Bulgaria 09
Trip Start
Jan 20, 2008
1
25
28
Trip End
Ongoing
Chepelare,
Smolyan,
Bulgaria
Monday, January 19, 2009
Needless to say, the morning after our third big night in Scotland was pretty terrible, a condition not improved by the prospect of 8 or so hours on a national express coach to get back to Manchester, followed by a walk to the train station (after figuring out where it was) and then another hour and two changes to get back to Whalley. Put together, it makes for a pretty long day and it's probably not even 300 miles as the crow flies between Whalley and Edinburgh, sheesh.
Once we got back to Whalley though, there was still no relent
roast chicken,bulgarian style
. It was upstairs for a shower and change, then back downstairs to get on the piss again for the Whalley Arms staff (late) Xmas party. (Tough life, isn't it?). The boss had put on a tab for us, which we took to about £160 (roughly $350 AUS) in very short order. If memory serves, it wasn't just short order, but also, "raucous, obnoxious, loud and out of control" order. But things were only to get worse from there (or better, depending on your perspective..). We took a mini bus over to Rawtenstall to continue the party at the boss's other, recently purchased venue, a nightclub called, "The Rhythm Station". It was a free bar for us here as well and I shudder to think what the bill would have been. It was on the way there that everyone was given a drinking name, which was supposed to be adhered to all night. Most of them were fairly unrepeatable, but for the sake of embarrassing those involved, I'll repeat em anyway. Guy Cornwell (the boss) became "Gay Fuckwell", Yvonne became, "I can't actually remember" John Bridge became, "Fire Crotch", Ben Farmer became, "Dover", Jane became, "Jugs", John Feeney became, "Fanny Fart", Hayley Price became, "dirty ruggers", "Ben Cradock became, "C*nt Face", Michal Price became, "Scrote" and for some reason, Doug got stuck with the name, "Aussie Butt-Plugg" while I was given, "Aussie Cock Ring". Butt Plugg and Cock Ring I can understand, but Aussie? Where the hell did that come from..? Anyways, failure to use anyone's nickname resulted in penalties swiftly and vigorously applied
Kalecko, me and Nasser
. Not that we needed to get any more pished, we were all pretty much leathered before we even left the Whalley Arms. While at the Rhythm station we all got steadily more pissed and even more out of control. There was one instance where one of the night club's bouncers threatened to throw one of our number out if we didn't modify our behaviour, only to be told quite pleasantly, "I don't fucken think so, Chief. I'm here with the owner". It's amazing what you can get away with after reading, "How to Make Friends and Influence People". Or should that be, "without having read...".Anyway, we all got very very drunk and had a great night. I somehow contrived to fall off my seat on nearly every corner on the way back to the Whalley Arms, much to hayley's amusement while she attempted to capture the moment on camera. Once back at the pub, everyone was having far too much fun to go to bed, except for Dougie, who rather uncharacteristically disappeared early. I guess Hogmanay took it out of him a bit. Or maybe he's just a skirt :P. The rest of us spoke shit and wrestled (for whatever bloody reason) until the wee hours of the morning.
A few short days after all of this, we went out for a bit of a going away do, with some good friends to a posh pub down in Barrow, called the Eagle
our digs
. Naturally, it has been nicknamed the spread eagle. Somehow this still manages to qualify as a nick name, even though it's longer than the original. Very nice place though and we all enjoyed a good meal. While there, we also ran into some other friends who decided to join us back at the pub for a few going away drinks. None of this had really been planned, but then, the best nights usually are the most spontaneous ones, aren't they? The short version of events is that we all wound up back at the Arms and proceeded to drink and dance (and in Dougie's case, "snog and fondle") the night away. We were having so much fun in fact, that it came as something of a surprise to see the clock at 0355H and realise that our lift to the airport (thanks to the bloody good bloke, John Bridge) would be arriving in 5 minutes. Lucky for us, we'd done almost all of our packing earlier in the day. We'd been planning to double check that we'd not left anything important out after the dinner at the Spready, but as things turned out, it never happened, so hell knows what's been left up there. A franticly short while later, John tuned up to take us to the airport, which meant that Dougie had to reluctantly (and to my mind, quite amusingly) disengage himself from who / what he was doing and get in the car. Just before going to the afore mentioned dinner at the spready, Guy had given us our final pays and some holiday pay earned earlier and as a result we had rather a large amount of cash on us and no opportunity to get to a bank. Not wanting to take this amount of cash into Bulgaria, we decided to divest ourselves of £600 and get John to stick it in his bank account, then transfer it to us later on. Aren't we trusting fellows? Lucky for us, John is a top notch, trustworthy bloke of unquestionable integrity.
our digs
In due course, we arrived at the airport and then the fun really started. Despite the information (or rather, Lack Thereof) on our E-tickets, we had somehow contrived to get ourselves delivered o the wrong terminal and had to walk over to the other one, taking some minutes. Have I mentioned that we were rolling drunk during all of this? Probably didn't need to, but for those a bit slow on the uptake - we were. Finally arriving at the right terminal, it wasn't too hard to find the right check in. Once there though, we also found that our combined luggage was about 7 kilos overweight. When extra baggage cost £8 pound per kilo, we decided that in technical terms this was, "not good". We buggered off to an empty check in desk to see what we could get rid of. Toiletries were the first to go, followed closely by an extra pair of shoes. After that it got a bit tricky, there was a towel, a couple of pillows we filched from Korean Air many moons ago, a book or two and miscellaneous other stuff piled in a heap until we had managed to pare our luggage down to 19.1 kg and 19.5kg.
We proudly marched back up to the check in lady and heaved our bags back on to the scales, only to find that the scales read 22.5kg and 21.9kg, respectively. What the hell kind of bullshit was this? It's fucken rigged! It's a bloody scam! All this and more, we said, severely unimpressed
not sure what the msg is here...
. When were these scales last calibrated, Dougie wanted to know. We were quite prepared to make a stink about this, well, a bigger one than we were already making anyway and as I mentioned earlier, we were still quite pissed. After explaining that we had just bloody well chucked out an acre of shit to get our bags back down under weight and had checked em on a pair of scales not five yards from that check in desk, the woman took us aside, checked us through on a different check in and found that, gee golly gosh! They really were under weight. There were a stack of people on that flight who were paying hand over fist for over weight bags too. What a scam! More like Cheeky Jet than EasyJet. After having made us ditch all the extra weight (well, after having told us we'd have to pay for it which is the next best thing to telling us to ditch it), the woman then looked at our pile of stuff and said we could put it back in! At least we still have the stuff, but why all the fuck around if she was going to let us through with it anyway?!After the trauma of the check in, the flight was pretty standard, aside from the encroaching hanngover which was beginning to land about the time we were. There were a couple of "go arounds" due to crappy weather before we landed on the icy and foggy tarmac at Sofia and the only reason the pilot didn't get a standing ovation once we were back on the ground was that he still had the seatbelt light on
our digs - the bathroom
. As for myself though, and presumably Dougie, I couldn't have given a toss if we'd crash landed or just normal landed. In fact, crash landing may have been preferable - sort of a "get out of hangover free" card. Well, perhaps not exactly "free", given that a crash landing may have ended with everyone's death. Right, moving right along...Making it from Sofia to Chepelare was nowhere near as interesting this time around as it was the first time. We knew to avoid the dodgy taxi drivers, we knew which counter to go to and what to expect to pay for the tickets when we got to the central bus station and we even knew what the bus station looked like in Chepelare, so the last hour was the bus ride wasn't stressful at all, like the first time around. Even our bus driver was bloody boring. The first time we took a bus up to Chepelare, the driver was simultaneously managing to drive the bus, smoke a cigarette, talk on his mobile phone, drink a bottle of what we assume was water, but may well have been rakia and overtake cars on the outside, around blind corners on icy roads going up a mountain range. Admittedly, that's a lot to live up to, but this guy didn't even seem to try. He just sat up the front and drove the bus in a professional sort of a way. Like I said, "dull".
Once we made it to Cheps, we set out to find our new home, Hotel Belona
hotel belona!!!
. Amazingly, our sense of direction led us just about straight to it, where we got an extremely warm welcome from Nasser and Vesela. I cannot say enough about how generous they have been to us. We eat with the family every night and the food is amazing, it's very difficult not to overeat here. So difficult that I'm not even sure we've managed it yet. If anyone brings a set of scales anywhere near me I may just brain them with 'em. We earn our keep here at the hotel by helping out however we can. Usually this involves bringing in the firewood for each of the three fires in the hotel, washing up all the dishes, clearing snow (when there is any), wrapping up the knives and forks in napkins, serving in the upstairs bar, helping out in the restaurant bar, taking drinks orders or meals out to the customers etc. Everyone in the family though (it's a family hotel) is so efficient and good at what they do that we feel quite superfluous and kind of jump at any opportunity to do something that makes us feel like we're being useful! Everyone is extremely friendly and like I said earlier, so very very generous.We hit the slopes for the first time a couple of days ago at Mechi Chal, the local slope in Chepelare. The conditions haven't been ideal here as of yet and some more snow will drastically improve matters. As things stand, it's all ride-able from the mid-station down to the bottom and the fancy new lift makes getting up there a lot quicker, but it's extremely icy
the church next door
. Even the piste is like solid bloody ice, and once the cord has been scraped off it's very slippery. That being said, we still had a ball. Even with all the stacks and ouchies, it was great to be back on the snowboards after almost 12months. We were a bit worried we might have forgotten how! Needlessly so, as it turns out. Check out the photo of Dougie's arse if you want to see just how often and how hard he fell on it ;). I fell over too, of course, just not so much on my arse. There's a bruise on my knee, but it's nowhere near as funny as Dougal's ringbit. The next day, Sunday just gone, we went a bit further up the road to the big ski resort, Pamporovo. The snow conditions here were much better. Like Chepelare, they also have snow cannons here, but unlike Cheps, they actually seem prepared to use them somewhat. Pamporovo is a fair bit higher than Cheps and the snow and piste conditions from the top to the mid station were pretty good and we had a really good day of boarding. Probably the best part was heading down the run that leads off to Stoikite. It had been pisted, but was still closed, but we decided to go down anyways and check it out. No-one else had been down at this stage and it was fantastic to put some lines on the fresh cord. The only bad bit was that the snow didn't go all the way down and got pretty ratty and icy in the last bit, so we all had to unstrap and walk out the last 500m or so. Luckily for us, the newly constructed lift from Stoikite was operating and we were able to get back up the top no worries.
Well, that pretty much brings everything up to date... hope I haven't bored you all too much! Life is good and we're liking it pretty well here in Cheps, so best wishes to everyone back home and all around the place, stay cool and if anything worth mentioning happens, I'll try and put up another (shorter) blog. We'll also try and keep some more regular photo updates happening, but I wouldn't hold my breath or anything ;)
Bye all!
Paul and Doug.
Comments
Doug's Bum
Don't mean to nag Son but with all the bruises from cliff diving in Greece, poker burns in Scotland and now more bruises from Chepelare, your bums gonna drop off!!!lol Try wearing pants damn it!! C Ya have fun.
Miss ewwweee
Hey Guys!Well this made me laugh quite a lot!I liked the parts about our staff doo and the Eagle and our last nyt!But It makes me miss you!
Dougal I will get credit soon then we can txt!I miss you both lots and am currently in discussions with Guy about visiting you with him and Yvonne in Feb xxxx Keep safe and Dougal take care of ur bottom.
Luff to ya both
Dirty Ruggers xxx