Bulgaria Again

Bulgaria Again

Walking around the city

The 5 hour bus ride to Sofia was mostly uneventful. When crossing the border, we all had to get off the bus and walk through the passport control individually. Since Bulgaria is not part of the Schengen zone, there was a duty free for us to visit. Like in airports, the price was such, that it would be better to just pay duty at a discount store. We were told that there would be wifi on the bus, so we had hoped to find a hostel for the night during the bus ride. But there was no wifi, so once we arrived, we biked around looking for a “vacancy” sign. At some point we found wifi, and then we found an okay hostel near the city center.

We spent the rest of the day strolling around the city, with no specific goal. At some point we noticed a theater school was having free shows all day. I don’t understand Bulgarian, but if the acting is good enough, I could probably get the gist. One of the shows was about a girl on a diet who eats plain salad and fruits. She has a friend that eats whatever she wants. The show is a comedy about their interaction. I pointed out how there were some parallels between the show and this trip. It took my biking partner some time to realize.

Another interesting story was regarding a protest I saw. My biking partner can read Russian, so I asked him if he could understand the signs. He said that it ws something like “no guns”. I thought that a pro-peace war sounded good, so we joined. Later, when asking the protesters what this was about, they explained that the protest was antifascist and against the Ukraine war. So far that sounded good. She then continued to say that it was anti NATO, anti America, anti EU. They want to stop the war in Ukraine to stop by no longer giving weapons to Ukraine. Soon after that we decided to leave the protest.

We also took the time to relax and play on our phone. We read that the rain in North Macedonia continued so much that there was flooding, and in one of the place we visited, Kriva Palanka, there was so much rain that it destroyed the bridge. So, although we suffered through a constant downpour of rain, at least none of the way got destroyed.

Since it was Sunday, there were a lot of ceremonies at the local churches. We saw several weddings that had a line of brides a grooms getting married. It was surprising that the wedding was joint, and that it was opened to the public, but from what I understood, after the ceremony at the church, every couple goes to a private meal with the invited guests.

Sofia was built in a very walkable way. We had no trouble navigating the city and reaching any location that we saw or planned to go to. Sofia was built with underground passages for pedestrians to cross the road. I liked the idea of that, since there were shops there protected from the weather, and some of them even had some archaeological structures to look at, that must have been discovered when building the passage. My biking partner on the other hand had childhood traumas from those passage ways. He explained that during the Soviet Union, those places would be a hot site for crime. There were homeless people sleeping there, drugged up people getting drunk and high, and muggers trying to take what they could get. I asked if the police every tried to keep the order there, and he said that the police where involved with the robbers and would sometime get a cut or even help the robbers mug people. He said that in the night they would take their chance crossing a wide road, rather than go through those passages. Nowadays, however, the passages are a fun place to go.

After enjoying the city we prepared a bike ride for Monday, and called it a night.

Last full day abroad

By this point in the trip I was starting to get a bad case of achilles tendinitis. My ankle was getting inflamed due to all of the activity, and the bad nutrition (it is hard to keep Kosher while on the road). However, since I was going to return to Israel soon, I decided to go for one more ride before resting as needed. So we planned a 53km ride to a local lake. This time we left all of our stuff at our hostel, so it was much easier to ride without all of the additional weight.

The view was nice, but there were quite a few hill.

We saw a hotel shaped like a snail. Next time I go to Sofia, I may decide to stay in the snail.

Afterward we moved to our final hostel.

Last day abroad

We only found out when we arrived, but it ends up that the hostel is owned by an Israeli, who has lived in Sofia for 15 years. Unrelated to that, usage of the washing machine, coffee machine and a towel require and additional payment.

We used our final hours in Sofia to go to the local market and get all of the souvenirs that we needed. I find the local market a much better place to get souvenirs than at souvenirs stores. Most of the stuff sold at souvenirs stores are made in China junk, that aren’t unique to the country. Local markets, on the other hand, have unique items that represent the place that you are visiting. Although most of our trip was in North Macedonia, and I would have preferred to buy souvenirs from there, since we were bike packing, we didn’t want to take extra weight with us.

We finally packed up our bike, along with all of out clothing and souvenirs. The final step was to get to the airport. So we had a 5 minute walk to the metro, a 20 minute metro ride (that comes at a frequency of every 8 minutes). Then we had to get from the main terminal to the low-cost airline terminal. That took us another 45 minutes, but we had enough time to spare. After a nice long nap, near the terminal, we got on and returned to Israel. From there we got our bikes, got on the train to Jerusalem, and took different buses home.