Turkey

The Moscow crowd - the six of us who travelled together for the entire 8 weeks, 

with Tony the Tour Leader.

From left:  Peter and Janette; Jane and Colin; Tony leaning forwards; Denyse and Jason; and me. I'd just like to draw attention to my bright orange watch and bright pink socks.

The overnight train to Istanbul was way hard core.  We were on it for almost 24hrs.  We got on at midday in Bucharest and got off at 1115am in Istanbul - we were early!!  AND Kim got off the tour in Bucharest so I had a cabin all to myself!  It was amazing.  I basically went in there and shut the door and didn't come out for six hours.

It ended up being quite good fun.  We were the only people in our carriage, aside from one other random person.  And he was weird.  He was travelling alone, and he told us all that he ran sold-out seminars for men on how to pick up women, all over Europe.  There was no way any of us believed him.  He was Canadian but he reckoned he'd been living in Bucharest for years.  He obviously thought he was the man.  None of the girls on the tour would've touched him with a ten-foot pole, and I didn't actually believe he'd been to half the places he said he had.  For instance, he was talking about how he'd spent heaps of time in Sofia, and it was just like Bucharest.

Not.  Even.  Close.

You may remember one of the stops on our tour was Sofia.  Sofia has wide cobblestoned streets and is beautiful and extremely well kept, there's no graffiti anywhere, there's no dirt anywhere, there are no buildings in any kind of disrepair.  And we've just discussed Bucharest.  Noisy.  Dirty.  I forgot to mention it, but they leave the ends of electrical wires dragging on the ground.  The buildings are half torn down and then abandoned.

Interesting.

Anyway, aside from that guy, everyone basically ended up standing in the corridor drinking together.  A lot of people had brought their own booze onto the train, and the conductor had something like four bottles of wine and six beers, and we ended up clearing him out as well.  Scandalous.

So we all eventually went to bed around 10pm (all the booze was long gone by 930pm).  We got woken up  crossing from Romania into Bulgaria, then again going out of Bulgaria, and then again going into Turkey.  A good time was had by all.  When we were going into Turkey, they made us all get off the train to get our passports stamped.  Everybody else on the tour had to buy their Turkish visas, which, depending which country they were from, cost from 15 euro up to 45 euro.  I didn't have to pay because I'm a New Zealander.  LOVE IT.  Some of the others were quite personally insulted that they had to pay and I didn't!  It was funny.  It was four o'clock in the morning and freezing cold, and they all had to go and line up (outside) to get their visa and then line up somewhere else to get stamped through.

We were staying right in the old part of Istanbul, close to the Grand Bazaar and the mosques.  We had a city walk that afternoon, then we really all just wanted to relax I think.  We had our final night dinner, but by then we'd already lost Peter and Janette, who were staying at a different hotel and joining a new tour (that's game).

On our city walk, we went to the spice markets and Grand Bazaar, which were awesome to take photos of.  The colours were amazing!  And so were the crowds!

The next day was my birthday!!  For my birthday, I'd decided that I should fly from one country to another, so I didn't have a lot of time.  But I spent the morning at Ayasofya, which is an old mosque that doesn't operate anymore and is preserved as a museum.  It was so busy.  I'm sure last time I was there (when I went to the Middle East with Tucan Travel two years ago) I had the place almost to myself.  However, I'm hoping I still got some good photos...

I was panicking about how I was so sure something was going to go wrong and I wasn't going to get to Athens, so I basically ran from Ayasofya back to the hotel, even though I was well early, to catch my transfer...  Which didn't show up!  More next time.....

Bulgaria

We had another five hours on a train from Nis to Sofia. Apparently a lot of people try to get stuff across the border on the trains, like cigarettes and drugs. We had quite a long stop at the border, while customs officers searched all the nooks and crannies, up in the roof and all that. They did find someone who was trying to get cigarettes across, from what I heard from other people on our tour who were at the other end of the carriage. She had them all strapped around her waist.

Bulgaria is randomly one hour different to the rest of the area, we had to change our watches going into and leaving the country. It must be because it goes so much further east than the other countries we’re visiting on this leg of the tour.

We arrived in Sofia reasonably late that evening, so we went straight out for dinner. The closest of the places Sara recommended was called Happy Bar and Grill, and almost our entire group ended up there at various times that evening. It was a good meal, and cheap. I love Eastern Europe. Kat and I had dinner with Gloria and Sara and Kylie and Christopher, and Marsha and Cameron went straight to the bar. When we’d almost finished our meal (and we’d all had at least one drink each) Marsha and Cam sent shots of vodka to our table. So we drank those, and by the time I’d finished dessert I knew it was time I went home. Chris decided to come home too; everyone else was sitting at the bar with Marsha and Cam. Thank God I went home… I think Gloria and Kylie came home quite soon after we did, but the other four ended up having quite the night out. I believe Kat came home at 3am, and when she woke up in the morning it took an hour to locate her cellphone, which Cameron found in his pocket when he eventually woke up.

I liked our hotel in Sofia too – they brought breakfast to our rooms. We got warm croissants with jam and butter, coffee, and juice. I put chocolate in my croissant instead of jam and butter, and Kat gave me her coffee since she doesn’t drink it. Good times.  The hotel was also on a road with a food hall diagonally opposite us and shoe stores in both directions. Even better times.

Sofia is very beautiful and affluent looking, with lots of well-maintained huge square government buildings and wide roads. On our city walk the next morning, we looked at all the churches, saw the dinosaur skeleton at the natural history museum, and went to the markets. Which also describes our afternoon quite well.

And now for a pictorial interlude:

Origami cranes hanging in all the trees.

We met our new tour-mate in Sofia, her name is Loreta and she’s from the UK and does cancer research. She came market hopping with us in the afternoon. At the market just down the road from our hotel, we found raspberries for NZ $1.50 per kilo. And they were so good, they were perfectly ripe and not rotten underneath or anything.
We went for a drink before we went back to the hotel, at Happy’s again, which is across the road from a nice church. That church was turning around weddings quicker than Las Vegas, it was amazing. They literally queued up at one door, bride and groom and congregation all at once, went in, and five minutes later they came out another door and the next bridal party went in the first one. Then they’d have about four minutes to take photos on the stairs if they wanted them. You’d want to be pretty set on getting married in that church, they would’ve only had time for “I do”, “I do too” and “sign here please”.

Chris, Kylie, Gloria, Kat and I decided to go to a Bulgarian restaurant for dinner that night. Sara marked on a map where we needed to go, and Canadian Chris took charge of leading the rest of us to the restaurant. He got us most of the way there before we found ourselves on a corner with no restaurant in sight and no idea which way to go. In fairness, he got us to the corner Sara had marked, but she was a block away from where the restaurant actually was. We asked in a shop and they knew the place and sent us in the right direction.  While we were walking, we went past a rather nice looking young Bulgarian man.  We do occasionally fall into the trap of thinking people won't understand us when we talk in English, so Gloria said "ooh cute" as she walked in front of this young guy.  And he said "nice huh?".  Unexpected.

All the food around here is based on meat, lots and lots of meat. Lucky thing Kylie and Kat are here to help remember what we ate; I had a chicken breast. Not that exciting. It was pretty tasty though. They had a live band playing, with a drum, a guitar, and a piano accordion. They were very good, the accordion player in particular. I noticed that he was exempt from singing. They came over to our table and played an English song for us. The other funny thing in that restaurant was the toothbrush dispenser in the loo. You put your coin into the machine and you got a travel toothbrush out. Kat made me go and buy her one, but I was too embarrassed to do it while there was a queue and other people watching me. Luckily nobody was behind me in the queue so when I came out of the bathroom I had the perfect opportunity to sneakily buy a toothbrush.

There was no big night out that night, surprisingly. We were all home in bed by about 9pm!