In Bulgaria.

Hey all,
Just wanted to let you know that we're safe in Sofia, Bulgaria.  Thank you so much for your emails & expressions of care.

Before I move on to our time in Bulgaria so far, I want to touch on the Istanbul riots a bit more.  Before we came back over to the European side for the last time, we saw tons of people holding and selling Turkish flags, a ferry ship full of people waving flags, yelling and wearing masks, and groups of police walking around carrying batons.  The energy was palpable and much more than we had seen on the Anatolian side of Istanbul just the day before.  Plus, we've heard that riots have spread to other cities in Turkey.  On our ferry ride across the Bosphorus, everyone on the boat was buzzing with talk about the protests.

Of course, we did our best to avoid Taksim square and Besiktas once we were over on the European side (we were lucky the ferry was running, by the way).  And actually, it was totally calm.  We hardly saw any protesters.  When we were waiting for the bus that formed the first part of the trip to Bulgaria, we wondered if some of the other tourists maybe didn't even knew about what was going on.

I also wanted to talk about the New York Times article written about the protests - click here for the article.  One thing I noticed was that they compared Taksim Square in Istanbul to Tahrir Square in Cairo - an interesting comparison, but Tim and I agreed that this seemed like quite the editorial remark.  It's just a central square in a city - you could say it's the 'equivalent' of any other similar square.  I compared it to Las Ramblas & Placa Catalunya in Barcelona.  It still remains to be seen, of course, whether or not these protests turn into something like what happened in Egypt.

On the other hand, I found certain aspects of the NYTimes article to be really quite accurate.  In my last post I described how we had spent an evening just sitting and chatting in the park next to Taksim Square the night before things really got going.  The NYTimes describes it as having a "festival-like atmosphere," and I was actually surprised how well that describes it.

I feel so lucky to be safe, and actually, I also feel fortunate to have seen what was going on there with my own eyes.  It was unlike anything I've ever seen before, and really opened my perspective.

Also, we just saw on CNN (which our Bulgarian hosts have on partially for us) and it says that Syria is officially warning its citizens not to go to Turkey because of the danger that the protests present.  Lol.

We did have some concerns about the transportation to Bulgaria possibly being cut off, and all in all we were lucky.  The trip, scheduled to take a mere 12 hours to reach Sofia, ended up taking 16, and we ended up getting mildly scammed.  On the other hand, we actually were able to get basically a full night's sleep on the train - we had a compartment to ourselves - and we found our new Couchsurfing hosts relatively easily.  Plus, there were some pretty nice views in those extra hours of being on the train:

Our new hosts are a couple with a 4-year old son, and they are great.  She is a computer programmer, he is a chemist, and their son is cute and very energetic.  Both of the adults speak good English, actually better than our last host.  After arriving at almost 4pm (we were supposed to arrive around 11am) we were able to walk around Sofia with the woman, whose name is Polina.

Sofia is a small city, and actually Polina and her husband Victor have both gently mocked us for choosing to come here.  True, a lot of the architecture is based on the concrete block hearkening back to the Communist days, but actually Sofia has some pretty cool stuff to see.  There are lots of old churches and buildings, but what I think Tim and I both thought was the coolest was the ancient stuff.  We basically stumbled over tons of little pieces of the ancient Roman city, which Polina told us were just found in the process of trying to build things like new metro lines.  She said it's actually kind of a pain, because then they feel like they have to stop building or build around the ancient city.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the camera along for our walk, but it was quite picturesque at parts.

Tomorrow we're considering renting a car to get to Rila Monastery, which is supposed to be pretty amazing and have wonderful hikes.  Maybe we can bring a picnic :).  Anyway, going to go to bed - goodnight all!