We went to Bulgaria!
May. 21st, 2024 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allekhaAnd we had a great time! In fact, I kept thinking near the end that I should have booked one more day, and then remembering that I originally had. (Our first flight was very delayed due to mechanical issues, which broke what I thought was a fairly safely long connection, so we landed in Sofia in the middle of the night instead of the morning as planned.)
When I was looking things up online before we went, I sometimes came across people portraying Sofia as this kind of ugly city that they had to learn to appreciate, and I have to say, that was not at all our experience. We liked it from the start - lots of parks, tree-lined streets, very pedestrian friendly, not crowded, felt very livable to us as tourists. Much nicer than somewhere like NYC for sure. It does have some Soviet-era buildings, and it doesn't have a delineated historical downtown area with beautiful architecture like Riga or Tallinn or Montreal, but I wouldn't call it ugly. We would happily visit again.
We were at an event for the first couple of days, so not much time to go to museums or anything, but we did explore a little when we weren't there. Z was very impressed by the mountains, especially the sight of Vitosha - he kept saying that he should have brought his hiking boots, although it turned out we wouldn't have been up for hiking in any case.
Our first day, we got breakfast pastries filled with sirene (a Bulgarian cheese similar to feta) at a bakery with the good old 'point and say this, please in their language' technique, then ate at a local park. Sofia has a lot of nice little parks and a lot of people with dogs, which made Z happy, as did the very friendly outdoor cats. We also came across a lot of tiny bakeries (Europeans sure love their bread), including one that was a just a meter-wide storefront with a register squeezed in next to the dispaly, and those one-person tiny convenience stores that I remember seeing in the Baltics as well. We also saw actual street sweepers, as in people with brooms sweeping up dust and garbage, which isn't something I've seen before.
The bus took us right to our event (and a better view of Vitosha), although we did discover taking it that much of the public transit of Sofia, while having great coverage and convenience, is not always super tourist-friendly. Most of the busses we took during our stay did not have any visual or audio indication of the current or next stop, although a few did, and at one point we missed a bus because it came without a number displayed and we weren't sure if it was the one we wanted or not. The metro did announce each stop, but the carriages don't display a number or have color coding or anything, so you have to rely on the signs on the platform saying which line is leaving in fewer minutes to know what you're getting on.
Also, they do seem to check fares regularly, as it happened to us twice. In fact, it happened to me twice in less than a minute the first time - the first inspector hopped off, and the second one came on and immediately demanded my card again. Then she got distracted talking to someone while still holding it and I almost missed my stop because it was next 😅 Fortunately, Z wasn't with me that first time, because we ran into a ton of issues paying for him on the bus. It's supposed to take tap-to-pay up to maximum of 4 leva/day, and I had no issue with it, but it wouldn't accept his tap-to-pay card. He tried using both that and his other card in Google Pay, no dice. He tried using his Paypal in Google Pay, worked once and then it rejected the charge. He tried using my card in Google Pay, worked once and then not after, but it passed the fare inspection, so. If we'd stayed longer, we would have tried to get a city card or something.
We saw a lot of these around but were a little puzzled as to what they were - turns out they're juniper, which I don't think we have in our area.
We ducked out of our event early because the timezone change was catching up to us, and after misadventure on the way back (we overshot our stop due to sleepiness and then had the 'bus with no number' happen trying to go the other way), we stopped at a vegetarian restaurant called Veda House for dinner. It was the most expensive restaurant we ate at during our stay at just over 25 leva each both times, but the food was delicious both times, it's all vegetarian, and they have a huge tea selection. Z asked to go back our last night because he liked it so much.
Incidentally, I had no problems finding anything to eat in Sofia as a vegetarian like I've had in some countries, and I enjoyed the traditional vegetarian foods I tried.
A tiny church we found
After dinner, we went to a nearby market to get some food for breakfast the next day, and of course I had to try the yogurt right away. As promised, it was good! Not 'I need to replace my yogurt culture with this' (I make my own) good, but I'd happily eat a ton more of it.
Cute packaging, too
Our second day, we went straight to the event again, although Z ducked out early once more because he was still fighting sleep deprivation. I stayed longer and went to another small market on the return trip. The way I took went through a nice wide pedestrian avenue with lots of shops and restaurants, and it was hopping on a Saturday night. I picked up more snacks at the market, as well as some milk, which turned out to taste less sweet than American milk.
On our third day, we had the morning free. We went to a small museum called the Socialist Art Museum, which, as the name says, contains art from the socialist period of Bulgaria. They have a sculpture garden out front that we wandered around, although we didn't know who much of anyone was besides Lenin. They were all in this rough realistic style that I did like. Then we went in to get tickets and amused the woman at the desk by thanking her in Bulgarian.
The pictures I had seen online were of a painting gallery, so I was surprised to walk in and see one room with zero paintings. Instead, the current exhibit was on political cartoons. Everything had a translation in English, but while some of the cartoons were understandable, some of them didn't translate even with a translation... and the exhibit text acknowledges that many of the cartoons are not easily understood even by younger Bulgarians if they don't have the cultural context of the moment they were made. We really liked looking through them all and stayed for a while. My favorite was a drawing of a sad-looking cow-snail hybrid and a caption like 'we crossed a cow with a snail and made meat with no bones'. I don't know what the context for that one was, but the drawing was cute.
We tried to find lunch afterward, but it turns out that a lot of places are closed on Sunday, so we had a market lunch. This was when I discovered something I very much liked about Bulgaria: we were looking through the snack section, and I was poking through a shelf that wasn't chocolates, and I read Халва on a big bar and went... oh, halva! And I love halva, but where I live, I've only found it in small bars that are maybe 40g for like $2; this giant 250g bar was something like 3.5 leva. Into the basket it went! It was so good that it was hard not to eat way too much of it at once, and I ended up buying several bars later to take home.
After sitting outside for a while to eat lunch, we went to our event. We returned by foot this time and took a nice walk through Borisova Gradina, Boris's garden, which is a big park you can't miss on the map of Sofia. The southern part of it is the closest to actual woodland I've seen in a city, and it's quite dense with trees. There were dandelions and what looked to me like chamomile. The northern part of it is more like you'd expect from a city park - lots of flowering bushes, statues and water fountains, and big grassy areas. It seemed like half the city must have been visiting it that Sunday! People having picnics, families out with their kids - one little girl was determinedly spraying circles of water on the sidewalk for a reason that clearly was very logical to her - people renting pedal cars and racing their friends. It was just nice to be out in good weather in a good park.
A lovely mural we found on the way to the park
Flowers in the park (not sure what these are)
A beautiful wisteria pergola set up over a bench outside the park - it smelled amazing
Once back in the downtown area, we walked through what I think was a different wide avenue, where they had an art market set up. Some of the vendors were breaking down for the day by that point, but we looked through it before continuing. For dinner, we stopped at a Sri Lankan restaurant that must be part of a food tour, because we were asked if we were on it. The food was good, and I had a rose drink to go with it, because it's Bulgaria and roses are one of their National Things. Like how Canadian souvenir stores have maple syrup and Japanese ones have matcha everything, Bulgaria has rose-flavored and -scented everything. I like most flower-flavored things, and this was no exception :)
We had been hoping to take a side trip to Plivdov, but that night, looking at what we still wanted to see in Sofia and how Z's feet were starting to hurt already with the amount of walking we were doing, we sadly decided not to. Maybe next time! This turned out to be a good idea in the end, because Z struggled with our museum trips the last couple of days, and getting up early to go walk around another city all day probably wouldn't have been the greatest idea. He thinks he overdid it too fast going from a sedentary winter to our eclipse trip, where we hiked up a thousand feet, and then a lot of walking around being tourists.
On Monday, we started with a trip to the National Polytechnic Museum. We were hoping to see some Bulgarian computers - they were a major creator and supplier to the Soviet states for a while there - and we did see some, but not as many as we expected. They did have a lot of Lego art for some reason. Very good Lego art, too. This was the first but not the last museum where we got our tickets from a staff member who didn't speak English and later got chased down by one who did to ask what country we were visiting from. I assume they wanted to know for record keeping, but it did startle me the first time (thought maybe I was going to get yelled at for my camera).
Lego to space
Lego typewriter
This one was my favorite
We struggled to find lunch in the area, since the only open places that looked likely were bistros we were too shy to order from. Instead, we headed towards the National History Museum and had lunch near the bus stop instead. I got shopsaka (a kind of salad) and tarator (yogurt cucumber soup with dill), both of which I liked very much - I'd eat more salads if they were all full of sirene. It was a filling meal, and it only cost 25 leva for the both of us. Then we walked up toward the museum. It was a bit warm out, but I was surprised when I checked my phone and it was about 30C, since it didn't feel that warm, until I also saw that the humidity was 19%. Which also explain how dry my skin had been getting 😅
My shopsaka and tarator
The history museum was great, and as people who want to look at and read everything when we go to the museum, we spent hours there. As we would also seen the next day, they had arrows on the floor to guide you chronologically through it. And there were lots of old pots in the prehistory section! Actually, the prehistory and Roman-era sections were the most thorough in guiding you through what was happening, to the point where we wondered if they were the most recently redone. The medieval section, sadly, was under construction, so we missed out on the stories of St. Cyril and Methodius, who we saw lots of images of through the city. The Ottoman empire era section also had some narrative. But when we went upstairs to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were really just cases full of things and notes on those things, with no overarching guide to the era. Just disconnected bits of 'and then Bulgaria got a monarchy' and 'Bulgaria managed to keep its Jews alive during WWII' and such. And then nothing post-WWII at all.
The last big section was on some traditional celebrations for various holidays, at least as celebrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and lots of beautiful traditional clothing. That is, they had lots of pretty dresses and then like two men's sets, lol, like most of these exhibitions tend to be. I spent a while staring at the embroidery and fabric while Z got a little rest.
After picking up some souvenir magnets at the museum shop and cooing over the adorable kitty sitting outside next to a line of police cars (wonder what they were there for), we bought a few things at a nearby supermarket. I was nervous about buying from the bakery section, because I have made mistakes buying items at supermarket bakeries before in Europe, but it turns out the system is just 'put goods in transparent bag, take to register with everything else'. Then we returned to the city center and dipped into a vegan place called Edgy Veggy for dinner. The food was incredibly good, and we both had leftovers to take back.
Z's feet were hurting a lot on our last day, but he soldiered through. First, we walked to the National Archaeological Museum. As with the history museum, the section covering the oldest history had the most detail and seemed like it was the most up-to-date, while the newer ones were more sparse on explanation. They had a whole bunch of religious frescoes around the second floor with lots of signs everywhere telling you not to get withing 70cm because they were alarmed, and someone did accidentally set it off while we were there. I was a bit less enchanted with the Roman-era statuary on the first floor, but they had some interesting weird spoons.
I loved this vaguely grumpy-looking sunflower person.
Once we were done there, we spent a while outside. The archaeological museum is in a historical-ish area of Sofia where you have the National Art Gallery, the Natural History Museum, some consulates, etc in nicer buildings. We walked around a bit, went through the Prince's Garden which had a ton of martenitsi (red and white spring bracelets) hanging in the trees, and also stopped to buy some souvenirs for our friends and family. Mostly rose-themed, naturally, but we also got one lavender-themed thing (Bulgaria is the world's largest exporter).
Continuing our souvenir hunting, we started heading towards a ceramic shop, and we stumbled on The One Church, the cathedral of Alexandr Nevsky, which is in, like, the first ten pictures of Sofia you'll see if you Google it. And it really is a pretty good-looking church in person. We stopped to admire it for a minute before going on.
The Church
St George was fighting a dragon close to it
Another lovely mural we found nearby
I got a couple of postcard prints and a couple of ceramic souvenirs, one modern and the others medieval-style (but a recreation that, I was assured, is made with modern lead-free glaze). The latter was for my pottery-loving mom, though she still hasn't received it. I was not really hungry yet, but at this point Z really needed to sit down, and he hadn't had as much breakfast as me, so we stopped at Ninja Bowl, an Asian fusion restaurant. I don't know if it was also on that food tour we missed out on, but it was listed in the Free Sofia Tour pamphlet at the place we were staying at. Z had a real meal and I had a delicious snack. We did have one odd little experience there when a woman came in and tried to very insistently sell us a jar of flowers, even when we told her no in Bulgarian several times. She finally gave up on us and started to approach another table before one of the proprietors went over and asked her to leave.
Sheep cup!
Medieval-style bowl
Afterward, we walked back toward the National Art Gallery while looking at more buildings. I had wanted to go to the Museum of Illusions, but Z was only up for one more museum at this point, and he wanted to go to the Natural History Museum - we do both like a good natural history museum - so we went there. I figured I could go to the Museum of Illusions after by myself, but Z wanted me to walk back with him so he wouldn't get lost, and I didn't really feel like walking back and forth again even though it wasn't that far... but I ended up not feeling too bad about missing it when I checked their ticket prices back at the apartment and saw it was more than twice as expensive as any other museum we went to during the trip for a space smaller than the Socialist Art Museum's. Would probably still go if we are in Sofia again, though.
And anyway, we had a great time at the Natural History Museum! They have a huge collection of stuffed birds, and while most of them are just perching there, some of them have been posed in very nice, lifelike ways, like preening or eating prey. Even more of the mammals were mounted like that, but it was the birds that really caught our attention. I think we spent an hour just looking through all of them. There were also a lot of art students there drawing from the animals.
Kingfisher slurping up a slug - this was my absolute favorite of the bird cases
We rested for a bit in the small park by the National Art Gallery, listening to some cool kids listening to early 00s English pop music, then went back. On the way, we passed by the national theater, which is a very striking red and white building. Our last meal out was at Veda House again, by Z's request. Then we packed up, left the next morning, and had a rather smoother trip home.
And that was our trip! There was only one thing I would say I really disliked about Sofia, which is that it is completely impossible to avoid cigarette smoke. The smoking rate is very high, and people smoke almost everywhere. It's banned indoors in restaurants, but we avoided eating at a few places because the reviews said that they still allowed it. Even when people didn't smoke inside, they would smoke just outside the door and the smoke would blow inside. I'm not allergic or sensitive, thankfully, but it wasn't pleasant having to sit or walk through it half a dozen times a day. (I also missed my rainbow bracelet the entire time, since I took it off for the trip to be on the safe side, though I didn't think I would have been in any danger or anything. But some of the things I read made me pretty sad for the LGBTQ locals.)
Last few other notes that didn't fit in anywhere:
So - good time overall. If we went back, we would definitely make it out to Plovdiv or some of the nature outside of Sofia.
Bonus mini-reviews for the two movies I watched on the plane home:
The first was If Only I Could Hibernate, a Mongolian film about a prideful teenage boy trying to care for himself and two of his siblings when their mom leaves them in the city over the winter and gradually becoming more desperate but unwilling to let on to that. I enjoyed it, especially seeing a culture I don't know much about and the contrast of traditions and modern (and more Western in some ways) city living, but I thought it was just okay as a film. The story just ends, and there's a bit that - and this is probably some amount of cultural difference speaking - fell extremely flat for me. One of the neighbors helping the kids exhorts him to love his mom, and soon after, he somewhat comes around on her. The same mom who leaves a teenager and two elementary schoolers to live alone on child welfare during winter while promising to send money that never reaches them because of some excuse or another, even when their electricity gets shut off due to non-payment.
The other was Tsugaru Lacquer Girl, which is not earth-shatteringly original in its central arc (girl wants to do the traditional thing as dad's heir, dad says no because she's a girl [even though she is already spending hours a day doing the thing], in the end dad accepts and supports her being good at the thing) but which I very much enjoyed in execution. There's lots of loving shots of lacquer work with great ASMR. A nice bonus for me was that her brother is gay, and the film touches on how even with acceptance (which they don't have at first) and the baby steps taking place to recognize same-sex couples in their city, Japan is just not a place where he and his fiance feel like they can live at the moment. I also really liked how the main actress played her character's body language and how she expresses her growing confidence. There's a scene that was almost disturbing to me when her brother brings his boyfriend home for the first time, and the main character acts more like a shy waitress than his sister, bringing drinks for the others with her eyes down and hiding in the corner with her tray, but in a similar scene at the end of the film, she suddenly sits at the table and asks for a drink herself.
When I was looking things up online before we went, I sometimes came across people portraying Sofia as this kind of ugly city that they had to learn to appreciate, and I have to say, that was not at all our experience. We liked it from the start - lots of parks, tree-lined streets, very pedestrian friendly, not crowded, felt very livable to us as tourists. Much nicer than somewhere like NYC for sure. It does have some Soviet-era buildings, and it doesn't have a delineated historical downtown area with beautiful architecture like Riga or Tallinn or Montreal, but I wouldn't call it ugly. We would happily visit again.
We were at an event for the first couple of days, so not much time to go to museums or anything, but we did explore a little when we weren't there. Z was very impressed by the mountains, especially the sight of Vitosha - he kept saying that he should have brought his hiking boots, although it turned out we wouldn't have been up for hiking in any case.
Our first day, we got breakfast pastries filled with sirene (a Bulgarian cheese similar to feta) at a bakery with the good old 'point and say this, please in their language' technique, then ate at a local park. Sofia has a lot of nice little parks and a lot of people with dogs, which made Z happy, as did the very friendly outdoor cats. We also came across a lot of tiny bakeries (Europeans sure love their bread), including one that was a just a meter-wide storefront with a register squeezed in next to the dispaly, and those one-person tiny convenience stores that I remember seeing in the Baltics as well. We also saw actual street sweepers, as in people with brooms sweeping up dust and garbage, which isn't something I've seen before.
The bus took us right to our event (and a better view of Vitosha), although we did discover taking it that much of the public transit of Sofia, while having great coverage and convenience, is not always super tourist-friendly. Most of the busses we took during our stay did not have any visual or audio indication of the current or next stop, although a few did, and at one point we missed a bus because it came without a number displayed and we weren't sure if it was the one we wanted or not. The metro did announce each stop, but the carriages don't display a number or have color coding or anything, so you have to rely on the signs on the platform saying which line is leaving in fewer minutes to know what you're getting on.
Also, they do seem to check fares regularly, as it happened to us twice. In fact, it happened to me twice in less than a minute the first time - the first inspector hopped off, and the second one came on and immediately demanded my card again. Then she got distracted talking to someone while still holding it and I almost missed my stop because it was next 😅 Fortunately, Z wasn't with me that first time, because we ran into a ton of issues paying for him on the bus. It's supposed to take tap-to-pay up to maximum of 4 leva/day, and I had no issue with it, but it wouldn't accept his tap-to-pay card. He tried using both that and his other card in Google Pay, no dice. He tried using his Paypal in Google Pay, worked once and then it rejected the charge. He tried using my card in Google Pay, worked once and then not after, but it passed the fare inspection, so. If we'd stayed longer, we would have tried to get a city card or something.
We saw a lot of these around but were a little puzzled as to what they were - turns out they're juniper, which I don't think we have in our area.
We ducked out of our event early because the timezone change was catching up to us, and after misadventure on the way back (we overshot our stop due to sleepiness and then had the 'bus with no number' happen trying to go the other way), we stopped at a vegetarian restaurant called Veda House for dinner. It was the most expensive restaurant we ate at during our stay at just over 25 leva each both times, but the food was delicious both times, it's all vegetarian, and they have a huge tea selection. Z asked to go back our last night because he liked it so much.
Incidentally, I had no problems finding anything to eat in Sofia as a vegetarian like I've had in some countries, and I enjoyed the traditional vegetarian foods I tried.
A tiny church we found
After dinner, we went to a nearby market to get some food for breakfast the next day, and of course I had to try the yogurt right away. As promised, it was good! Not 'I need to replace my yogurt culture with this' (I make my own) good, but I'd happily eat a ton more of it.
Cute packaging, too
Our second day, we went straight to the event again, although Z ducked out early once more because he was still fighting sleep deprivation. I stayed longer and went to another small market on the return trip. The way I took went through a nice wide pedestrian avenue with lots of shops and restaurants, and it was hopping on a Saturday night. I picked up more snacks at the market, as well as some milk, which turned out to taste less sweet than American milk.
On our third day, we had the morning free. We went to a small museum called the Socialist Art Museum, which, as the name says, contains art from the socialist period of Bulgaria. They have a sculpture garden out front that we wandered around, although we didn't know who much of anyone was besides Lenin. They were all in this rough realistic style that I did like. Then we went in to get tickets and amused the woman at the desk by thanking her in Bulgarian.
The pictures I had seen online were of a painting gallery, so I was surprised to walk in and see one room with zero paintings. Instead, the current exhibit was on political cartoons. Everything had a translation in English, but while some of the cartoons were understandable, some of them didn't translate even with a translation... and the exhibit text acknowledges that many of the cartoons are not easily understood even by younger Bulgarians if they don't have the cultural context of the moment they were made. We really liked looking through them all and stayed for a while. My favorite was a drawing of a sad-looking cow-snail hybrid and a caption like 'we crossed a cow with a snail and made meat with no bones'. I don't know what the context for that one was, but the drawing was cute.
We tried to find lunch afterward, but it turns out that a lot of places are closed on Sunday, so we had a market lunch. This was when I discovered something I very much liked about Bulgaria: we were looking through the snack section, and I was poking through a shelf that wasn't chocolates, and I read Халва on a big bar and went... oh, halva! And I love halva, but where I live, I've only found it in small bars that are maybe 40g for like $2; this giant 250g bar was something like 3.5 leva. Into the basket it went! It was so good that it was hard not to eat way too much of it at once, and I ended up buying several bars later to take home.
After sitting outside for a while to eat lunch, we went to our event. We returned by foot this time and took a nice walk through Borisova Gradina, Boris's garden, which is a big park you can't miss on the map of Sofia. The southern part of it is the closest to actual woodland I've seen in a city, and it's quite dense with trees. There were dandelions and what looked to me like chamomile. The northern part of it is more like you'd expect from a city park - lots of flowering bushes, statues and water fountains, and big grassy areas. It seemed like half the city must have been visiting it that Sunday! People having picnics, families out with their kids - one little girl was determinedly spraying circles of water on the sidewalk for a reason that clearly was very logical to her - people renting pedal cars and racing their friends. It was just nice to be out in good weather in a good park.
A lovely mural we found on the way to the park
Flowers in the park (not sure what these are)
A beautiful wisteria pergola set up over a bench outside the park - it smelled amazing
Once back in the downtown area, we walked through what I think was a different wide avenue, where they had an art market set up. Some of the vendors were breaking down for the day by that point, but we looked through it before continuing. For dinner, we stopped at a Sri Lankan restaurant that must be part of a food tour, because we were asked if we were on it. The food was good, and I had a rose drink to go with it, because it's Bulgaria and roses are one of their National Things. Like how Canadian souvenir stores have maple syrup and Japanese ones have matcha everything, Bulgaria has rose-flavored and -scented everything. I like most flower-flavored things, and this was no exception :)
We had been hoping to take a side trip to Plivdov, but that night, looking at what we still wanted to see in Sofia and how Z's feet were starting to hurt already with the amount of walking we were doing, we sadly decided not to. Maybe next time! This turned out to be a good idea in the end, because Z struggled with our museum trips the last couple of days, and getting up early to go walk around another city all day probably wouldn't have been the greatest idea. He thinks he overdid it too fast going from a sedentary winter to our eclipse trip, where we hiked up a thousand feet, and then a lot of walking around being tourists.
On Monday, we started with a trip to the National Polytechnic Museum. We were hoping to see some Bulgarian computers - they were a major creator and supplier to the Soviet states for a while there - and we did see some, but not as many as we expected. They did have a lot of Lego art for some reason. Very good Lego art, too. This was the first but not the last museum where we got our tickets from a staff member who didn't speak English and later got chased down by one who did to ask what country we were visiting from. I assume they wanted to know for record keeping, but it did startle me the first time (thought maybe I was going to get yelled at for my camera).
Lego to space
Lego typewriter
This one was my favorite
We struggled to find lunch in the area, since the only open places that looked likely were bistros we were too shy to order from. Instead, we headed towards the National History Museum and had lunch near the bus stop instead. I got shopsaka (a kind of salad) and tarator (yogurt cucumber soup with dill), both of which I liked very much - I'd eat more salads if they were all full of sirene. It was a filling meal, and it only cost 25 leva for the both of us. Then we walked up toward the museum. It was a bit warm out, but I was surprised when I checked my phone and it was about 30C, since it didn't feel that warm, until I also saw that the humidity was 19%. Which also explain how dry my skin had been getting 😅
My shopsaka and tarator
The history museum was great, and as people who want to look at and read everything when we go to the museum, we spent hours there. As we would also seen the next day, they had arrows on the floor to guide you chronologically through it. And there were lots of old pots in the prehistory section! Actually, the prehistory and Roman-era sections were the most thorough in guiding you through what was happening, to the point where we wondered if they were the most recently redone. The medieval section, sadly, was under construction, so we missed out on the stories of St. Cyril and Methodius, who we saw lots of images of through the city. The Ottoman empire era section also had some narrative. But when we went upstairs to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were really just cases full of things and notes on those things, with no overarching guide to the era. Just disconnected bits of 'and then Bulgaria got a monarchy' and 'Bulgaria managed to keep its Jews alive during WWII' and such. And then nothing post-WWII at all.
The last big section was on some traditional celebrations for various holidays, at least as celebrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and lots of beautiful traditional clothing. That is, they had lots of pretty dresses and then like two men's sets, lol, like most of these exhibitions tend to be. I spent a while staring at the embroidery and fabric while Z got a little rest.
After picking up some souvenir magnets at the museum shop and cooing over the adorable kitty sitting outside next to a line of police cars (wonder what they were there for), we bought a few things at a nearby supermarket. I was nervous about buying from the bakery section, because I have made mistakes buying items at supermarket bakeries before in Europe, but it turns out the system is just 'put goods in transparent bag, take to register with everything else'. Then we returned to the city center and dipped into a vegan place called Edgy Veggy for dinner. The food was incredibly good, and we both had leftovers to take back.
Z's feet were hurting a lot on our last day, but he soldiered through. First, we walked to the National Archaeological Museum. As with the history museum, the section covering the oldest history had the most detail and seemed like it was the most up-to-date, while the newer ones were more sparse on explanation. They had a whole bunch of religious frescoes around the second floor with lots of signs everywhere telling you not to get withing 70cm because they were alarmed, and someone did accidentally set it off while we were there. I was a bit less enchanted with the Roman-era statuary on the first floor, but they had some interesting weird spoons.
I loved this vaguely grumpy-looking sunflower person.
Once we were done there, we spent a while outside. The archaeological museum is in a historical-ish area of Sofia where you have the National Art Gallery, the Natural History Museum, some consulates, etc in nicer buildings. We walked around a bit, went through the Prince's Garden which had a ton of martenitsi (red and white spring bracelets) hanging in the trees, and also stopped to buy some souvenirs for our friends and family. Mostly rose-themed, naturally, but we also got one lavender-themed thing (Bulgaria is the world's largest exporter).
Continuing our souvenir hunting, we started heading towards a ceramic shop, and we stumbled on The One Church, the cathedral of Alexandr Nevsky, which is in, like, the first ten pictures of Sofia you'll see if you Google it. And it really is a pretty good-looking church in person. We stopped to admire it for a minute before going on.
The Church
St George was fighting a dragon close to it
Another lovely mural we found nearby
I got a couple of postcard prints and a couple of ceramic souvenirs, one modern and the others medieval-style (but a recreation that, I was assured, is made with modern lead-free glaze). The latter was for my pottery-loving mom, though she still hasn't received it. I was not really hungry yet, but at this point Z really needed to sit down, and he hadn't had as much breakfast as me, so we stopped at Ninja Bowl, an Asian fusion restaurant. I don't know if it was also on that food tour we missed out on, but it was listed in the Free Sofia Tour pamphlet at the place we were staying at. Z had a real meal and I had a delicious snack. We did have one odd little experience there when a woman came in and tried to very insistently sell us a jar of flowers, even when we told her no in Bulgarian several times. She finally gave up on us and started to approach another table before one of the proprietors went over and asked her to leave.
Sheep cup!
Medieval-style bowl
Afterward, we walked back toward the National Art Gallery while looking at more buildings. I had wanted to go to the Museum of Illusions, but Z was only up for one more museum at this point, and he wanted to go to the Natural History Museum - we do both like a good natural history museum - so we went there. I figured I could go to the Museum of Illusions after by myself, but Z wanted me to walk back with him so he wouldn't get lost, and I didn't really feel like walking back and forth again even though it wasn't that far... but I ended up not feeling too bad about missing it when I checked their ticket prices back at the apartment and saw it was more than twice as expensive as any other museum we went to during the trip for a space smaller than the Socialist Art Museum's. Would probably still go if we are in Sofia again, though.
And anyway, we had a great time at the Natural History Museum! They have a huge collection of stuffed birds, and while most of them are just perching there, some of them have been posed in very nice, lifelike ways, like preening or eating prey. Even more of the mammals were mounted like that, but it was the birds that really caught our attention. I think we spent an hour just looking through all of them. There were also a lot of art students there drawing from the animals.
Kingfisher slurping up a slug - this was my absolute favorite of the bird cases
We rested for a bit in the small park by the National Art Gallery, listening to some cool kids listening to early 00s English pop music, then went back. On the way, we passed by the national theater, which is a very striking red and white building. Our last meal out was at Veda House again, by Z's request. Then we packed up, left the next morning, and had a rather smoother trip home.
And that was our trip! There was only one thing I would say I really disliked about Sofia, which is that it is completely impossible to avoid cigarette smoke. The smoking rate is very high, and people smoke almost everywhere. It's banned indoors in restaurants, but we avoided eating at a few places because the reviews said that they still allowed it. Even when people didn't smoke inside, they would smoke just outside the door and the smoke would blow inside. I'm not allergic or sensitive, thankfully, but it wasn't pleasant having to sit or walk through it half a dozen times a day. (I also missed my rainbow bracelet the entire time, since I took it off for the trip to be on the safe side, though I didn't think I would have been in any danger or anything. But some of the things I read made me pretty sad for the LGBTQ locals.)
Last few other notes that didn't fit in anywhere:
- You could, honestly, get by in Sofia without any knowledge of Bulgarian or even Cyrillic if you really wanted to, and people often responded in English when I bought things with my limited 'voda i Coca-Cola molya' [water and a Coca-Cola, please]-level Bulgarian. However, it was definitely useful to know those few words for interacting with older people who didn't know English, even if we still had to mostly communicate with gestures in those cases. Even imperfect knowledge of Cyrllic was useful for navigating and buying things without English/Roman-letter labeling at stores. And without knowing it, you wouldn't know which were the giant bars of halva to take home with you!
- Bulgarians generally nod for no and shake their head for yes. However, we found it impossible to rewire our decades-old nodding and head shaking instincts for a short vacation. We remembered that it was reversed before we made the gesture precisely once. It did cause a little confusion a couple of times, but nothing major.
- For whatever reason, there was a lot of graffiti in Sofia. Apparently there's even a walking tour about it.
- Flying out on an American airline: "You're a vegetarian, so that must mean you want a healthy dessert with your meal, right?" (Read 'healthy' as 'the packaging is almost entirely about what isn't in it'. Whatever sweeteners were in it tasted strange.) Flying in on a European airline: delicious kheer for dessert.
Some cost info in case anyone was curious about how much a trip there might cost
I took out 400 leva in cash our first day. This covered all meals, museum tickets, and small souvenirs (postcards, magnets, sweets), except one meal and one museum, for five days for two people. That was with eating out once or twice a day. We did a registered apartment rental with a kitchen and washing machine in downtown Sofia for 100 leva/night.So - good time overall. If we went back, we would definitely make it out to Plovdiv or some of the nature outside of Sofia.
Bonus mini-reviews for the two movies I watched on the plane home:
The first was If Only I Could Hibernate, a Mongolian film about a prideful teenage boy trying to care for himself and two of his siblings when their mom leaves them in the city over the winter and gradually becoming more desperate but unwilling to let on to that. I enjoyed it, especially seeing a culture I don't know much about and the contrast of traditions and modern (and more Western in some ways) city living, but I thought it was just okay as a film. The story just ends, and there's a bit that - and this is probably some amount of cultural difference speaking - fell extremely flat for me. One of the neighbors helping the kids exhorts him to love his mom, and soon after, he somewhat comes around on her. The same mom who leaves a teenager and two elementary schoolers to live alone on child welfare during winter while promising to send money that never reaches them because of some excuse or another, even when their electricity gets shut off due to non-payment.
The other was Tsugaru Lacquer Girl, which is not earth-shatteringly original in its central arc (girl wants to do the traditional thing as dad's heir, dad says no because she's a girl [even though she is already spending hours a day doing the thing], in the end dad accepts and supports her being good at the thing) but which I very much enjoyed in execution. There's lots of loving shots of lacquer work with great ASMR. A nice bonus for me was that her brother is gay, and the film touches on how even with acceptance (which they don't have at first) and the baby steps taking place to recognize same-sex couples in their city, Japan is just not a place where he and his fiance feel like they can live at the moment. I also really liked how the main actress played her character's body language and how she expresses her growing confidence. There's a scene that was almost disturbing to me when her brother brings his boyfriend home for the first time, and the main character acts more like a shy waitress than his sister, bringing drinks for the others with her eyes down and hiding in the corner with her tray, but in a similar scene at the end of the film, she suddenly sits at the table and asks for a drink herself.
