This was probably the most surreal experience of my life thus far. Hopefully in putting this into words the weekend will start to make more sense. I had to leave the country this weekend because of visa stuff, so a friend and I looked into a few spots on wikitravel that were relatively near Istanbul. Greece is on the euro, so we ruled that out until it gets warmer and we can go to the beach. Instead, we decided to go to Bulgaria. Instead of going to Sofia, we went to the second largest city, Plovdiv. It seemed like a great place to go on wikitravel. It's a very ancient city with ruins going back before the time of Alexander the Great. Sounds like a great place for a history nerd, right? Plus, the bus ticket to Plovdiv was cheaper than Sofia.
Of course I had class until 17:00 on Friday so we hit rush hour trying to get down to the bus station in Istanbul. There are 3 evening buses that go to Plovdiv. We got out at the bus station on the Golden Horn and stared around cluelessly. There are easily 50 bus companies operating there. We were looking for a specific one and had no idea what the logo looked like. I went up to an old guy on his smoke break and said "Bulgaristan'a gitmek istiyoruz. Plovdiv'e." He said "Tamam" and indicated for us to follow him. Totally sketchy, right? Just follow the old guy across the parking lot of a massive, poorly-lit bus station at 20:00... Worked out just fine. He led us to the bus company we were looking for, we bought our tickets and grabbed a durum at the bus station cafe. Last decent meal we'd have till we got back to Istanbul, tho we didn't know it at the time.
The bus was nearly empty. We spent a fair amount of time reading and watching the Turkish version of Fear Factor. It all seemed fairly normal until we got to the border crossing. I don't know if it's that we were passing into the EU or that we were leaving Turkey, but that was where the real ridiculous nature of the weekend began. During this whole process, you get on and off the bus for about an hour to an hour and a half. Border crossings seem to be colder than any other part of the country. At some points I was involuntarily shivering. It didn't help that it was about 1am. Between the Turkish passport control area and the Bulgarian passport control there is a duty free shop. I didn't want to have any problems getting in and out of Bulgaria, so I didn't buy anything.
However, there's a restriction on the number of cigarette cartons each person can bring into Bulgaria. Why they don't restrict the number a person can buy at the shop is beyond me because these Turkish women get back on the bus with 5 and 6 cartons. The lady behind me kind of jabs a carton into my shoulder. I am still clueless about the restriction or any of that business at this point, so I think she's offering me cigarettes. I tell her in Turkish that I don't smoke. She says no, no and hands me an extra duty free bag that she pulled out of her purse. Apparently she was prepared for this. Other people are doing this throughout the bus so that everyone has 1-2 cartons of cigarettes. Some of the women are breaking open cartons and shoving packs into various pockets of their sweaters and jackets. We only learned what was actually going on when we talked to a half-Italian half-Sierra Leon guy sitting near us later... wtf.
The bus makes a lot of stops so that the bus driver can smoke and drink more cay (Turkish tea). Some of the stops are 2 minutes, others are 15-20. Hence, a 6 hr bus ride became a 7 1/2 hour bus ride. This put us in Plovdiv around 3:30am. There are two stops in Plovdiv. The first one was in a neighborhood and a lot of the cigarette carton women got off. Brent and I are staring at each other very confused and asking the driver in Turkish if we're at the Plovdiv bus station. He says it's 2 km away and keeps driving. We have no idea at this point where he's going to drop us off at.
Finally, the bus stops next to an overpass at what we later found out actually is the bus station, tho it looked to us like locked, abandoned building with an ATM in front of it. There were 3 cabs parked in front of it, but none of the drivers were in the car. We walked across the block and it was all abandoned. The only thing that looked open was a "nonstop electronic casino" next to the bus station. Brent went inside to see if the cab drivers were in there. Sure enough, that's what was going on. With the word "taksi" one of the big Bulgarian guys comes out smelling distinctly of cigarettes and alcohol, puts our bags in the cab and through a broken conversation in Bulgarian, English and Russian we get to our hostel by 4am.
At 4am a lot of things look sketchy. The entrance to the hostel was definitely in that category. There's a sign over a gate with the hostel's name and graffiti next to it saying "F*** Fashion." We buzzed at the gate and it unlocked about a minute later. Instead of leading to a front door, we were in an unlit cobblestone courtyard. We followed the little path and found the door unlocked. The chick at the door looked like we definitely woke her up and told us where our room was. Neither Brent nor I thought to bring padlocks, so I had booked a private room with two twin beds. Normally, that means you get the nicer room in the hostel and the door locks. In our case, it meant we were in a poorly insulated attic with the window open and a space heater that we thought was an alarm clock. The ceiling was so low that you easily hit your head... but at 4am we just wanted to sleep. This is what it was like in the morning:
After a quick breakfast in the hostel of bread and jam with some luke-warm coffee and a cup of very weak tea, we set off to explore the town. We had a map of part of the town and a general idea that if you turn right you get to the ancient amphitheater and left takes you to the ruins of a fortress. We opted with the fortress first. Essentially we wandered around for a few hours. The city is a mixture between ancient ruins, more modern ruins, abandoned buildings, communist architecture, and new EU-funded building projects. Casinos and sex shops are everywhere, typically in the newest buildings. There are no markets selling fresh produce, so the main staples of our diets were gone: apples, pomegranates, oranges, dried apricots. The rest of the day is better explained in photographs:
This is the typical architecture in the old town. The cleaner ones are hotels. Others are falling apart, full of broken glass and heaps of rubble.
We stopped for lunch in what seemed to be a decent restaurant. It was crowded, and that's usually a good sign. Sure enough, we found out we were in an Italian place when we sat down, or something trying to pass as Italian. First thing to check for is what other people are drinking. Apparently Saturday at noon is a perfectly normal time to drink beer... or pitchers of milk. Mind you, nobody drinks plain milk in the rest of Europe, or in Turkey for that matter, other than children. Not that we didn't already look confused and out of place, but we ordered some beers so that we didn't stand out even more. The food came and my order was wrong, but I didn't really care. It came out in a foil take-out dish and tasted like a microwaved casserole. Oh well, it was sustenance. We wandered for a few more hours after that.
Clothes and such are cheaper in Bulgaria than they are in Turkey, so we went hunting for shoes and jackets. No dice. I found a few pairs of boots I liked, but none of them were in my size. I tried on some jeans, but the sizing system is different so I couldn't figure it out. I was about to buy a winter coat for the equivalent of $20, but it was one-size-fits-all and didn't button right over my chest. Go figure. The models in the Bulgarian mall were one of the funniest things we saw all day:
We made a brief stop in the hostel around 17:00 to enquire about restaurants for dinner. Got completely lost trying to find it. Took a right for a few kilometers when we should have taken a left. Ended up finding where we were trying to go. They had lots of open tables, but said they wouldn't seat a party of two. How on earth that works is beyond me. I don't know if it's because there was a private party or they don't seat people who speak a mixture of Russian and English. We ended up eating at a restaurant across the street. No one serves pork in Turkey, so I decided to order a pork dish that was stuffed with godknowswhat. It was bland. Meh. If the main courses are bad, it's generally a good idea to go somewhere else for dessert.
We found a dessert shop that looked promising, and actually was quite good. It was too early to go to the bar the hostel had told us about, so we sat around talking after dessert and sipping on coffee. Finally we decided to brave the cold again and find Fabric, a new bar/club in town. The interior looks kind of like it's trying to be American, but in a very distinctive manner. The place is dark. Walls are red brick with a lot of arches kind of like a mill. All the tables and chairs are dark wood. They played all American music, which I found surprising. At one point they were playing Louie Armstrong... It was pretty fun people-watching.
The next morning, we each hit our heads a few times getting up. Not fun. I braved the shower at the hostel, which was a shower head attached to a wall between the sink and the toilet (thankfully western style), with a drain in the middle of the floor and a sliding partition separating it from the other toilet "stall." At this point, we were both ready to get back to Istanbul. We went down to the bus station with our bags, only to find out that the 11:00 and 14:00 buses were full. So we bought tickets for the 19:00 bus, dropped our luggage in the bus company's office (fingers crossed that they'd still be there when we got back) and tried to figure out what to do for the next 8 hours. There were a few food stands near the bus station, so we stopped at one in the hopes that it was half-decent. The guy was selling sausages with bread. I ate about half of it, felt my stomach churning and we ended up leaving the rest of it for the stray cats. I don't know if it was bad meat or if it was just undercooked.
On top of one of the hill/mountains in Plovdiv is a giant statue of a Russian soldier commemorating the Russian "liberation" of Bulgaria, which was part of the Axis in WWII. It would seem that a hill that is visible from any vantage point would be easy to find. However, when you're on street level it's very difficult to tell. We essentially turned a 30 minute walk into a 3 hour walk. Got to see more of the residential areas tho. If it hadn't been a beautiful day, and the city wasn't more or less empty, it would have been pretty sketchy. At one point we found ourselves walking down an obviously communist-era housing project area. All the buildings were the same, right down to the peeling paint. The boulevard was much wider than necessary and seemed like it might make a nice little park in summertime if it was cleaned up a bit. A few more confusing Bulgarian-Russian-English directions took us to a working class neighborhood where some of the bricks weren't held together by mortar, but we could see the mountain. The area was abandoned. People obviously lived there because we could see their washing, but it was silent. After a short rest and a snack of stuff we brought with us from Turkey, we walked up towards the mountain. An old man in a mechanic's jumpsuit told us in Russian how to get up to the stairs. Those led to a main road that led up to the monument.
It was a pretty good climb up to the top. We sat along the ledge and looked out at the city and the mountains for a while. We were hungry and dazed running on about 5 hours of sleep sitting on top of a mountain with a giant Russian monument behind us. That was where the word "surreal" first popped up. From the mountain you could see some people playing tennis and others climbing up the rocks of the mountain along very unstable looking ledges. Finally hunger got the better of us and we wandered down. The first thing we came across that looked halfway appetizing was one of these hotdog stands. Positively the most fake tasting meat I've ever seen. Once again, it was still pink. I ate half of it and decided that I probably couldn't stomach the rest.
A few blocks further and we found ourselves in an impromptu skate park. I had no idea Bulgaria had a big skating and bmx community, but apparently they do. We sat in the middle of the square next to a statue watching these guys on skateboards and bmx bikes attempt tricks on their ramp and on the benches and rails nearby.
A short walk away from the skatepark took us back to one of the main roads. It was at this point that we discovered that it should have only taken 30 minutes to get to the top of the mountain instead of 3 hours. We called it quits and headed for the bus station even though the bus wasn't leaving for two hours.
Those two specs at the top of the picture are actually guys from our group. I have no idea how they got all the way up there. 
