2022 World Tour – Sofia, Bulgaria
Hello from Sofia, my 51st stop on the trip. This is my last stop within Bulgaria so I’ll abbreviate the story to just give the highlights of the city.
My bus from Plovdiv to Sofia leaves at 4:10 pm so I have a leisurely morning and then headed to the Google mall for a late lunch and a quick walk to the bus station next door. I now realize there’s a warning on my emailed bus ticket receipt that I must print out the ticket, having the bar code showing on my phone screen isn’t good enough, ugh. I checked with every likely store in the mall and nobody could print it for me until I went into a tech product store and the guy happily printed it! He didn’t want anything, but I gave him some money to buy a coffee or a snack. At the bus station I waited for a bus to pull into the #8 slot as designated for the 4:10 run to Sofia. A bus parks there but it’s got a different destination in the window. I looked to the next bus in #7, marked Sofia at 4:00pm and asked, she said yes this is the bus. Wrong bus slot, wrong bus time, genius. I sat down next to a big burly guy, shoulder to shoulder. Luckily, in a feature I’ve never seen before, the seat slides out into the aisle adding about 4″ so we had some elbow room. I started playing podcasts and fell asleep, woke up halfway there. Fell asleep again and woke up 10 minutes from the station, wow, that was a good trip!
My Barcelona AirBnB buddy Vanille has gone back to her home in Sofia for a while and she agreed to let me visit and sleep on her pink couch, in exchange for some tech support! Her apartment is just down the road from the bus / train / metro station so it was an easy roll to get there. She was ready with a salad, two tzatziki flavours and bread, then moussaka, all delicious. We took pictures and sent them to our two other AirBnB buddies. I made up the pullout couch and slept well.
The next morning we made a plan of things for me to see and I went back to the metro station and bought three one-day tickets, since there’s no such thing as a 3 day pass. Google Maps works well here, a big help as all public transport signage seems to be in Cyrillic. I went 3 stops to Vitosha Street and came up at the National Palace of Culture, an impressive building but closed as no performance was currently going on. I walked down the wide pedestrian walkway, lined with shops and cafes, with lunch and gelato along the way. I continued on to the Sveta Nedelya church, or Saint Sunday. That name may sound familiar as it’s the same name as the village back in Croatia where Rimac has its headquarters, but it’s spelled Sveta Nedelja in Croatian. There are a lot of churches in this area, including the awesomely-named Church of St. Nicolas the Miracle-Maker. Sounds like Miracle Max from the Princess Bride! Then to the Archeological Museum with items dating way back to the Thracians 3000 years ago, but the full history of the city dates back around 7000 years, making it one of the oldest cities in Europe. The area’s Roman name was Serdica and there are archeological excavations nearly everywhere you go, including inside subway stations. I walked past the Parliament buildings and a string of Embassies, the Mosque, then over to the Hot Springs. It’s a small square with about 10 water spigots pouring out quite hot water – I could only hold my hand in the stream for about 2 seconds. Lots of people were filling up jugs and taking them away. It had a slight sulfur smell but tasted OK. I walked to St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and the Red Brick Church next door. Approaching 10K steps I found a nearby hardware store where I bought a wall anchor, screw, washer and screwdriver to mount Vanille’s flower pot. Got a bus back to the Central Station and walked home. We met later for dinner at Mi Casa, right next to the hot springs, really good chicken tagliatelle and good wine.
The next day was drizzly and overcast, good thing I got most of my walking done yesterday. Vanille wanted me to check over her home Internet router and Wifi as she had some extra parts. Since her current system is working well and her provider has locked the hardware I wasn’t able to make any improvements. I need to print, sign and scan my election ballot so I walked to two nearby print shops before I found one that could handle it. Back home we made dinner from ingredients from a local veggie shop as we watched a tremendous thunderstorm with very close crackling lightning and building-shaking thunder. Later I learned that four people, likely migrants with nowhere else to go, were killed by a lightning strike near the hot springs.
The next day it cleared up and I did another walking route through the city and watched “Don’t Worry Darling” with Bulgarian subtitles in a big cinema. I thought it was a good suspenseful drama, despite all of the off-screen drama surrounding it. Florence Pugh’s acting was just fantastic. My phone was running out of charge so I asked a young guy at a phone shop if I could catch a quick charge and he said OK. We struck up a conversation and it turns out he’s interested in IT and wonders if he should join a company or start his own. We talked about how hard it is to find a paying customer, inflation, which programming languages and platforms he should try, etc. I met Vanille at an authentic Bulgarian restaurant, it felt like we were inside a barn with old tools and wagons in the ceiling and hanging on walls.
On my last day I decided to go for a long ride to a church at the edge of the mountains south of the city so I got on the metro and went all the way to the last stop. Turns out it’s at a huge shopping center, so I got out and walked through it, then got on the bus for the remaining ride down to the church. I finally reached it and found it completely fenced in by a brick wall and I couldn’t see much, ugh. Retraced my steps and got back home, then we walked to a Happy restaurant for dinner. In the evening I set up an Amazon Echo box that she had been given, got it connected to her Wifi and linked with her Amazon account. Now she can ask Alexa to tell a joke or give the weather forecast. Any song we requested led to a big sales pitch for the paid Amazon Music service of course. Big thanks to Vanille for her hospitality and great cooking!
Is it worth a visit? As the capital of Bulgaria, it has some impressive buildings, churches, pedestrian walking areas and a great metro system. Add on the thousands of years of history and archeological sites and it’s a place you should definitely visit.
Next Stop: Thessaloniki, Greece
