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.