Sofia, Bulgaria

After the longest continuous stint in Ireland of six weeks (not counting my return home in February) we finally embarked on our long awaited trip to Sofia, Bulgaria, including a day and a half in Plovdiv and a day trip to the Rila mountains, south of Sofia. This post will highlight the highlights of Sofia.

We arrived in Sofia after a three hour flight from Dublin on Saturday night, and grabbed a taxi for 10 leva (5 euro) into the city to the Sofia Guesthouse, situated in a great location near countless bars and restaurants. After dropping our stuff off, we had dinner at Divaka, an amazingly cheap and quality restaurant. We were definitely the only english speakers there to experience a great meal for only €30, which included 4 courses, wine, and rakiya, a traditional (and strong) appertif traditionally served with salad (we later learned it was historically served with salad to kill the germs hiding in the lettuce).

The next morning we woke up to an amazing sunshine that normally escapes us in both Ireland and during our eastern europe trips, but we were blessed with sunshine and took a couple hours before Rila monestary to buy some gum at this little store. As you can see, there are many stores you literally have to crouch to make your purchases, don't think it would fly in the US due to handicap inaccessbility...
Note that when traveling to Bulgaria, it might be a good idea to write down the cyrillic name of the restaurants and bars you want to check out, or at least have a guide book with both the roman and cyrillic names in them, as all the names are in cyrillic in Sofia (naturally). Our guidebook had only the roman names, but we lucklily had the address numbers of the places and a pair of good navigators.

On a factual note, Sofia is the highest elevated capital in all of europe as it is sitting in a large mountain valley, its even higher than Bern!

There is also a riff between the gov't and the rubbage collectors, so we ran into a few of these.
After checking out the piles of garbage we saw the two cool sights of Sofia (there may be a couple more, but you are stretching to say so...the best thing about Sofia are its people and its food), Alexander Nesky church, and the Russian Orthadox church.

After our trip to Rila, we went to the Butcher's Cafe, a little spot that looks like a shotty meat counter from the outside, very simplistic, but once you get past the simplified meat counter, you go to the back and find one of the most charming little restaurants around. The owner is very friendly and just lists off the menu for you (thankfully his english was good enough to make it work). We had a nice charcuterie board, followed by a spanish egg and potato dish and then a peruvian meat and rice dish. This was all washed down with a nice Bulgarian wine (which is amazing by the way and very affordable of course). Desert completed a great meal, which we walked off by checking out the cathedral at night;

then going to a great bar called apartment, in which you enter an old loft, make your way to the fridge in the kitchen and help yourself to some beer, homemade wine or rakiya and a selection of finger food of your liking. It was probably one of the most laid back bars I have ever been too, very very cool.

The next morning it was off to Plovdiv. Sofia is definitely worth a visit, but only if you combine Plovdiv or a day trip to the countryside as you run out of sights relatively quickly. However, the food was terrific and the price was even better. Cheapest drinks since Prague circa 2001 (30 cent pints with Jordan and Dann cannot be beat).