Hotel Bansko Sofia

... Bulgaria Operations Manager).

Batting for the Bulgaria team are Tedy Koleva (National Development Co-ordinator), Mimi Georgieva (Admin/Projects Support) and Valya Stankovska (translator and all round helper).

Do not be impressed by these titles. We made them up so that they sound great.

It's not often that you can say that everything went to plan on a Christmas box trip day but today it nearly did, which means we are pretty happy. The day started with ...

... ve got nothing worthwhile to say? We didn't get ranked #1 douche for nothing, so as Tom would put it, let's go meta.

So let's talk about blogging. You might have noticed that the volume of my writing, if not its
quality, has steadily ratcheted up over the weeks since I got the
netbook in Madrid on the 31st (everything from Tomatina til Bari were
asof postings -- Siam, you catch that? There's B&R for you in a
nutshell ...

... like a po' boy's London or at least Birmingham, plenty of decent food and coffee, bakeries as good as anywhere I know. After starving myself in Albania, too lazy to deal with currency exchange, I'm gorging in Sofia, plenty of foreign exchange since the transport companies won't take €, and I had to cash a wad. I'd like to go on to Prishtina in Kosovo, but it looks like there's no direct route so, since I've already passed ...

... t going to get them back. We finally did about 20 minutes later and after being stopped at the border for about an hour we were were back on track again. The person in the corner of our box ended up leaving before our stop, so we had the place to oursleves for a while. We kept trying to find comfortable sleeping positions because we were so exhausted, but it proved to be impossible. It was also freezing on the train because there was no heater or anything. We arrived in Sofia ...

... Rotunda of St.George (from 4th century A.D.),and National theater builded in Neoclassical style. Also worth see in the city center is space around Sveta Nedelya square with Sv.Nedelya church,mosque and synagoge all 5 mins apart from each other. A little bit further from city center is National historical museum,which is one of the largest museums in Eastern Europe,with around 650 000 artifacts including ...

... a wall of cigarette smoke. Through the haze I could just make out a hippy looking fellow sedately puffing away his long term health with great content. I headed sheepishly to the bed, already thinking of ways to get out of this scenario. I had just endured two indescribably smoky hours with Pat and Dot on the train, and my lungs could not now take a whole night in this smoke-filled dorm. After five minutes of the usual introductory speeches - during which time ...

At the last station in Serbia a huge rush of women got on the train with heaps of bags all fighting for seats,our carriage filled up very quickly the Serbian passport control come through again and give us another farewell stamp then the Bulgarian passport control come through and start searching the train looking in vents under seats all very weird they also have their own swipe and lap top to check passports it took ...

... were pretty unhappy when everything was taken, so us affluent westerners tried to look as incospicous as possible, and got the hell out of there as soon as the train finally got to Sofia. It was interesting to see in the whole 'never would see this in oz' sort of thing, but it wasnt really a pleasant experience. So anyway, Sofia. Everyone i have met so far who has been there told me that Sofia was terrible, it was ugly and that i shouldnt go there ...

... is trying to get into the EU, the English have come over to tell them how to do customs checks. Anyway, there was lots of fevered running back and forth, moving bags into different compartments and under seats and into the overhead compartments. They were trying very hard to stuff their bags in between our backpacks, to make it look like they were ours. Again, not a great concern.... they were just so nice about it. At the last minute, the guy in our compartment ran off ...

Albania is a beautiful country! --Majestic Snow-Covered Mountains form an almost impenetrable barrier to the east... --The deep blue blue blue Mediterranean Sea a stunning contrast to the golden Southern California-like hills that drop into it... --Crystal clear streams flow from mountains to sea--their clarity almost shocking I like Albania! Which...actually...is saying quite a bit...because...Albania is FAR FROM PERFECT! Albania ...