Sofia

We rolled into Sofia, Bulgaria tired, smelly, and hungry. The train station wasn't welcoming either. We almost got run over by some street cleaner. Our first priority was to make sure that we were indeed in a sleeper for our overnight train tomorrow. We got tossed around from ticketing office to ticketing office until we got to the right one and confirmed that we were in a sleeper. Ideally, we'll luck out and there will only be the two of us again, but who knows. Unlike the Budapest train, this is the only train that goes from Sofia to Bucharest. At least we get beds.

Also, trains in Eastern Europe make Italian trains seem prompt. This one arrived three hours late. While we're training into Bucharest tomorrow, we're ultimately trying to get to Brasov that day. At Budapest, they told us that we didn't have to make reservation for the Brasov train. I was going to do it anyway, but it migth be better that I don't. Who knows when we're going to arrive in Bucharest on Wednesday morning.

Anyway, we got out of the train station and everything smelled like pee. We had to make our way through a million taxi drivers and peole advertising hostels before we made it to the tram. The area of Sofia that we saw on our tram ride reminded us of some of the less touristy areas of Mexico. There were definitely some dirt roads and the streets were not completely done or in disrepair. That might have been fine, but add the rows of communist-era architecture and you'll get our first impression of Sofia.

We finally made it to the hostel. It's a pretty cute hostel, but because we got a private two bed room, we're in an apartment a couple streets away. Thus, we did not get to partake in the free pool table because we did not want to have to wake in the dark Sofia streets more than we had to :(. Anyway, we checked in, but they told us that it'd take a couple of hours for the room to be ready. We had the option of doing an 11 am free walking tour, but we were too tired hungry and gross feeling to do that. Instead, we sat around and hung out in the hostel. We also dug into the bag of mini croissants that we bought in Belgrade. They weren't that good, but we made them better with the packet of knock off Nutella that we also got.

Our room was supposed to be ready at 2, but it ended up being ready at 12. This was great. We showered. They do a laundry service here for 8 lav (equivalent of 4 Euro), so we decided that our train clothes from the past few days either needed to be burned or washed, so we went back to drop that off, pay for our room, and book ourselves in the tour of the Rila Monastery that they put on. Once that was done, we ran back to the room for the much needed sleep.

We were up and out by 5 and decided to do the 6 pm run of the free walking tour that we missed earlier in the day. This was a very tough decision for us. Included in the hostel price, they'll make you pasta for dinner. But that only happens from 7-8. On the other hand, this tour lasted from 6-8:30. We almost tried to do both and were going to leave the tour an hour into it, but we actually ultimately really liked the walking tour. The Sofia we saw on the tour was a lot nicer than what we had seen in the morning. There are a lot of underground Roman ruins in the city, so when our tour guide would take us to the subway area, you'd just see old walls all around. There are a lot of really pretty churches scattered around the city, some of them going back to the 11th century. The biggest church and the one pictured below is the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. It was huge. We saw a palace, the president's building (but just missed the changing of the guard). The tour guide was pretty funny too. 

Oh, another cool thing about Sofia is that they have a lot of mineral springs all over the city. It's completely safe to drink, so we got to fill up with some natural mineral water.

The tour ended around 8:30, right after the dinner. :( All in all, though, we were glad that we did the tour because we saw a lot more of Sofia and did a lot more than we would have otherwise.

Tomorrow we check out and we take an overnight train to Bucharest. Instead of having an awkward day, though, we're doing the hostel's tour of the Rila Monastery which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. We could have taken public transportation to the monastery and it would have been a lot cheaper, but seeing as they only have three trains to and from Rila each day and the trains we've encountered so far have not been particularly reliable, I think the private transport is the safest bet. It's also a pretty long drive to and from the monastery, so we've got a full day ahead of us.

Prague Day Two

Our second day in Prague was much, much nicer than our first. We got a pretty late start, after deciding to let James and everyone sleep in until 9 if they wanted. Not all of us did, especially since the rooms were super bright in the morning, but we definitely had to wake James up. We had bought milk and cereal from a local market the night before, so we also had breakfast in our room before heading out.

We bought a day pass for the public transportation. It is a 24-hour pass and it worked out very well because we were able to use it the next morning when we needed to get to the train station for our train to Buapdest. Chris decided that instead of taking the trams into the main part of town, we'd take the metro. This meant that instead of catching one of the buses literally down the street, we walked up this bizarre hill full of mud and slugs before getting to the metro station. It was exhausting, but allowed us to continue our pattern of seeing all of Prague except for the parts that people rave about.

Fortunately, that didn't last long. The metro pretty much dropped us off in the Old Town area and we were finally greeted with the scenic views of Prague that you see on the postcards. We started our tour of Prague in the Old Town Square, where we were greeted with the aroma of all of the different foods cooking in the square. We were like the group of kids from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Even though it had been pretty much an hour since we had gotten our foods, our tails wagged with delight and we ended up having a mini feast in the middle of the square. It was great. We sampled everything from Czech goulash, to this delicious Slovenian gnocchi dish, to Slovankian honey wine (so so good). We were in our heaven.

In fact, we were so engrossed in our food that we missed clock show that happens on the hour. The area around the Astronomical Clock in the town square does this little routine every hour. It's a really short show, one of those blink and you miss it deals. By the time I was able to pry Mia away from her goulash, we had missed it :(

After we finished eating, we made our way to the Charles Bridge. On the way, we stopped through several of the touristy shops, and I had to drag Mia away from a few of the marionette stores that were selling Messi marionettes (along with the rest of Barca). Personally, I think it'd be fun to do my own reenactment of Nsync's Bye Bye Bye video with a set of Barca marionettes. Too bad they would be such a pain to bring back.

It took us a while, but we finally made it to the Charles Bridge. The Charles Bridge is this huge pedestrian bridge that crosses over the Vlatava River. While crossing the bridge, you get a fantastic view of the Prague Castle and the other areas surrounding it. There are giant bronze statues that line the bridge, including one of St. John of Nepomuk, a priest who the Queen at the time confided all of her secrets in. When he refused to tell the king her secrets, the king had him tortured and thrown into the river. They also have a small bronze marking showing where he was thrown into the river and you're supposed to touch it to get your once chance to make a wish. Shouldn't take you too long to figure out I wished for.

All in all, the bridge was pretty impressive (albeit incredibly packed), not just because of the epic views you got of the city and the river, but also because it was built in like the 1300s.

Once on the other side we bought some water and made our way up to the Prague Castle. It would have been a painful walk up, so we took a tram up. Once there, we watched the changing of the guard and watched Mia and Jimmy try to take jumpining pictures next to the guards.

We then made our way through the St. Vitus Cathedral, which was gorgeous both inside and out. We wandered aroudn the castle grounds for a little longer. There are some great views of the city from up there. We also tried Czech sweet bread (really good) before making our way back down to the Little Town area (the area under the castle)

We walked around the Little Town streets for a while to get to our next destination: the Lennon wall. When John Lennon died, locals in the city spontaneously started writing tributes to Lennon all over the wall. Each night, the police would try to remove the graffitti only to find that it would immediatley be redone. According to my Rick Steves book, it eventually became a bit of a symbol of freedom during the communist days and is still covered in Beatles-related graffitti today. It was fun trying to play spot the Beatles song with the lyrics scribbled all over the wall.

From there, we made our way back over the Charles Bridge and back to the Old Square. We were initially going to have dinner in the same style that we had our lunch and dine off of street food, but decided that our tired feet would better appreciate a sit down restaurant. It was some touristy hotel restaurant. There was good goulash so I was happy.

After dinner and dessert on some gelato, we made our way back to the hotel and got back around 6:30. That gave Chris and Jimmy a chance to clean up their stuff and have some down time before the taxi picked them up to take them to their airport hotel. Because they were leaving from Prague so early the next day, Umma thought it would be better for them to spend the night at a hotel by the airport, rather than our rather inconveniently located hotel. It worked out well for them and I think they were happy to be in a shower that was not so awkward.

Once they left, Umma Mia and I went on another laundry adventure. We went to an address given to us by the woman who worked at the reception. In her defense, when I looked up the place online, the address she gave us matched the one online. There are no conveniently located laundromats near where we were, so we took a tram up to the right area. We found what we were pretty sure was the street and got to the correct address. All we found was an old door covered in graffitti and no sign of any laundromat. We confirmed with several people walking by that we were indeed on the right street. There was a comic book store, which would have provided some solace to our failed laundry trip, but it was closed.

We got home and cleaned up our stuff, got some blogging in, and went to bed early in preparation for our early bus ride to Budapest.