Searching for Viktor Krum: Bulgaria

My very last day in Greece was very very long.  I woke up at 5am to catch a 6am ride with a friend of the Monastery down from Anatoli to Larissa.  I spent a few hours walking around Larissa completing a few errands, such as checking my e-mail and buying sunglasses to replace the ones I stepped on in the garden.  I highly recommend Larissa if you're ever passing through-- it's a nice little town with lots of shops and stores, and on Tuesday they have an open-air market next to the train station.  I left my bag at Park Hotel, who generously allowed me to do this without charge, so I could wander the city for a couple hours.  I bought a sandwich at a bakery and ate it in a park by a fountain.  It was a lovely morning.

Thessaloniki I did not like as much, though to be fair I only covered the streets near the train station.  What I saw looked like every other city, concrete and pavement and shops; you'd think they'd put something nice like a park near the train station to lure tourists.  I stopped in a 1-euro shop and bought a hair clip just for fun, and then spent the rest of the evening at the train station's internet cafe.  I did find a nice cafe across from the train station, where the guy at the counter smiled and sold me a really good turkey sandwich and let me sit there until midnight when my bus left, so that was nice.

The bus from Thessaloniki, Greece, to Sofia, Bulgaria, left at midnight (well, 12:45) and reached Sofia around 5:30 in the morning.  So that's 24 hours of uninterrupted travel and intermittent napping.  I took a quick snooze in the bus station before walking down the road to Hostel Mostel, where I was immediately welcomed even though I probably looked and smelled rather bad at this point.  I recommend Hostel Mostel because the people there are very nice, they let me doze on their couch since my room wasn't ready at 7am, and they let me use the shower while basically living out of reception, and then they stored my luggage for me so I could go into town.

At their recommendation, I washed up after my nap and then walked to the Court House at 11am for a free 2.5-hour walking tour of Sofia.  It's a very smart way to show tourists around Sofia, especially since most of the sights are in the same part of the city.  We saw churches and mosques and parliament buildings, and our guide helpfully provided historical anecdotes (and some jokes) so that we actually knew what we were looking at. When the tour finished I was famished and walked off in search of some bulgarian food, but accidentally ended up in a nice sushi restaurant.  Oops, these things happen.

I spent the afternoon wandering around the archaelogy museum, looking at marble friezes and statues until I could barely stand up, because I'm a dork like that.  The artifacts there were nicer than some I've seen, and the place earns brownie points for being small-- nothing overwhelming, just a taste of history.  I had an intention of going on a hostel-led "free" pub crawl after dinner (Hostel Mostel provides free dinner with beer as well as breakfast (without beer), seriously I recommend it), but instead I fell asleep at like 8:30.  Oops these things happen.

Since I hadn't seen enough monasteries lately, on my 2nd day in Bulgaria I went on a day trip to Rila Monastery, 2 hours outside Sofia.  It was quite a lot bigger than the monastery I stayed at in Greece, but it didn't have an organic garden or baby cows, so...

Sofia is a nice city but a small one, and there isn't actually much to do, so on my 3rd day (at Hostel Mostel's recommendation.  Seriously, go here) I took a bus north to Veliko Tarnovo, the old capital of Bulgaria.  If I was going to find Durmstrang on this trip (Balkan Hogwarts), it would be here.  The place has an actual fortress, which these days doubles as a gigantic stone playground for tourists.  At night (not every night, but some) the fortress puts on a great big light show, red and blue and green, with laser beams from the tallest tower and flashes like paparazzi from the lower citadel.  I had a great day and evening just wandering around the old city, down cobblestone streets and into towers.

Had I unlimited time, my next detour might have been to a Bulgarian town on the Black Sea, but I have a schedule and Bucharest was calling me...