Rila ( ) Sofia

... oops we forgot to tell you the airport is stupidly expensive...cheers dad!

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!!

... that cleaned. I think they are lovers. But anyway, we are pretty sure they use this dorm room as their bedroom. We needed 2 of the 3 beds so the cleaning guy moved all of this stuff out - to where I don't know. Then he made up the 2 beds for us, but all the owners stuff was still in there. So, we thought we'd be sharing a room with the owner of the hostel. Weird. We still weren't sure what was going on when we were ready for bed. He had spent the entire evening out in the ...

From the look of him you'd think I'd just killed his entire family and danced victoriously on their unburied corpses. "Gamartosut farnickart" He spits. My Bulgarian wasn't really up to scratch but by process of deduction I reckoned it either meant "Welcome to Bulgaria" or "Get your feet of the seats". It's 3 in the morning and I'm on a 9hr train from Bucharest to Sofia. Foolishly thinking that second class would be ...

I'm back in Sofia for a month, so I thought I would post a few photos from this trip. Some photos are from the Sopot area (I went hiking there with a friend rom NZ), Veliko Tarnovo and Ruse. I always return here with mixed emotions. I grew up as a citizen of the world, and most of my friends from Bulgaria are now scattered around the globe... but this is still home for me. A place where every flower and stray dog, every lake and grain of sand feel dear. Even the cow dung and ...

Phin and I wake up leisurely and head over to pick up Debra and Kim at their hotel. After realizing why they woke up covered in glitter, we all head down to the harbor to catch a ferry to the neighboring island of Heybeliada. A brief, yet adventurous, horse and carriage ride later and we get to a beach club for a swim and relaxing ...

(S) Pulling into Sofia at 8 in the morning, we were impressed with the modernity of the train station. We were soon less impressed with the international ticket office where we were not sure if we had a ticket to Istanbul or Kiev. Fingers crossed for Istanbul. Next was finding the Avis office, which was somewhere ...

... till Wednesday (although the lonely planet states different) we now make the decision to head straight to Turkey as we were speaking to a couple who tried to do what we had plan to do island hop to Turkey but on the winter time table that is a no go and we would have ended back in Thessaloniki to catch the train to Istanbul, thankfully we were able to get seats or should i say very expensive sleepers to Istanbul.

... to Sofia city center. Though it is a capital city and has more than 1 million residents, Sofia felt smaller than I expected. Maybe because it was Sunday, there was not that much traffic on the main streets, Boulevard Mariya Luiza and Boulevard Vitosha. Hostel Mostel lies just 2 to 3 blocks from Boulevard Vitosha and an easy walk to most of the interesting sites in the Center. When I checked in, I was told that not only ...

... every using these phrases. Sofia airport was very dark on arrival. They made me and two other American girls on the plane fill in landing cards, which they promptly stamped and tossed aside. My ride from the hostel didn't show, but thankfully the girls I met had their phone number and soon we were off into Sofia. The city isn't all that pretty, LP describes it as a 'Balkan Novosibirsk,' but that does not mean in the slightest that it ...

... hanging off the exposed floor--that was in the path of wreckers). Sure, this change is isolated--only in the most-promising regions for growth (the country capital and seaside cities)--but, watch out! Albania is on the move! Southern coastal areas are taking on the look of satellite resort towns--of Italy and of Greece. The coastal scenery is stunning, and surely will welcome the introduction of seaside estates and large resort ...