Bulgaria

Sofia is just one long bus trip from Istanbul. While travelling from one big city to another is not much of a way to see the sights we were only after a diversion to soak up some spare time before our flight to India. What we got was a lot better, and so different from the rest of our trip. Bulgaristan (as the turks refer to it) is a recovering ex-communist country with a huge amount of history and culture, and also very cheap beer.

We traveled through a good portion of Bulgaria to reach Sofia and the countryside was green and pleasant and seemed quite empty. Only occaisional towns appeared on what seemed like a fairly major highway from the maps.

Our first impression of Sofia was of the contrasts of new, the old, and the older, the shiny new bus station led out onto a decaying sunken plaza and across the road to the industrial dirty orange gothic trams which traverse the city streets screeching and dropping the sparks. But some of the streets the trams traverse are lined with beautiful classical architecture and gold tipped russian orthodox churches. Our first choice of hostel was noisy with young backpackers when we arrived and busily serving the free pasta dinner. Needless to say nothing pleases young backpackers more than free pasta dinner and there was no room at the inn. So we walked north and eventually found our second choice, perched on the first floor of an apartment building. It felt like all the walls and floors were suspended plasticated faux-wood, built inside the original concrete walls but we were gladly received by the enthusiastic manager, and proceeded to occupy the three bed dorm. Three bed dorms are awesome as you almost always get smiled on and the hostel will leave that last bed free till the last minute to avoid disturbing you, and if you do have to share if you have a distinct home ground advantage.

I should mention the two different blokes that shared the running of the hostel fell into certain Eastern European stereotypes all to easily. You could easily imagine both in wife-beaters, sprouting stubble as soon as they turned away from the shaving mirror. But like many people we met in Sofia they were both verging on sweet, very warm and welcoming and made a huge effort to work around their limited English to get across all the things we needed to know and several pleasantries besides.

The are we ended up staying in was fairly residential and fairly light on restaurants, but eventually we found our local and over several nights worked through the menu of fried cheeses, sausages, salads with cheese and/or sausage, and all manner of fried and casseroled meats (and did I mention the cheap beer). Suffice to say, we were comforted (and occasionally tipsy) and looked forward to the two meals we could squeeze in each day.

Our first big tourist attraction was the stunning St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, occupying a large stately round-about surrounded by genuine handicraft stalls run by authentic middle aged peasant women (the kind that I imagine proudly replying "Da! Me Peasant!" if queried). The cathedral itself is not as impressive close up  as the wikipedia photos look but the inside is incredibly painted covered with soot stained orthodox iconography and is just incredibly striking and moody.

We moved on to the nearby Natural History Museum not expecting an awful lot but were fairly stunned by the massive collection of stuffed and displayed wildlife. While they lacked the enormous exhibits of British Natural History Museum (notably the fake whale), I think it actually does better on depth and breadth and we spent a full afternoon wandering through several floors of exhibits. The geology exhibits too were much smaller and therefore more interesting than wading through the cases and cases and cases and cases of rocks at British version.

The Art Gallery we visited too surpassed my expectations hosting the finest collection of Indian sculpture I have seen (including our subsequent second trip to India). It seems to be one of those odd maxims that often you will see the best pieces from a region outside that region.

By this time in order to survive we had rapidly taught ourselves Cyrillic pronunciation as signs and maps are almost exclusively in the native tongue. But luckily many words are borrowed from either English or Spanish (or maybe the original Latin who knows) so we could often decipher menus by just sounding out the Cyrillic. Of course all that learning has completely faded now and all I can remember is that R is P and P is N (or is that vice versa).

On our last day we made an epic trip by tram and bus to Boyana Church in the wooded hills of the city outskirts. The church is about a thousand years old and beautifully painted but its so small that we ended up waiting for nearly an hour for our number to be called for our brief look inside.

Near by is the enormous edifice of the National History Museum. With its bunker like exterior and a random helicopter gunship parked outside it certainly evoked a sense of the communist past right from the outset. The inside too was filled with exhibits from the archaeological to the recent past, and more than giving me any sense of what Bulgaria has been like just made me think that it would actually require a whole lot more time learning about Eastern Europe in general before I'd be ready to come to grips with the expanse of Bulgarian history.

While I've written mostly about the older stuff in Sofia, it has a distinctly modern side to it as well. With several streets of ludicrously expensive high fashion stores, western fast food chains, and several malls about town. Also gone are the crappy old Ladas that Nick remembers from his trip to Sofia.

So we headed back to Istanbul and managed to spend a whole day catching up on Internet consumption before flying out to Mumbai and beyond...