It was a short night. Our taxi…let’s make that two taxis (6 people have a lot of luggage!) picked us up at 4am to take us to the Torino airport. It was raining and the forecast was predicting five straight days of rain in Strambino so it was a good time to leave. After a hop over to Munich we arrived in Sophia, Bulgaria around 12:30pm. Once you are in Europe, it doesn’t take very long to go from country to country.
Our river cruise is through AHI Travel which stands for Alumni Holiday International which we booked through Colorado State University Travel. My sisters and I had wanted to visit Bulgaria to see the country where are grandfather was from and this tour begins in Bulgaria. We get to spend two nights here. There are alumni groups from other universities on the tour as well.
AHI greeted us at the airport and bussed us to our hotel in downtown Sophia. Along the way one of the tour guides provided some information about Bulgaria and pointed out some places of interest. Antonio, Barb and Lori were picked up by a Seica sales rep that lives in Sophia and he gave them a little private tour along the route to the hotel.
After checking in, we found some lunch and while the others opted for naps, Don and I had a second wind and headed out to explore.
Near the hotel is a pretty outdoor area of shops where vehicles cannot enter. It reminded us of the 16th Street Mall but is much nicer. There were many restaurants. Most of them had a glassed in patio in front which I thought was cute. Later we found out that these are the smoking sections of the restaurants. There are a lot of people who smoke here.
We eventually found our way to a Starbucks so I could get a Bulgarian cup. It was a little off the beaten path which was nice so we could get a snapshot of life in Sophia. Unfortunately, we had to rely on Google maps and Translator to read signs since Bulgaria uses the Cyrillic alphabet so there are no context clues that we could use to try to read anything. Earlier the tour guide told us that they don’t use the Russian alphabet, the Russians stole their alphabet!
Our family group met up again that evening at the hotel bar. I decided that I needed to try Rakia, a traditional Bulgarian brandy. Yikes! It’s about 60% alcohol and tastes nasty! Well, I guess it would be more polite to say that I didn’t care for it but it could come in handy if you ran out of gas or needed to start a fire..
Tomorrow we will explore more of our homeland!
No comments:
Post a Comment