Plovdiv

Trip Start Jan 06, 2006

120

Trip End Sep 02, 2008

Loading Map

Map your own trip!

Map Options

Show trip route

Hide lines

Flag of Bulgaria Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Thursday, October 19, 2006

Bro has an ingenious way of picking an English speaker out of a crowd. Ball caps are a dead give away. For some reason, the people who wear them in Europe all seem to speak English. So was the case with Rado, whom I sat next to on the bus to Plovdiv. I sat down, and before we left he asked me if I could save his seat as he was getting up to buy something. (It's pretty obvious that I am a tourist and therefore I speak tourist languages). He came back a moment later and told me that he had been sitting on a bus since seven Monday morning when he left London (it was two on Wednesday afternoon).

In fact he is now a naturalised Englishman but he was from Plovdiv. He was coming back for the for first time in five years. It wasn't a question for him of the bust costing less than a plane. He's English - one of those lucky blokes who has Ryan Air and Easy Jet at his fingers - he can fly to Europe for the weekend for a day's wages, not two weeks' salary like for me

01 Apartment building

. He wanted to get a sense of how far it actually was between London and the city he was born.

We talked about travelling, it being a common hobby of ours. He had found a new company that flies London to Hong Kong and bought a return ticket for seventy five pounds! and the two hour ride to Plovdiv went by quickly (I write in this blog's title "busing" around the West Balkans because that's the best way to get around. Had I waited for the train to Plovdiv, I would have been getting onto it in Sofia at about the same time that I got off of the bus in Plovdiv). As we rode into the city, he pointed out the secondary school he attended. As it always is the case on the road, we parted ways, and Bro and I strolled off to look around.

Plovdiv is an old Roman city. Every time I think of a Roman city, I think of a ruin somewhere in Turkey. Plovdiv doesn't feel too much like that: in front of the first church we saw is a big poster for a type of Vodka. It's got a scantily clad woman on the back of a bull, looking back over her shoulder at you. Bulgarian adverts are pretty forward. The local Maxim, which Bro had to peruse, is pretty much soft-core porn.

Plovdiv still has some Roman features, of course. At the end of an affluent and very European street is a Roman theatre (hello EU! - the 11 star flag can be seen not infrequently). The theatre is sunken below ground, everything is built around it, more or less. A mosque is built to one side. The architects of an apartment building were not as considerate as those of the mosque. The piled some concrete on top of the seats and did their building.

Perhaps Plovdiv's Roman ruins aren't to die for

02 Interior of a Church

. The city has some great Ottoman era houses, and it hosts a huge quantity of house-museums. These are houses that people turned into museums. We checked one of them out; it has become an ethnographic museum. The building's exterior is painted plaster and the interior is decorated with beautifully applied wood. So often old intricate work reminds me that at one time, labour was way cheaper than the materials that labourers used. I cannot imagine what it would cost someone these days to build a ceiling like the one in this house considering what a competent tradesperson is paid.

As a museum its value was limited. We were only charged a student fee (one Lev each, so about seventy cents), but we got only that much out of it. Most everything was labelled in Bulgarian and the majority of the exhibits were of 19th century technology; plows, farm tools, scythes, pots, an anvil, clothing, a tea pot. A lady was making doilies in a section of the house.

We did enjoy the ottoman houses as we walked through old Plovdiv. These are the charm of the city. I had a lot of fun trying to shoot photos of them. The sun was out but so many streets are too narrow to get all of a building in one shot. Most of them have some sort of wooden exterior. Dozens of them have become museums whose staff looked at us from inside

03 Ottoman Era House

. Paused outside, invariably someone got up to go to the till so we could buy a ticket from them, just in case we came in. There were not many other tourists around. These museums can't be making too much money in this season.

Ottoman houses usually have parts that overhang the road. Most of them have been repainted recently and some others are under renovation. One had its walls entirely removed: normally this means it was deconstructed or "demolished." But not this case. Something was special about the roof, so they left supports holding that up. Whatever it was about the roof we never discovered. Such are the mysteries of Plovdiv.

At the top of the old city is a hill where a fort was once stood. It was one of Europe's oldest settlements. Some local kids were playing around in it as we arrived but they left soon afterwards. It would have been a lot of fun to play in as a kid, but there is a lot of junk lying around, including a huge broken window that was completely out of place, there not being any walls anywhere nearby. The hill did offer a great view of the town. It's attractive to most directions, nice hills and all. The Southern side is a bit of an exception. A small forest of white apartment buildings stretch along that vista remind the viewer that it was once a communist country

04 Outside of Ethnographic Museum

.

Still, country's Communist centurions were good enough to leave up the old churches in Plovdiv too. From the exterior they are simple enough, but a few interiors could be described as garish. There is a lot of wood and it mostly painted in bright colours. We weren't allowed to take photos but the painted columns did remind us that Roman cities were probably not as drab as the grey stones that remain of them.

The last point of interest we tried to visit closed at the same moment we arrived. Another old Roman theatre (I am pretty bored of these but they are a tourist's staple). We met a San Fransisco couple. The husband was from Plovdiv, but he defected to the West in the early 70s. It was the wife's first time seeing her husband's city. They were really enjoying themselves in Bulgaria and we chatted about how much we all love Bulgaria for a half hour. They were really happy to see that young kids like us are out travelling. They said they have a 22 year old son who would rather not travel (even though they would pay for him! Hear that, Mom and Dad??). Hey, if you out there are 22 and you haven't travelled, and your parents will pay for you to do it, go! You might just get the chance to buy a Bulgarian Maxim!

* * *

Well that was about it for our sojurn in Bulgaria. Before leaving we had another meal at "background" and felt like pampered yuppies. We bought some "authentic" designer clothing at fallen-off-the-back-of-a-truck prices and stayed up way too late at our hostel one last night before climbing on another bus to take us back to Skopje...