Post 49. Sofia, Bulgaria. Part 1
My wife Tricia was joining me in Sofia for the final four nights of my trip. She flew from Dublin with Ryanair, but her flight was not scheduled to arrive until after mìdnight. So I had a few hours to unpack and get settled in the apartment before going to meet her in the airport.
Tricia's flight was delayed until 1.50. Unfortunately the Sofia Metro shuts down at midnight, so I had to find a taxi to get to the airport to meet her and travel back again. There is no Bolt or Uber taxi service in Bulgaria, so my research told me to download the Yellow! app. The cost of the trip back to our apartment was only about €7.
The Accommodation
Our accommodation was in Alex and Tanya's eclectic and arty HomeExchange apartment in central Sofia, which we got for GuestPoints.
It was just 50m from the Opalchenska Metro station, with direct connections to both the central train station and the airport - it couldn't have been handier or more central!
For those who are not HE members, here is direct link to it on Booking
The apartment at 28A Opalchenska was in an old building, probably dating from the 1950s or 1960s. It was full of character and the owners’ personalities.
This was an unusual, artistic and quirky spot, with lots of vintage and restored old furniture, numerous small details and personal touches, such as a restored 1930s parquet floor, a high-end restored vintage record player and a great coffee machine. It was certainly a place that had soul and character to it.
Inside the apartment we found an interior design magazine, with a big feature on the apartment, and with the aid of Google Translate we discovered that the owners are both interior designers, so everything made sense.
The hosts gave us great advice and tips for visiting Sofia and several suggestions for the best places to try Bulgarian cuisine, such as "Kontesa”, which was in the park in front of the apartment building.
An added bonus for us on this occasion was that there was a 50 BGN cleaning fee (€25). As our flight to Dublin was very early on Wednesday morning, we didn't have to worry about cleaning everything as you normally have to do before departure from a HomeExchange property.
Travel and Tourism Information
I found the RJ On Tour blog very useful in researching and planning the Sofia trip. RJ stayed in Sofia for three weeks, so his blog contains far too many suggestions for our three full days in the city, but it was a great resource from which to pick and choose things to do:
Another brilliant blog post on Sofia is from the Flying Baguette blog, where blogger Jan Sevilla describes Sofia in a very positive light: https://flyingbaguette.com/sofia-a-city-reborn
The Go World Travel blog post on Sofia is also very comprehensive:
The Sofia Metro Map, available to download at
https://www.metrosofia.com/en/maps was a godsend.
Day 1
We had a good sleep in on Sunday morning and were awoken by church bells around 10am coming from the Church of St. Nicholas of Sofia, just 100m away. This is the view from the bedroom window:
We consulted the recommendations of our hosts and the online travel blogs, and decided on brunch in Izzy's Coffee and Brunch 1km away. We took the Metro and were there within 10 minutes.
On our way to have brunch, we passed the site of a completed archaeological dig at Serdika.
There were other digs ongoing in various parts of the city.
Izzy's had great food and great service, plus a wonderful atmosphere.
After brunch we had to find an ATM to withdraw some Bulgarian Leva as we were operating with cards / phones and needed some small notes for tips, etc.
Most of the trams passing by were sleek new modern ones, but then this lovely old tram painted in Bulgarian dark green came around the corner.
We made our way up to the top of the main shopping and eating pedestrianised street Vitosha Boulevard, named after Mount Vitosha in the background.
We hadn't realised that Halloween was such a big thing in Bulgaria. The supermarkets had loads of pumpkins and we passed this display, sponsored by a drinks company whose product is orange.
At the top of the Boulevard we came across a Sunday market in the grounds of the National Palace of Culture. There was an eclectic mix of stands including half a dozen craft brewers, but it was too early in the day to imbibe!
We took the Metro back to the apartment, marvelling that we would have unlimited travel on the Metro, all trams and all buses for the rest of the day for a maximum cost of €2. Below is our nearest stop, Opalchenska, with our apartment building in the background, all of 50m away.
The Metro is celebrating 25 years this year and it is superbly designed with lots of cool features.
It also looks very sleek and clean and is such a contrast to the dour and uninviting Bucharest one.
We had booked a guided walking tour simply called Communist Tour with a company called Free Sofia Tour. This was a bit of a misnomer as there was a standard charge of €18 per person. This was a little steep compared to the other tours I did over the past three years, especially for a country where the cost of living is so low.
The starting point of the tour was outside the Palace of Justice. Our guide Daniel, a history graduate and a Sofia local was excellent.
No question phased him. It may have been a little like ‘a dummies guide to communism’ but he was keen to impart his knowledge to those who were not that familiar with it.
The street we stopped on (above) had at least 10 high-end cars parked on it, including two Porsches, a Lamborghini and a Maserati. There was a Rolex store at one end of it, Prada in the middle and Ralph Lauren Polo at the other. This was not something I was expecting to see in Sofia!
Monument to the Soviet Army
The most interesting item on the tour and by far the most controversial was the Monument to the Soviet Army. This memorial complex was installed in 1954, a decade after the Soviet military entered Bulgaria during World War II.
The site has long been a rallying point for far-left activists and, in recent years, the memorial has also become a target for anti-Kremlin activism. Over the years the figures at the base have been painted over in the colours of Superman, Santa Claus, Ronald McDonald and the Ukrainian flag.
There is an interesting account of the history of the monument on the Radio Free Europe site with archive photos of all the different 'paint jobs" at https://www.rferl.org/a/sofia-soviet-monument-vandalism-ukraine-war-protest/32290150.html (recommended reading).
It is currently badly damaged and the whole site is cordoned off with metal barriers.
Below is the first building constructed after WWII in Sofia, unsurprising it was the HQ of the communist party!
A close up reveals a shadow and hint of where the hammer and sickle used to be.
There was a young Polish woman on the tour who was in Sofia for the first time, visiting where her father was born and raised. He was now deceased and she wanted to find out more about his past.
As part of the tour, Daniel brought us to the former HQ of the Bulgarian Secret Service, now housing the National Archives. Daniel told her that with her father's death certificate, she could enter here and see all the records that were stored about him. Understandably, she became quite emotional at this news. The ground floor of the bar housed an Irish bar !
The most hilarious moment of the tour was when a Japanese tourist got too close to one of the ceremonial guards outside the President's office, and he slammed the butt or heel of his gun loudly on the ground, causing the Japanese man to jump almost his own height. This prompted a policewoman, who was there to protect the ceremonial guards, to run over and admonish the mortified tourist loudly in Bulgarian. So many stereotypes played out in this one small incident!
Here the guards are carrying out the hourly 'changing of the guards ceremony'. The feathers in their hats are eagle feathers.
We also heard connections between other prominent buildings and communist history, such as the parliament building ...
Above is Sofia University ... while below is a beautiful Russian Orthodox Church named after St. Nicholas the Wonderworker.
We got a recommendation from Daniel for a restaurant serving traditional Bulgarian food that would not be thronged with tourists. We made our way there but there were no tables available - they had a lot of early bird bookings for dinner, as Robbie Williams was scheduled to play that evening in the National Stadium close by.
So we just wandered around for a bit and eventually came upon Divaka on 6th September St.
We both had salads to start, then Tricia had a schnitzel and I had chicken cooked in a spicy red pepper sauce.
We discovered a great organic Bulgarian red wine called Korten Natura, made from grape varieties we had never heard of before.
Comments
Post a Comment