Our arrival in Sophia was relatively painless and we made our way through the streets to our Hostel (the fantastic Hostel Mostel). And we're still here.... all that is about to change though as we're getting our act together and will be getting the sleeper train to Bucharest tonight.
We do have an excuse for our delay in getting to Romania though. The Romanian Embassy here in Sophia take 5 working days to process your visa. It was annoying though when I got to the Embassy today and handed over my passport and $40US ($40US for a piece of paper!) and they then went through a pile of papers on the desk, grabbed my application which had no changes and then stuck the piece of paper in my passport.
Frustrating, but it has given us an opportunity to relax here and meet some fellow travellers as well as sampling the local beverages. Imported "brand" drinks cost about 6 times the cost of the local brew so we've tried the local rum (with the fantastic name of "Pom"), the local beers and of course the wine. Most of the wine was quite drinkable but when Banz and a couple of fellow travellers went for a late night run they bought back one bottle which cost a total of 0.95 lev (approx 34 of your English pence or 84 Aussie Cents). Unfortunately this wine had the colour and bouquet of red cordial with none of the sugary taste or post-drink hyperactivity. We stuck to the expensive 3 or 4 lev bottles after that!
So our three or so weeks in Bulgaria will finish tonight. We had originally planned to spend about a month in Romania after enjoying it so much on our first trip there back in 1998 (also our first trip together - ahhh!), but time is against us, so it will just be 3 or 4 days before heading up to Warsaw to meet up with Beatre, Gerry, Kuba and Victor and getting our flight back to the UK next Thursday, December 9th.
We've enjoyed our time here in Bulgaria and will definitely come back as there's a lot more here than we realised.
We still haven't got to grips with the yes/no headshaking thing, but we proudly translated a Bulgarian calendar with cyrillic into its Italian food equivalents the other night.
