So now we're safe in Transylvania. We're not armed with wooden stakes. Maybe we should. Maybe.
Anyway, our second day in Bulgaria was spent doing one of the hostel's side trips to the Rila Monastery. The Rila Monastery is a UNESCO World Heritage site is and is this excluded monastery up in the Rila Mountain. The tour basically got us someone to drive us directly to the monastery, which having been there, would have been hellish to do via public transportation. There were three of us signed up for the tour: Mia, me and some guy named James who sounded like Daniel Radcliffe. The drive out to the Rila Monastery took about two hours, but there was a stop over at a gas station.
Before we got to the Rila Monastery, our tour guide stopped us somewhere else in the mountains to go see a cave that St. Ivan used to live in. It was a funny moment because Mia slept for pretty much the entire ride to the monastery and she woke up for a very sweaty uphill hike. She was clearly thrilled. The hike was a lot longer than I initially thought when he said he was taking us to a cave. We pretty much got out of the car and he pointed to this giant hill and said we're climbing up that. It wasn't too bad. The cave was pretty cool too, but there was this tiny hole at some point that we were expected to squeeze through. I declined as the only image in my head was of Winnie the Pooh.
After climbing back down the hill, he drove us to the Rila Monastery and left us there for a few hours. The monastery is very pretty. It used to house like 300 monks, but according to some tour guide we were listening to there are only like six monks living there. Apparently, those few monks aren't too lonely because they rent out some of the rooms as a hotel.
In any case, there was also a giant church in the middle of the monastery. From the outside, it looks like the rest of the monastery, but it was incredibly ornate on the inside. I'd post pictures, but we weren't allowed to take them inside. Judging from all of the paintings all over the interior, I can understand why.
Even though the monastery was very pretty, we were left there for two and a half hours and there's really only so much of the monastery that you can see in that time. We were all kind of hungry, though, so we got some food. Tried some monastery-style bean soup (good) and some Bulgarian beer (not so good). For dessert, we got Bulgarian donuts that the woman at the hostel had been raving about. That was entertaining because there was a large selection of different syrup flavors to try out.
After eating, we wandereed around the monastery for a little wihle longer, before finding our tour guide and heading back to Sofia. The driver stopped at some point to buy some fruit and gave us some. Other than that, it was a pretty awkward and quiet ride back.
We got back to the hostel around 4:30 and hung out at the hostel for a little while because it was deadly hot. We went out for dinner around 6 before coming back, grabbing our bags and heading to the train station. That was fun. We had like 5 dollars worth of Bulgarian money to spend and nothing to spend it on because we had already gone to the market. I think we got Snickers bars or something.
The overnight train that we took to Bucharest had a final destination in Moscow. That was kind of fun. We had a sleeping compartment and were the only people in the compartment. It wasn't as big or comfortable as the one that we took to Belgrade, but the door also didn't make noises the whole night and I actually managed to sleep. They took our passports for a while, but we eventually got them back.
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