Veny Hostel Sofia

... hmm that can of coke cost us 2 pound 50 (I though Bulgaria was supposed to be cheap!!) and she couldn't give us some coins. got change in the exchange office then as we went to the pay phone I saw my dad outside. Didn't even need the damn change! hugs kisses hellos then in the car to start the 5 HOUR car journey to Srebarna...argh! On the told the father about the most expensive can of coke in the ...

... by now, but instead find myself still loitering in
the wastelands of the 300s. Uploading and labeling photos does suck, though - TravelPod insists that all photos contain a label (which, upon
consideration, is sensible) but its upload tool frequently crashes
midway through operations (which sucks).
Eastern Europe doesn't have the same photo-compelling quality as
Western, so I'm glad for the reprieve (though you might feel ...

... increase in difficulty. It's like learning a secret code you invented as a child. PECTOPAHT is 'restaurant', pronounced exactly the same. It gets weirder than that of course. 'Bar' is 6AP and 'bazaar' is 6A3AP, all pronounced like their Latin cousins. Now they're looking more like techie passwords. If I had a Cyrillic keyboard we could go on, but I don't, so you get the idea, right? About the only food they bother to write in English ...

... off in any way that they can. I don't competely disagree, but at this point and time I knew it was our only way to the hostel. Well, this time, Jared was right--completely right. The cab driver's meter was jumping up so fast it was ridiculous. We sat in traffic for awhile and the meter jumped up 10 lev just while we were sitting there. I looked at the sticker on the window which shows how much the fair is supposed to be and it definitely wasn't the same as what we were being ...

... staying at a hostel. Altogether we are off to a good start! I will just quickly say that Sofia is just as deserted as Plovdiv. We were the only visitors to most places... and we got hefty student discounts without question... Even in front of the famous Alexander Nevsky (sp?) Church, there was nothing resembling a crowd... It's a surprisingly pleasant city- not the gray and grimy former-Soviet city ...

... daily ritual and filled a bottle of my own. Soon enough, however, the sun grew higher, robbing the air of its morning crispness, disguising the mountain in a selfish haze, and consigning this perfectly imagined winter morning scene to memory. All that remained was a fairly uninspiring cityscape, of the kind of bland Soviet-era uniformity that had so underwhelmed me in Belgrade. Away from the commercial city centre things improved considerably, the office blocks and ...

... which adds to the experience. Bulgaria I found refreshing also as it is still very under developed, it kind of reminded me of Peru. It was surprisingly very dry with the poor economic structure of the country evident. We were also there for Australia Day and the snow was amazing for us, it was our best day of boarding. We spent the whole day on the mountain and then hit some of the Bulgarian Clubs that night, it was quite the experience.

... 1057; is how McDonalds is spelled in Bulgarian Cyrillic! She Said: So, I'm sure you are all dying for a night train review. Again, interesting concept, but if you are looking for luxury, it's not hiding on a Bulgarian train (trust me, I looked). As promised, we had a private sleeper cabin with two bunks and a little sink (see pic). It had a solid door that locked (so it was private and safe) and a window to the outside. Each train car had a shared toilet, and ...

Day 30 - Sofia Our next day was a drive day where we ended up in Sofia, Bulgaria. This was the first of our ex-communist stops and you could really see the different style in the buildings. We went from what we consider relatively normal to big square box like buildings. The theme behind communism is that everyone is equal and therefore everyone has the same things. So they made all the buildings the same size and shape and no one could say his ...

... have been very effective. I feel bad for all the poor *******s that wrote "eagle-shaped" in the box marked "nose". Needless to say, me and normal nose got a visa a week later. This year however, I am on my own. I have been to the Immigration office about a dozen times thus far. One of my previous visits went a little like this: I scrambled up to window number 7 and pushed my pouch of requested goodies through the ...