Ah, Bulgaria

Apologies for the obnoxiously long delay in writing. I posted my last blog, went to Bulgaria for a few days, had the second week of art week (which left little time for anything), and then just neglected to write for a week. Hopefully that will not happen again. I am going to cover one thing in this blog, and then a few more tomorrow and this weekend.

Bulgaria:

Ethan, Nick, and I decided to go to Bulgaria from February 1^st through the 4^th. Why Bulgaria? The inexpensiveness of the flight and lodging mainly. The whole trip cost around 150 dollars per person. Besides that, the city we would be in, Sofia, has a lot of interesting influences. Greek, Christian (mostly Orthodox), Muslim, and Soviet influences can be seen all over the city. We mostly cared about seeing the Christian churches and experiencing a very different culture from our own and even Italy (they use a different alphabet in Bulgaria, not just a different language).

We flew out of Rome early in the morning on February 1^st and were in Sofia a little before noon. We had not had breakfast, so our first mission was finding food to eat. We ended up at a burger joint called Boom!, chosen mainly due to the fact that it had a menu that was partly in English. The burgers were good and really cheap. The unit of currency in Bulgaria is the Lev (spelled how you would say it as I have no idea how to spell it), and the meal for all three of us cost between 50 and 60 Lev. That is the equivalent of about 30 or 35 dollars for three really big burgers and more fries than we could finish. It was awesome. After eating, we proceeded to walk around the city. We ended up in one of the many Orthodox churches in the city and it was beautiful. None of the churches we visited were like the Catholic churches that Americans would be used to seeing, and they were even quite different than the churches in Rome that we had seen. These churches were completely covered in icons of various saints. They were truly incredible. We happened to enter that church at around the time for vespers (evening prayer), so we decided to stay for it. The chanting was enchanting. We stayed for an hour (we had places to be so we left early), but the time certainly flew. We stood in place for the entire time, and I could have stayed much longer without any complaint. It was one of the highlights of the trip for me.

The next day was spent looking at more churches and going to a military history museum (just a park with a bunch of tanks and fighters). The day after that we had a Bulgarian guy drive us into the mountains in his van (aka, we paid for a tour) to visit an Orthodox monastery. It was an awesome place. We saw snow for the first time since leaving the States (aside from a random pile in Ravenna), and it was kind of nice. The church for the monastery was beautiful. The inside and outside were completely covered in icons. One thing that struck me was how the Orthodox Christians do not shy away from gruesome icons. Several of the icons depicted souls being tormented in Hell, while others showed martyrdoms (including blood, heads, etc.). Our tour guide had told us that there were bathrooms we could use at the monastery, but that they were uncomfortable. We had no idea what that meant (did they cover the seats in nails to mortify the flesh?), but we found out when Nick decided to use one. The toilets were actually just holes in the ground, so standing or squatting were the only options for use. We also decided to try the monastic donut things (more like funnel cakes than donuts) and they were very good. After the visit, we went back to our lodging, slept, and woke up at 4 am to catch a flight back to Rome (using Wiz Air as our airline), thus concluding our trip to Bulgaria.