OMG this place is noisy!!
We are currently sitting in our lovely Bulgarian apartment watching some athletics on our fancy full package cable and grumpy old man Phil has just turned to me and said - "is that someone drumming... at a quarter past midnight... on a Tuesday?"
After whipping around Eastern Europe these past - what is it now, six weeks?? - walking til we dropped, followed by the epic train journey, we arrived in Sofia... absolutely knackered.
Once we'd checked into our apartment on Thursday night, I took one look around and decided not to move for at least a couple of days.
We lucked onto just the right place at just the right time - I think this is our favourite apartment so far!! Right in the centre of town, big kitchen, nice open lounge, balcony off the bedroom, perfect.
Plus, we've got the aforementioned "full package" cable which, it turns out in Bulgaria includes several porn channels, which is... an interesting choice for a rental apartment.
About half the the channels are in Cyrillic, which meant that I channel surfed right into it... resulting in a scream from me, followed by Phil bursting into the room to see what's wrong and then five minutes of hysterical laughter (from me)... because I am not very mature! We are now sticking to MTV and Eurosport...
I know, right? I didn't want to have to mention it, but I have a journalistic responsibility to report the facts!!
* Update - Phil snorted when he read this... can't imagine why.
We have observed are a couple of unique traditions here - one of them is attaching balloons to the outside of cars.
I would guess that about 20% of the cars we've seen are decked out like this
The other "tradition" is honking one's car horn for no apparent reason. I think they're both meant to signify celebration. There seems to be about an hour each evening where it is a near-constant stream of honking - mostly from cars sporting balloon decorations. I've started calling it the witching hour - it's starts at about 6.30pm and doesn't let up!
Every night there seems to be some sort of party going on. Last night, from our balcony we could see a large crowd of people - all really dressed up - walking down one of the main streets with a police escort followed by what seemed like an endless trail of balloon cars and honking horns. One car was doing almost stationary burn outs on the road throwing up plumes of stinky smoke!
Tonight there were three guys walking through the bumper to bumper traffic outside our building playing drums and a saxophone and getting high fives from all the stationary drivers. Again, no idea why...
Oh, and to add to the noise, our neighbours are renovating the apartment next door so there's a constant symphony of bangs, drills and sanding to complement the honking and drumming, etc.
And Sofia
Sofia is... a bit of a grower. The more I see of it, the more I like it!
My first impression of the city was the dramatic mountains that frame the North side of the city which is a gorgeous view, especially from the main shopping strip.
The look of the streets reminds me more of Malaysia than the rest of Europe. It's a bit run down in a charming sort of way (cracked footpaths, streets, buildings), with hole in the wall shops and bars everywhere and hot and humid, or alternatively thunderstorming... It's pelted down every day so far.
Crumbly apartment blocks abound
But other parts of the city have a more European feel with huge churches, an impressive parliament and uncovered Roman ruins dotted throughout the city.
Roman ruins a couple of minutes walk from our apartment
It's probably the least expensive city of the trip... It's taken a few days to adjust to the Bulgarian Lev, but my budgeting app tells me that it is great value. $1 per litre of beer is the cheapest we've seen in Europe.
The people are super friendly and English is fairly widespread, which is good because it's taken me five days to learn the word for "thank you".
Random things I've noticed about Sofia include awesome street art, lots of unique independent fashion stores, and heaps of tiny hole in the wall places selling nuts and honey. Plus for some reason, all the basketball hoops in schools appear to be sponsored by chupa chups!
Street art - half the transformer boxes in the city are painted
Apart from our random street wanderings (and they are random - I can't seem to get my bearings at all and the Cyrillic street signs don't help) we've visited the Alexandar Nevsky Cathedral which made even this churched-out traveller stand in awe, the movies (at early 1990s pricing) and a fantastic little place called vegan kitch for a delicious lunch of chickpea burgers! We also tried the traditional breakfast drink, boza, which is made of fermented grains and smells a bit like a soggy bowl of Special K!
The impressive Alexandar Nevsky Cathedral
Centre of town - they have near silent trams whipping through
Phil has proclaimed that Sofia has the best soundtrack of our trips so far. We keep hearing awesome classic 90s hits everywhere we go!And, to top it off, look who's touring:
We got to listen to the whole album over lunch yesterday.
There's still lots to see in Sofia and we're here until Sunday, after which we head to Greece.
Maybe we'll figure out what all the car honking is about by then...
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
No comments:
Post a Comment