acted as a human shield as I quickly took a covert picture of the cross.  It really is amazing!

When we came out of the museum it had started raining!  Amazingly, this is the first time that we've seen rain since we left Hungary so many weeks ago.  It wasn't too bad though, we were about to leave anyway.  Before getting back in the car we got some Bulgarian donuts, which turned out to be hand-sized funnel cakes.  They were really good.  It was a great trip.

Right now we're about to leave our hostel and figure out our next step.  We're catching the night train to Istanbul, but we may catch an early train south to Plovdiv to explore the ancient city there and kill time before our train leaves.  Hopefully this train won't be nearly as bad as the one to Sofia...the Alaskan couple told us that at least this train has couchettes and not just coach seats.  Crossing our fingers!

Sofia - The Edge of Europe

Me at Alexander Nevski Cathedral

They call Sofia the "edge of Europe," the last European city before reaching the distinctly oriental villages and towns of Turkey and the Middle East.  Once in Sofia, we stopped in the hostel to try to take a quick nap, but it didn't work.  Then we went out to catch a free 2-hour walking tour of the city.  The free walking tours here are an effort by residents to promote a better image of Sofia and Bulgaria, intrigue people with its history, and dispel misconceptions about the country in the hopes that it will increase tourism and the country's international reputation.

The tour itself was fantastic.  We saw all of the major sights in the city and our tour guide was the most knowledgeable, albeit idiosyncratic, tour guide I've ever had.  He showed us the Holy Sunday Church, where the largest terrorist attack in the world pre-Oklahoma City occurred.  The Communists assassinated a beloved general and then rigged explosives on the dome of the church during his funeral.  We also saw the Banya Bashi Mosque, the oldest mosque in Bulgaria, built by the same architect who created Istanbul's Blue Mosque.  Along the tour our guide told us about all of the ancient ruins that have been discovered in the city.  Sofia has a problem building anything because, no matter where they build in the city, during excavation they uncover ruins they didn't previously know about.  The coolest of these ruins was the only surviving section of the major road that connected the Eastern and Western Roman Empires.

While the tour was fantastic, it was too long.  It started at 11:00 and was supposed to take 2 hours.  At 2:00 we looked at the map and were only half finished.  Kati and I were both exhausted, so we decided to ditch the rest of the tour.  We stopped a few more places on the way back.  Most notable was the Alexander Nevski Cathedral, the giant Orthodox church that Sofia is known for.  It was incredibly beautiful but surprisingly dark inside.  We also saw the Russian Church, which looks very similar to St. Basil's in Moscow. The other church of note that we saw was the Catholic Church.  There is only one in the city and it's hideous. The outside looks alright, just very modern, but the inside doesn't look like a Catholic church at all.  The windows all looked like cheap stained-glass imitations that depicted trees and lakes instead of saints and religious scenes.  The most interesting thing about the church is that Pope John Paul II laid the first brick.  The former Pope's involvement is significant because it was a Bulgarian Turk that attempted to assassinate him in the 80's.

One more final interesting sight in Sofia: there's a giant office building with a balcony uncharacteristically jutting out of the top floor.  As our tour guide explained, apparently after the fall of communism there was a very large banking bubble the burst and most people lost everything.  The building in question was built after that crisis for a new bank coming into the city and the architect purposely put the balcony on the President's office so that if they ever screwed up again he would have the very clear option to jump.  This story brings up an interesting political point that I feel required to mention, but won't labor on.  It's amazing to me how many similarities there are between the fall of communism and the current state of the US.  From starting an impossible war in Afghanistan (like Gorbachev) to having an excessively high national debt (the adjusted US per capita debt now exceeds that of Romania when communism fell, the highest of all of the Eastern Bloc countries), the parallels are stark and cannot be ignored.  What amazes me most is that we watched the USSR make the same mistakes 30 years ago and we're still making them, despite the fact that many of the same people are still involved in our government!

Anyway, back to Sofia.  After the tour we stopped in at the hostel for a little nap before heading out for dinner.  Dinner was an experience.  We went to a place recommended by the owner of our hostel.  It was called "beloved" and we were told would give us an authentic Bulgarian dining experience.  It was definitely authentic.  We showed up and there was no English on the menu at all; there wasn't even a Latin alphabet translation of the Bulgarian on the menu, only Cyrillic.  On top of that, our waitress spoke very little English.  Despite the massive language barrier, we managed to order two beers and told the waitress what kind of meat we wanted, leaving the choice up to her.  I had pork, covered with pancetta, peppers, and cheese, and potatoes.  Kati got a chicken and potatoes dish and a chicken salad with pineapple and candied walnuts.  Save Kati's chicken and potatoes, which were mediocre, everything was really good.  The waitress kept laughing at us because we couldn't finish that gigantic Bulgarian portions.  After dinner we stopped in a bar for a glass of wine and then headed back to the hostel, still exhausted from the night before.

The Night Train to Sofia

I'm going to try to make this post brief.  Our trip to Sofia was ridiculous!  Our train left at 9:15 pm from platform 3.  At 8:40 a train pulled into platform 3...a two-car train.  I went to confirm that the train went to Sofia with the conductor and he said no, it was going to Skopje, Macedonia.  Immediately after I walked away, another American woman (Alaskan) asked him the same question...apparently one of the two cars was going to Skopje and the other one was going to Sofia.

We had seat reservations, but there were no seat numbers.  Apparently they sell reservations but then let people sit anywhere on a first-come-first-served basis.  Luckily we got two seats because there were a number of people who spent the entire 9 hour train ride standing up in the hallway.  We were sitting by the window and my folding table didn't fold...up or down.  If you tried to put it all the way up, it just fell down.  If you tried to fold it flat against the wall, it wouldn't work.  It was perpetually stuck at a 45 degree angle...awesome.  We had a nice thing going with four people in our car.  However, then a very big Serbian man came in.  He didn't cause too much of a problem..  Our sixth person wound up being a tiny blonde French woman who had, not one, but two giant suitcases and a huge bag and a giant purse.  To make matters even worse, she snored like a banshee!  The wheels screeched constantly and it got really cold in the cabin in the middle of the night.  Kati and I, sitting across from each other, just pushed our chairs together to make a cot-like bed.  It wasn't very comfortable.  Somehow I slept alright but Kati couldn't sleep at all.

We had an interesting experience at the border.  I was awoken by Bulgarian police several times as they pulled off paneling on the train, checked in vents, and everywhere...except inside our bags.  We learned after we got off the train (From the Alaskan couple) that they were searching for cigarettes.  Why they looked all over the train but not in people's luggage is beyond me.  We finally got into Sofia around 8:30 in the morning (After crossing a time-zone, so now we're 7 hours ahead).  It was a rough night, but we made it through.