April 3rd, 2011

We are in Bulgaria now! Here is what Rani had to say about it from our original blog:

We’re here!

We arrived in Sofia on Saturday, after a long 20+ hours of travel. We made it to the hotel, and were almost ready to drop. First, though, we took a bit of a walk, to get a feel for some of Bulgaria and also just to stretch our legs! We tried to go to the Nevsky cathedral, but alas, there was some sort of shindig happening right on the front steps, complete with what looked like a crush of newly ordained priests and news crews. We got some pictures and walked around the cathedral, but that was all that we could see there.

We continued on about a block or so, where we saw the St. Sofia church. It is quite old, and undergoing renovation. In the park across from there, a market was set up, with vendors selling some cool old stuff - an old Cyrillic manual typewriter, records, and even books. There were also vendors selling hand painted/carved religious icons that were beautiful, and even a lady selling matrushkas. I may try to revisit her stand on Saturday if she is still there…

After wandering a bit, Mike and I made our way back to the hotel. We still had not eaten, and wouldn’t you know it: the hotel restaurant was closed for a private event. We ended up eating at the hotel bar. The food was fine, but this was our first experience with European waiters. They are the complete opposite of American waiters, in that you have to flag them down if you want anything - refills, to order, to get the check, etc. It took us about an hour and a half to simply eat dinner, but we finally caught on. We paid the bill, and went upstairs to sleep for about 12 hours straight.

On Sunday, our driver picked us up promptly at 10:00am. We hopped in the car and settled in for the long drive to Dobrich. Little did we know that the ride was about to get longer…at our first stop, the car broke down! Luck was on our side, however, because we broke down literally across the street from a service station. They pushed the car over and 1 hour and 1 new fuel pump later, we were back on our way.

We arrived in Dobrich Sunday evening, and checked in to our hotel here. Our translator beat us here, and was already checked in to the room next to ours. We wandered over to the restaurant for dinner, met our translator, and then settled in for a nice sleep before the big day on Monday….