Barcelo Festa Sofia

... oops we forgot to tell you the airport is stupidly expensive...cheers dad!<br><br>car ride was looong but its quite a nice journey scenerys lovely. you go out of sofia and through the mountains then its through farmers fields and small villages dotted about. notlooking forward to the bus trip back though, the parents don't fancy a 10 hour round trip to take us back to the airport too, damn!!

... in town in a big way. <br><br><br>An initial reccy of central Sofia, revealed a city with fine architecture, wide, leafy avenues and cafes absolutely everywhere. We had read and been told that Sofia was dull and not worth seeing but that is very unfair, there may not be as much going on as in somewhere like Belgrade but it is a much nicer place to wander around and spend a weekend.<br><br><br>Back at The Rooms we met the father of Caleb Folan, hoping that ...

... as we were) At the plaza outside the station, we passed a woman standing on the street with a bathroom scale, weighing folks for money. We also saw the world's most industrial concrete Jesus and Mary sculpture. One the brighter side, one of the few billboards I remember seeing (most of the rest of the town appeared to be some kind of industrial supplies warehouse - acres of styrofoam, pvc pipes and other building ...

... everyone can read Cyrcllic alphabet. So there wasn`t any sign of a museum,garden,or a sign that says `this is a must see`.Or maybe there was, but it was in alien language. I have encountered only one museum,because there were pictures of some paintings hanged outside which told me it probably was a museum.Only the names of a few main streets were written in Latin.In Bulgaria,Cryclic gave me a hard time together with Bulgarians,really. I didn`t dare to enter a ...

Sofia was a town with a rollercoaster of emotions. From the moment I arrived I changed a fem hundred dollars at the exchange office but when given the receipt to sign I noticed it was for about $35 less than what it should have been. "Whoa, no way, just give me my money back, you told me 1.25 leva per dollar" She was having none of that and just ignored me. She figured she had my money already, why would she give it back. Anyways, I was ****** off ...

... Paul and I visited a local hardware store to pick up a new hose for the shower. The previous one blew out the night before. The hardware store was a small stall in a larger building with shops of all types surrounding, much like a flee market in the US. Paul successfully used the word for "hose" in Bulgarian for the first time, and unlike my home-improvement/fix-it projects, this one only took a single trip! Scott Ulrich, one of Paul and Erin's team ...

... myself that I was waiting for the computer to write this blog. Progress was slow. There was a great cross section of travellers. Some were on backpacking expeditions like ourselves. Some were young adventurers, others were middle aged and older out after their children had been kicked out. Some were a year on the road, others only days. A Dutchman was interviewed about his 13 month travels by a local paper. A Bulgarian literature student of German ...

... but didn't arrive 'til 2pm. As we went searching for a place to stay, it started to rain. The hostel we were going to stay at was closed (and apparently never really a hostel). A lady renting a room found us so we followed her. The place was alright so we took it. By this point it was after 3pm. Cleaned up a bit and went to lunch. Now it's 5pm so the castle is already closed. Mari wanted to hike up the hill (it's not raining any more), which I thought meant a short hike ...

... and cheese. oh and they'll throw fireworks out the window so all the small town americans think they're in Baghdad or Kosovo for just a minute and dive beneath the bed. gypsies and horses in Sotirya, this little village at the foot of the Stara Planina (Old Mountains) in eastern bulgaria, for the first time in my life I saw people who actually ride horses around because they have no cars and no public transport. imagine a dark-skinned, maybe turkish looking ...

Well after playing numerous hands of cards and trying to pass the time until about 4:00am as we decided there was no point in finding a place to stay,we got another early morning bus from Nics (Serbia) to Sofia. We did have an interesting experience on the bus ride when we were stopped at some town for a quick stop and the bus driver came down to us and said that we could get off for a few minutes but we decided to stay on. He started to look ...