Sofia doesn’t make the best first impression. It’s a big, dirty city, and after the other beautiful places I’ve seen in Bulgaria it looked pretty grim in comparison. At first.
Just like Plovdiv, Sofia has a long history. You’ll find Roman ruins, medieval churches, and Communist apartment blocks all jostling for room here. The apartment blocks win.
Nonetheless there are some very beautiful parts to the city. The Orthodox churches are beautiful, and in the centre there is an Orthodox church, a Catholic church, a mosque, and a synagogue all within sight of each other.
Speaking of the synagogue, which has a beautiful interior, all of Bulgaria’s Jews survived the Holocaust. Although Bulgaria allied itself with the Axis, when Hitler asked in secret that they deport the Jews, it didn’t remain a secret. People took to the streets in protest, with Christians wearing Star of David armbands in solidarity. The government couldn’t really stand up to Nazi Germany’s power, so instead they delayed and deflected. They said that the Jews were busy doing labour and they would be sent once they were done. Eventually they delayed long enough and the war ended.
I visited a very interesting museum called ‘The Red Flat’. Museum doesn’t really describe what it is, which is a fully preserved communist era apartment. You enter with an audio guide and can walk around or relax while you hear stories about everyday life and the people who owned the apartment during communist times. You’re free to touch everything in the apartment, so you can flip through books, put on records, and fiddle with various vintage varietals. It was a pretty cool experience.
Sofia was a perfectly lovely city in the end, and it speaks to the quality of Bulgaria that it is my least favourite place in the country.
Bulgaria has really been my favourite country so far, and I’m sad to leave. But I’ve been here longer than any other country so far, and any of the upcoming countries could overtake the top spot, so I will continue on.
I am loving Bulgaria. I think I already mentioned that. Even though I encountered my first (minor) setback of my trip so far.
My trip has been going super smoothly, everything working as planned, always getting where I want to go. So it was about time something went wrong. It was really such a small problem that it hardly bears mentioning.
There I was in Veliko Tarnovo, all ready to catch a bus to my next destination of Plovdiv. I arrived 45 minutes early to the bus station (the bus stations in Bulgaria are in annoyingly non-central locations), and went to buy my ticket.
“It’s finished”, the ticket salesman tells me. For some reason ‘finished’ seems to be the English word used throughout Eastern Europe for ‘sold out’, or ‘closed’. So all the tickets to Plovdiv were sold out for the day. I guess Veliko was a popular weekend getaway for Bulgarians and they were all heading back home.
After sitting dejectedly for a few minutes, I booked a ticket for the next morning, and headed back to the hostel for another night. If I could have been stuck anywhere for an extra little while, beautiful Veliko Tarnovo was a good option.
The bus to Plovdiv takes four and a half hours. One full hour of that time is the bus sitting around at a rest stop in the mountains and a bus station in another city. It was also the first bus driver I’ve encountered who seems to follow the speed limit. Bus drivers throughout my trip so far have been all about efficiency, speeding down the road, passing at every opportunity. This bus driver was positively slow. We were on some winding mountain roads, to be fair, but even so I expected a bit more verve from the driver. The drive was beautiful at least.
One unnecessarily slow bus ride out of the way and I was in Plovdiv, the European Capital of Culture this year. It’s also the oldest city in Europe, so they’ve had plenty of time to perfect their culture.
Plovdiv feels like a city of culture, and like an old city. In the old town every one of the beautiful houses contains a museum or gallery. The upper levels of the buildings jut out over the street, a tricky construction technique to get more floor space without paying for a larger plot of land. The cobblestone streets in this area are the most rugged I’ve seen yet. But the old town is hardly the oldest thing in town.
Plovdiv has been a city occupied by many cultures over the years. Thracians, Macedonians, Romans, Bulgars, and the Ottomans all put their stamp on Plovdiv before the modern Bulgarian state was formed one hundred years ago. There is a gate in the city wall that may date to the Macedonians. There are also some excellent Roman ruins here. I love medieval stuff and Communist stuff, but my journey has been lacking Roman stuff up to this point.
Plovdiv has an amphitheatre that still hosts concerts (sadly none while I was there), and seated six thousand back in it’s prime, a stadium which seated thirty thousand but is mostly buried today, and other Roman ruins. Apparently, being named Capital of Culture gave the city more incentive to excavate and display some of these ruins, with some being made open to the public only months ago.
Seeking to become the Capital of Culture also caused the city to clean up an area in the city centre that was basically streets full of parked cars seven years ago. Today the area is full of cool cafes, restaurants, and bars, as well as beautiful street art.
There is also one of the longest pedestrian streets in the world, and it wouldn’t feel out of place in Western Europe.
Also there are tonnes of cats here, and though they are stray, they’re getting fed and they’re healthy and friendly.
Bulgaria is my favourite country so far. I’m going to spend a little while longer here before heading into the rest of the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia.
I’m super happy to be in Bulgaria. It’s such a nice change from everywhere else I’ve been for the last two months. I’ve enjoyed every country so far, but the differences between countries has been subtle. If I were to go straight from Estonia to Romania I would of course notice big differences, but since I’ve made my way south more slowly, each country has been only a slight change from the one before it. This makes Bulgaria refreshing, as for the first time I feel that I’m somewhere different from where I’ve been before.
I guess it feels like I’m finally in the south of Europe. The weather’s been warm since I got to Poland, but it’s even warmer here. The landscape is starting to feel Mediterranean, the architecture as well. It’s nice.
Admittedly I am in a beautiful old town in Bulgaria. I’ve yet to visit a big city, so opinions may evolve. I had to change buses in the city of Ruse right after crossing the border from Romania, and it was an uninspiring place. A couple of hours later, however, I was in Veliko Tarnovo, gazing up at the massive ruins of the Tsarevets Fortress, illuminated with the warm light of spotlights.
Veliko Tarnovo was the capital of Bulgaria during the middle ages, and it has a suitably large fortress to go with the title. Even in ruins Tsarevets is an imposing sight, covering a hilltop near the old town, with a causeway leading up to it. It’s a beautiful sight. The church in the very centre of Tsarevets has been well preserved and has very unique, modern murals inside.
I spent most of a day here just sitting in the sun reading. I’ve been travelling all this time, but now I feel like I’m on vacation.
I don’t really know what else to say. It’s lovely here, but words are failing me at the moment.
Today marks 2 months, or 60 days of travel. Time hast flew-eth.
Hello from Bucharest! or is it Budapest… Where am I? Oh well, the journey is more important than the destination they say, and my journey here was quite interesting, although the destination, Bucharest, is rather nice as well.
A bus from Chisinau takes 7-8 hours, the train takes 13. I took the train. It is also more expensive than the bus, but I was travelling first class. That’s correct, I booked a ticket for a first class berth on the overnight train from Chisinau to Bucharest, it was only $7 more than second class anyhow. Luckily I had read up on the journey beforehand, or I may have been somewhat shocked with what I discovered. The train has been described as a rolling Soviet museum, it appears relatively unchanged since the 50s or 60s. First class is not comfort class, but it was an experience. My cabin had two seats/beds. Nobody joined me on the journey. The train was a quarter full at most. The conductor is a gruff Moldovan man who speaks Russian.
Why does the train take so much longer than the bus? Well partly it’s because the train is very slow. Mostly it’s because they have to lift the train up. Train tracks in the former Soviet Union are a different size than those in the rest of Europe. This means that at the border with Romania they have to lift each carriage individually and change its wheels to fit the tracks. This, along with the border crossing, took about two hours, starting at about 7pm. If you take the train in the opposite direction you get woken up by immigration and customs at 3am.
The Moldovan customs officer poked through my bag and checked every possible storage spot in the cabin. Her Romanian counterpart said hi, asked if I had cigarettes or alcohol, and wished me a good journey. A middle aged Moldovan lady came by to ask if I was feeling well. I was.
While all this was going on the carriages were jacked up, and the new wheels installed. I watched the process happening to another carriage out of my window. I didn’t even feel when my own carriage was lifted or lowered. The experience was not all it was chalked up to be.
After that it was smooth sailing all the way to Bucharest. And when I say ‘smooth’ I mean ‘not smooth’. The train bumped along all through the night, and while my little bed was comfy enough, I’ve had better sleeps. That morning at 6am there was a knock on my door letting me know we were about to arrive, and just like that I was in Bucharest.
Many of the old buildings here were destroyed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Communist leader of Romania from ’65 to ’89, to make way for his massive building projects. One man saved over twenty buildings and churches by lifting them, installing train tracks underneath, and rolling them out of the way. This includes one apartment building which he moved with the residents still inside. There are still some nice buildings, especially ones from the turn of the century when French style was all the rage. The biggest attraction here is the biggest, literally.
The Palace of the Parliament is the second largest administrative building in the world, after The Pentagon. It is also the heaviest building in the world, on account of all the marble, and carpets, and 16m high velvet curtains. Construction was started in 1983. Many of the best architects from Romania and worldwide submitted designs. Ceaușescu chose the design of a 27 year old straight out of school because hers was the largest, no other considerations. It was meant to take two years. When communism fell and Ceaușescu was executed in 1989 it was not complete. Since they had all the building materials ready to go they continued the project, finishing in 1996. There are over one thousand rooms inside. It currently houses the Romanian parliament, many government offices, a contemporary art museum, some restaurants, and other things. Less than 400 of the rooms are in use. You can rent them for conferences and other events.
As stupid as the building is, almost all of the building materials came from Romania, which is nice. There is marble everywhere, and expensive wood. The hundreds of chandeliers are made of crystal. If they turned on all the lights at once it would cause a power outage in Bucharest. The carpets are so large that they were made in pieces and stitched together once they were inside. I took a tour. We walked two kilometres (not in a straight line), and up 300 stairs, and saw only 5% of the building. I still struggle to grasp just how large it is. It is as big under the ground as above it, with a nuclear bunker at the bottom.
Ceaușescu wanted a massive balcony on the front so that he could give speeches to massive crowds of people. He died before the balcony was completed. The first person to speak from the balcony was Michael Jackson. He said, “It’s really good to be here in Budapest“. Many other international musicians have made this mistake. The second time Iron Maiden played Bucharest the road from the airport was lined with billboards saying, “You are in Bucharest, not Budapest”. Some tourists book a ticket to the wrong city. I was here on purpose.
I also visited Ceaușescu’s house. This was his private residence for him, his wife, and his three children. It was not as large as I expected, but I think that if I had not just been in the massive Palace of the Parliament I would have been more impressed. It was a pretty darn nice house.
I saw some other things in Bucharest, but these stood out.
I’m walking down the street in an unrecognized country in Eastern Europe. It is night time.
Eight hours earlier I was boarding a minibus in Chisinau, capital of Moldova. Minibuses, or marshrutkas as they are called in Russian, are a very common form of transport in this area of the world. It’s like a large van, seating about 15-20 passengers. My minibus goes to Tiraspol, capital of the unrecognized republic of Transnistria (Pridnestrovie in Russian).
Moldova was a part of the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the USSR, the Moldovans, who are primarily of a similar ethnicity and culture to Romania, began to set up their own country. In the east of Moldova, across the Dniester river, the ethnically Russian population were not happy about this, so they formed their own country, Transnistria.
A short war later and they were still part of Moldova. Since then they have operated as their own independent country. Although Moldova considers Transnistria to be part of itself, they have essentially let the state be. Transnistria has its own government, currency, and even passports (although most citizens have Moldovan or Russian citizenship as well). No countries recognize Transnistria. Three other unrecognized countries recognize Transnistria. Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Artsakh. Despite its status, and unlike other unrecognized countries, Transnistria has been conflict free for years, making it an ideal destination to travel if you want to get off the map a bit.
As I waited for my minibus to leave the station, who should arrive but two other travellers who were at the same hostel as me in Chișinău, and would be staying at the same hostel in Tiraspol. Hearing us speaking English, a lady on the bus strikes up a conversation. Her English is excellent. She works in Chișinău and is returning home to Tiraspol for the weekend.
The bus sets out. I’ve mentioned already that the roads in Moldova are bumpy. Most of the journey is on a two-lane road. Traffic generally drives half in the lane and half in the shoulder, allowing cars to pass down the centre line regardless of oncoming traffic. Some of the journey is on a three-lane road where the centre lane is seemingly reserved for passing in both directions. It’s exhilarating.
We arrive at the border. Most of the passengers on the bus must be Transnistrian because they don’t have to do anything. Us foreigners get off the bus and head into the tiny immigration office. Our new Transnistrian friend comes along and speaks to the officer in Russian for us. There are no problems. It would have been fine without her help, but a few years ago we likely would have had to navigate bribes and poor communication. They don’t stamp your passport here. Instead, you get a slip of paper with your details to keep with you until you leave. We have arrived in Transnistria.
Immediately after crossing the border the roads improved. I guess Transnistria is putting the money they receive from Russia to good use, while in Moldova who knows where the tax dollars go. That being said, the capital Tiraspol is fairly similar to Chișinău. Slightly better sidewalks, and more statues of Lenin being the main differences. Oh, and it’s very quiet. There isn’t much to do here.
Upon arrival, we exchange our Moldovan Lei for Transnistrian Rubles. The currencies have very similar values, but the Ruble is worthless outside of Transnistria. You can only exchange it back to real money while in Transnistria. You can’t pay by card anywhere in the country.
Our hostel in Tiraspol, one of three available, is fantastic. There are three other travellers already there, and when we arrive the owner has just finished making borscht. Maybe it was special for Saturday night, free breakfast is also included.
Oh yeah! The cliff-hanger from the beginning of my story…
Bang! Bang! Bang!
We’re walking along the main street that night when we hear these sounds from the building next to us. We look over to see fireworks exploding above the roof of the building. Maybe November 2nd is a special day? I think someone was just setting them off for fun.
We’re heading to a pub, we think. There aren’t many options here. It’s called Bro Beer Burger. It’s pretty upbeat. There are many young people here. One group of young men (I later learned they were 16-year-olds), realize we are foreigners and immediately welcome us. They’re excited and amazed that anyone is visiting their country. A beer is $1. A boy who looks younger than 16 buys us shots of vodka.
I had a decent conversation with one of the guys who spoke fairly good English. He’s not so happy with the country since there’s little to do and few opportunities. His family wants to move to America. The others don’t know much English, but at every opportunity they say “thank you for coming here”, and “we love you”. We end up at a club. It was a half-decent club I think… I really wouldn’t know. I’m uncomfortable enough at a club in Canada, so a club in Transnistria was really not my scene. I left before the others.
The next day I walked around the city. There’s an old amusement park. It’s still operating. Looks like a good way to injure yourself. There are some old Soviet buildings. Two statues of Lenin. A couple other sights. Not too much. A meal with a glass of Transnistrian wine is $5. Tiraspol has the Kvint factory. They make what is supposedly the best brandy in Eastern Europe, as well as wine and vodka. A bottle of vodka is as little as $1. The tourist information centre, which doubles as the country’s only souvenir shop is closed while moving locations, so my only souvenirs from the country that doesn’t exist are some worthless money and my immigration paper, which is printed on receipt paper.
I have been to many places, and have many more to see, but Transnistria will always be one of the most unique.
And whither then? 