Spring Break

I leave for spring break tomorrow! And this is what it looks like outside...

Gross.

But I'm so excited! Tomorrow morning I have to take an early morning bus from Blago to Sofia and then our flight goes from Sofia to Dortmund (Germany). We have to spend the rest of Wednesday in Dortmund,  but it's worth it because our Thursday morning flight from Dortmund to Zagreb only cost 25 euro. Plus it means that we'll get to Zagreb on Thursday afternoon, which gives us a head start on the break. We're probably going to need it because right now the tentative plan is to go from Zagreb to Pula, then Zadar/Plitvice Lakes, Split, and Dubrovnik, with a possible island day trip thrown in there near the end. It's going to be a brisk pace, but we'll get to see a lot. Plus, my aunt put me in email contact with some distant relatives (think great-grandmother's sister's grandchildren) who live by Zagreb who have invited me to meet them.

Croatia

The last week or so has been pretty jam-packed as well. I had scary history midterm last Wednesday (still haven't gotten the grade yet, so we'll see how that went) and my philosophy midterm was yesterday. Over the weekend, I went on a mini-trip to Sofia. The university had organized a trip to the opera on Saturday where you could buy a ticket here and AUBG got a bus to Sofia. Also, for my Falsifications in History class, our teacher organized a field trip for Sunday to a medieval church and a history museum in Sofia. So my friends and I just decided to stay overnight in Sofia instead of going back and forth.

On Saturday the opera bus left here at 11 in the morning, and we got caught in a little traffic jam and didn't get to Sofia until a little after 1. My friends and I set out on foot to try to find our hostel, which was a little difficult because it was raining and nasty out. We finally made it there and dropped our stuff off. I changed into my opera clothes (good thing I brought exactly one dress skirt here with me) and we decided to go get something to eat because we were all pretty hungry. Since Sofia's a pretty big city, they actually have a number of ethnic restaurants that you might not be able to find in Blagoevgrad (indian, chinese, mexican, etc.) We were all craving something a little different (and spicy! Spicy is hard to find in the Balkans), so we decided to try out a nearby chinese restaurant. The portions were huge (still haven't quite figured out to decipher grams), but the food was really good. I had some spicy soup and a chicken stir fry dish that was wonderful. We took our time and had a leisurely meal, then went to a Starbucks (!) we had passed earlier on our walk. We mainly just wanted a warm place to sit down and plan our next move, but it was entertaining to go to a Starbucks here. It was virtually identical to how they are in the U.S.

Aleksander Nevski Church in Sofia

We decided to split up because some of the people wanted to go to a specific outdoor store to buy backpacks before spring break. The rest of us decided against sightseeing, just because it was so cold and rainy. Even though we didn't have that long in the city, it was just too miserable to be outside. We went to a mall a little bit outside the center of the city that Heather had read about. We took a cab to get there for about 4 leva (remember this...foreshadowing). The shopping mall was actually really nice. I bought a cute shirt for only 6 leva (gotta love a good sale) and some earrings. We didn't have much time there, though, before we had to leave for the opera. Sofia shopping, from my limited experience of it, seems to have much more variety than Blagoevgrad. Some of the stores were much pricier, but you could find some good deals.

Speaking of pricy, this next part is the worst experience I've had in Bulgaria, so I'll try to keep it short...We had to take taxis to get from the mall to the opera house and there were five of us, so we decided to split up. Max, Kyle, and Heather went in the first cab and Chelsea and I got in the second. We checked the rate when we got in, and it said 59 stotinki per kilometer (stotinki to a lev are like cents to a dollar). That's a normal rate, so we got in, but the meter started going up really really fast. I tried to ask the driver how much it cost per kilometer (which, btw, is the extent of my useful Bulgarian for this situation), but he just angrily pointed at the sign on the front. I asked again how much it cost and he grunted something about the meter and pointed at it. At this point, I was starting to get very frustrated, because I knew that we were getting ripped off, but there was nothing I could do (correction: nothing I could say) because I don't speak enough Bulgarian. We called Kyle in the other taxi and he said that their meter was at 20 leva (at this point, ours was around 21 leva). So we thought maybe that it was some sort of nighttime rate. But by the time we got to the opera house, our meter said 46 leva. Now, to take a taxi from Sofia to Blagoevgrad is between 80 and 120 leva, and that's for an hour and a half long drive. There's no way that it should have been that much, but we didn't know what else to do so we just paid it. We found out that Kyle's cab only paid 33 leva (and they were ripped off too). I think that it should have been around 5 leva and that he switched it so the meter was going up by a lev instead of a stotinki...so like going up a dollar at a time instead of a cent. The money part sucks, but the worst part of all of it was the frustration of feeling like I had no control in the situation. Ugh.

The Sofia Opera

The opera was nice, though. The building was beautiful, and we were in the top balcony. We saw Rigoletto, and the music was beautiful. I had absolutely no clue what was going on in the story, though, because the singing was in Italian and there were Bulgarian captions on a screen above the stage. At the intermission, one of our Bulgarian friends gave us a synopsis of what had happened so far, and it was hard to believe that she was watching the same opera as we were...I looked up the plot on Wikipedia afterwards and it made much more sense. Even missing the story, though, it was cool to hear the music and see the costumes.

After the opera, we walked to our hostel and changed clothes. There was actually a bar in the basement of our hostel and we had received a voucher for a free drink when we got there, so we decided to check it out. It turned out to be a legitimate bar, with tons of people who weren't staying in the hostel. It was an interesting crowd (lots of hippies and dreadlocks) but we met some cool people. We befriended a Fulbright scholar teaching english in Serbia, which is neat because it's something I might be interested in trying to do. Also, it was nice to not have to walk very far to get back (as in, up the stairs).

Boyana Church (picture stolen from Abby)

We got up around ten the next morning and checked out of the hostel. We grabbed something to eat, then took a taxi to the National History Museum (just outside of the city) where we were meeting our history professor and classmates. From there, we first went to the Boyana Church, a medieval church nearby. It had some of the most beautiful paintings I'd ever seen, frescos from the 11th-13th centuries. It was really small and only 8 people could go in at a time, but it was worth the wait. Once all of the groups had gone through, we went back to the museum.

Part of the National History Museum in Sofia

Our professor led us around the museum which was in a really neat building that used to be the home of a high-ranking Communist leader. It went all the way from prehistoric times to the 20th century, and was pretty interesting. The last museum we went to for that class was the Blagoevgrad city museum, which had no heat and was not that impressive. This one was much cooler. It had a lot of Hellenic and Thracian  artifacts that were beautiful. After the museum, we took the bus our teacher had arranged back to Blagoevgrad. We got back here around 6:30 pm and then I had to get down to business to get ready for my midterms/papers.


Now I just have one more class today and then I leave tomorrow morning for Croatia! I can't wait. But I really need to pack, so I should probably stop procrastinating.