If it doesn’t seem like I have enough entries for a four-day trip to Sofia, it is because I virtually lost an entire day due to bad weather. One day, in the middle of my visit, it was rainy, windy and the high temperature was about 48. All of the other days, we had sunshine and 70s. Fair tradeoff, I suppose, but I spent most of the horrible day indoors.
I found where the touristy section of town was and headed in that direction. From my hotel, it was only about a 25-minute walk. I found Orlov Most, the bridge, and let me tell you there was nothing spectacular about it. I don’t think it was a river that it was built on top of because I’ve seen stronger and larger streams of water coming down Wisconsin Avenue in D.C. after a main break. That’s not important though. Orlov Most wasn’t as important for what it was as it is for what it is surrounded by.
Before I reached Orlov Most on my walk from the hotel, I reached the Alexander Nevsy Cathedral, which I wrote about in my last entry. It was as magnificent as it had appeared on the shot glasses the day before. I walked around and took some pictures from various angles. I moved on from the cathedral towards the bridge and I realized that there was a lot more to Sofia than I realized in this part of town, alone. I passed by several older churches, like the Russian Church, and memorials, like Bulgaria’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as well as the nicer hotels in town.
The one thing that actually made me double-take, however, were the streets. The streets in Sofia are paved in gold. Literally. Well, not literally literally, but kinda sorta literally. The main street in Sofia, Tsar Something-or-other-ski Street, is paved in gold bricks. Not the kind of gold bricks that Goldfinger was after in the best of the James Bond films, but bricks that were painted gold. The reflection from the sun left this soft, low glow around the surrounding structures. I’m sure that the pictures from my iPhone don’t justify how cool I thought it was, but you should try to check it out online or something.
As you go down the main street, it sort of curves towards an intersection and the only way to get across is through an underground tunnel and also is a metro stop. Down in the hole is a McDonald’s and a book store, but it was my first trip down that made this tunnel stand out for me. There was a fashion show going on. Yes, a bona fide fashion show, with music, models, an emcee and everything. I’ve been in subway stations in New York, Paris and Milan. I’ve never seen a spontaneous fashion show break out in any of those “fashion capitals.” But in Sofia? Hells yes!!!
I guess the last thing that caught my eye and that I’ll bring your attention to is the park on the other side of Orlov Most. Everything was written in Bulgarian, which I kept referring to in my mind as Grussian because the characters were part Greek and part Russian, and I couldn’t make much out. The park, however, was pretty good-sized and surrounded the largest sports stadium in Bulgaria. (I’m just guessing at that factoid, but if I’m wrong, it can’t be off by much.) The entire park is also wired with free wifi, so I took my computer to the park to work on my soccer blog, as well.
Overall, I have to say that Sofia was a beautiful city and one of my favorites in Europe. With the exception of the area directly around the train station, the city was very, very clean. (This is in contrast to the area around the city, in which it appeared that the train was running through an uncovered landfill based on the amount of garbage that had been dumped along the route.) Everybody that I met was very nice, though they could be a little scary because they also were very loud. I was concerned about my inability to communicate at all in Bulgarian would be a major problem, but like in most large cities, English got me by most of the time.
Food-wise, the city ain’t Rome. I tried some little places here and there, like the cafeteria I mentioned earlier, but I also tried some KFC because I knew what I was getting there. My last night in Sofia, I went to a Bulgarian version of TGIFriday’s, Happy Bar & Grill, and had a pork chop, Slavic salad and some Kamenitza.
If you’re ever in the area, I would highly recommend a stop in Sofia. I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the cities that I visited in Greece and it’s not difficult to get to as it is sort of in the center of the Turkey-Romania-Hungary-Greece-Croatia area that surrounds it and has trains going to all of those countries with some regularity.
At the moment, I’m on a train to Belgrade, Serbia. I’m sharing a train car with a seventy-year old Bulgarian woman who is very, very talkative. Unfortunately, I know about three words in Bulgarian and she knows about five in English. I’m learning stuff, but I’m working too hard on this ride. Unfortunate for a nine-hour trip.
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