21) Bulgarian ATM’s give you 10 lev notes most of the time. You wouldn’t believe how awesome this is! But Romanian ATMS give you 100 lei notes — very annoying! But they are only worth about $37 AUD .

22) Most people seem to live in Communist issue flats. These are usually big, plain, concrete, flats that are built together in one place. Since they fit a lot of people into a relatively small space, a city of 100,000 takes up less area than an Australian city of 40,000. It means that there are a lot more people walking the streets at night.

23) In most toilets you cannot flush your toilet paper. Instead, there is a bin next to the toilet bowl for you to dispose of your freshly dirtied paper. Surprisingly it doesn’t smell bad, as most of the paper is scented. Luckily, I’ve never been the person who had to empty the toilet paper bin. :-)

24) Overtaking is scarey!. Every overtake seems to be made with “only just” enough room. Most minibuses will start the overtaking process before the car coming the other way has gone past, which turns a two lane road into three lanes. And if you are merging lanes, just make sure sure that there is a gap 10cm longer than the length of your car and go for it! Dangerous? YES! I’m so gratefully to live in a country with good drivers.

25) Tailgating is epidemic. I don’t think anybody has ever heard of the 2 second rule. You know… the rule about being no closer than 2s to the car in front. If there was a rule here, it’d be more of a 0.5 metre rule — even on the highway at 100km/hr. Yes, it is scary being a passenger!

26) Coffee… haha… Most coffee is sold as espresso, or medium-blacks. And there you were thinking that I wasn’t going to mention the coffee situation Don’t bother ordering a milk based drink — it’ll either be Nescafe, or have super-terribly frothed milk.

At least it’s cheap. You can buy a rather average take-away shot in a clear plastic cup for 30 stotinki (25c). On the up side, we went out a few times for coffee and cake, and it only cost about 10lev (~$9AUD) for the three of us. So worth it! Although, I think my snobbiness for a good cup of coffee has disappeared. I’m sure it won’t take me long to get it back though :-P

27) “Quality” — Bulgarian goods. I bought an expensive (for Bulgaria; but only $35 in Aussie dollars) ski jacket to keep me warm. But, the first time I wore it, two bits of it broke. Building materials are also dodgy — we stayed at a newly renovated hotel, but all the fittings where already falling apart. I kept wanting to go around the room with a screwdriver and re-tighten every screw.

28) Rubbish is everywhere! There doesn’t appear to be the concept of “you bought it in? you take it out” that we have in Tasmania. Don’t look at the side of any highway — it’ll just look like a tip. Even in Turkey, rubbish was along every walking track we walked along and in every rock cave we looked in. I’ve always heard people comment about hoe clean Tasmania is. I guess I didn’t realise what dirty was until then :-)

29) Bulgarian fashion is funny — well at least stuck in the 90’s. Crimped hair, and pleather (plastic-leather) are currently the rage. And Elly would definitely want me to mention what she calls “nappy pants”. I’ll let you ask her about them :-)

30) Nobody seems to care about pollution. A shopping complex we went to in Romania was built across the road from a fertiliser factory. It didn’t smell very good. Also, everybody has these coal fire places in their houses. If you thought wood smoke pollution was bad in Launceston, you should smell the coal smoke pollution in Eastern Europe!

THE END

Well, I’m now about 25 mins off landing in Australia, so I better head. Bye!

11) There is no concept of a shower screen or curtain. Instead, the entire bathroom floor is treated as the floor of the shower. This means that EVERYTHING in the room gets wet — often including toilet paper! In one hostel we went to, the shower head was almost directly above the toilet seat. On the other hand there was been many times when the only place I could find to store my dry clothes & toiletries was on top on the toilet bowl (lid down of cause :-P).

12) Everybody has a mobile phone. At first, this sounds normal to us. But here, people will buy a phone before they will fix the hole in their roof, or fix their leaking sewage. This photo of a man riding a horse and cart while talking on his mobile phone says it best! I wonder if you could get booked for that?

13) All food is sold by grams In Bulgaria & Romania every menu and sign will state the weight of the meal. This is awesome when ordering a meal at a restaurant, but is really weird when buying an ice-cream cone. The three of us ordered 1-scoop ice-cream cones while in Sofia and the cost of each of our cones differed by about 60c. It was just like buying 4 pieces of ham from the deli — you have no idea how much it will cost you.

I’ve heard of two possible reasons for this. 1. That it’s a requirement of being a part of the EU to keep trade fair. 2. That it is left over from communism, where food was limited to rations so how much something weighed was important.

14) They still use 1 and 2 coins, and they are completely useless and annoying. The ice-cream I mentioned above came to 2.02 lev, so I gave the girl a 2 lev coin. Although, she insisted that I give her the extra 2 stotinki. She then took ages to sort through her coins so that she could give me exact change. What a waste of time! Also, Romania uses 1 lei notes (about $0.37 AUD) which leads to a LOT of notes in your pocket.

15) Food is awesome! Especially salads. Food might contain more fat, but it is far less processed. My bowels are going to be sad to head back to Australia.

16) You usually have to pay to use a public toilet. I wouldn’t mind if the toilets were well maintained, but usually they are much more disgusting than free Australian public toilets! All of the public toilets that I’ve been to in Romania have been smelly squats, and you only get a very small amount of toilet paper. I recommend holding on until Macca’s or your hostel!

Yes, I had to pay to use that!

17) Milk… haha… yeah… If you can find it. If you can it could be out of date — so make sure you check the date Stu. Oh, and it usually comes in a bag, or a uht container, and won’t taste fantastic.

18) Mobile phones are cheap, well the phone itself will cost you about the same, but call rates are much cheaper. In Romania, it was cheaper for me to use my Bulgarian SIM card (with global roaming) to SMS an Australian number than it would cost me to SMS an Australian number from Australia using my Australian SIM card.

19) Speed limits are pretty much ignored. The minibus (called a maxi-taxi here in Romania) didn’t slow down for towns and villages. He (and every other car) just kept driving through the tight village streets at highway speed. I’d hate to know what would happen if a kid jumped out onto the road.

20) Haskovo Zoo (In English: Haskovo Animal Prison). To waste some time we went here for a walk. Apparently some foreigner recently paid the zoo a lot of money to have a large bear (that was living in a cage there) moved to a more humane location. I think somebody should do the same for this poor lion :-(

Week 1

About two weeks ago I landed in Istanbul after a loooong flight (Parts 1, & 2), had a look around, and stayed a night there. The next day I caught the bus to Haskovo, Bulgaria and stayed there for a few days with Elly & Stu. They are currently living there in an old communist style flat and teaching English to a 6yo. There we saw everything Haskovo has to offer, met some of the other Aussies there, and went a few times into the Mahalle. The Mahalle is a really interesting place (we would probably call it a slum), and I hope to write more about it in another post. A photo of the awesome Haskovo tour to the abandoned & incomplete power plant is shown below. Apparently, it never got completed due to the fall of Communism.

Checking out Bulgaria

Elly & Stu have also written some posts about these few days —
part 1,
part 2

Once we (read ‘me’) got bored of Haskovo, Elly, Stu, & I started out on our tour of Bulgaria by catching a bus to Plovdiv. Plovdiv would be my favourite Bulgarian city so far because it’s a great mix of new and old. We stayed a night there in a 8 bed dorm room, were we got woken up by some drunk travellers who came back drunk at 5am and then got up to some [not so] hush hush shenanigans. Memories = Repressed :-).

The next day we caught the very cool train to Bansko. Bansko is an up and coming ski-resort, and has recently become the most developed ski-resort in the Balkans. Luckily for us, it was the off season, so the place wasn’t crawling with tourists. It also meant that we stayed in rather nice hotel, for only $13/night which is much cheaper than what we could have stayed in a hostel. for. While there we climbed most of the way up Mt. Vihren, which you can read about on Elly’s blog post, The Grand Tour Part 2. Here’s one of the MANY photos that I took while up there:

After Bansko, we bused to Sofia and checked that our for about 4-5 hours. I couldn’t stand it there. It stunk of pollution, looked dirty, and there was way too many beggars who were trying to scam off us. When we got to the train station, somebody came up to me asking if they could help me. My first thought was that it was a scam, but then he seems to be wanted to help me find where we were going, and not asking for money. Maybe he works here I thought? Anyway, turns out he wanted money for helping us out. So I reluctantly offered him 2 lev (only about $1.60, but worth about $5 for them), but he wouldn’t take it and insisted I give him 5 lev. Once I did that, he tried to get 5 more lev off Stu, but I told him sternly that 5 lev was more than enough for showing us where the ticket office was and off he pottered.

Heading to Romania

Elly & Stu have also written some posts about these few days —
part 3,

That night we caught the night train to București, Romania. It was a 9 hour journey, but didn’t seem to take that long since we had a sleeper car. The border crossing was pretty uneventful – we didn’t even need to get out of our beds. The Romanian guard did make us laugh we he said, “Australia? – Kangaroo”. The train then crossed the Danube and we were in Romania.

We arrived at București at 5:45am and since it was dark, we didn’t know what to do besides buying some barely drinkable coffee at macca’s so we could use their wifi while waiting for it to become light outside. That was good, because weren’t planning on coming to Romania as quick as we did, so we had no idea what to do. The most interesting part of McD’s was not the coffee (that was sickening) but have the staff physically remove a beggar who was trying to get me to buy him something. It’s really sad that beggars are really common here. I had a kid harrasing me outside an ATM I was trying to use yesterday. I’m still undecided about how I want to react to them because it’s impossible to give to everybody. When I get a better idea, I think think I should do a blog post about it. Any ideas?

Anyway, back to the story… We left macca’s, passed though the gauntlet of taxi drivers, walked for 3-4 hours with our packs, and arrived at the maxi-taxi station. Oh yeah, we had a bit of “fun” trying to find the place without a map. Elly commented that “you know it’s bad when Humphrey starts whinging!”.

Now these maxi-taxi’s require an explanation. They are Mercedes Benz vans, with seats, and a couple of bars screwed into the walls for people to hang on to. They are a long way from comfortable and leg-room is non-existent. Of course, that is only if you get a seat. According to the sign on the inside of one of these mini-buses it was able to carry 16 seated and 16 standing. That’s 32 people in a tiny van thing! Yesterday, while standing up in a maxi-taxi, one of the screws fastening the bar was I hanging onto came loose, “CL-ICK”. Was a little freaky Oh, and the drivers cain the maxi-taxis! They tailgate VERY close, overtake with less than a metre to spare, honk, and don’t really slow down for village streets. These drivers would loose their licences very quickly in Australia. But, these are the easiest and quickest way to travel around Romania. Thanks to jeffltaylor2 for uploading this photo of one to Flickr.

In Romania

The maxi-taxi to Târgu Mureş took a bit over 5 hours. You can tell he was speeding because it took us 6 hours on the way back. Once there we stayed with the Nairns for a number of days. On Sunday, James took us to a local church, followed by a “just as spiritual” game of paint-ball. In the last round I broke the main rule: Don’t shoot anybody closer than 5m. Sorry for the friendly-fire Stu!

While there we also did a heap of shopping, chilling out, and going out for the odd drink. Yesterday we checked out the village of Sighişoara, which is a place where Vlad (The actual Dracula) once lived. It was a really nice historical village, and we also managed to find the best coffee that I’ve had in either Bulgaria or Romania.

Back to Bulgaria

Today we caught the maxi-taxi back to București, where we are currently. Tomorrow we’re planning on catching the train back to Elly & Stu’s place, where I’ll spend a couple of nights before heading onto Turkey. We’re still not too sure how the Turkish leg will work out. I don’t think Elly & Stu are able to spend a whole two weeks in Turkey, so they will either join me for the first week, or stay in Bulgaria and rendezvous with me somewhere in Turkey. Everything else has just fallen into place so far, so I trust that will too.

Here’s Elly being tough at the train station:

Thanks for reading my blog. If you were gullible enough to fall for my recent facebook status update, then I extend a “ha ha” in your general direction. And, remember about the commenting rule – commenting is cool, just like school.

PS - You may have noticed that I’ve added a new link to the top of my blog for a google map of my trip. I’m planning on adding the Romanian leg of the journey to the map soon.

PPS - I’m currently proof-reading this post while sitting on the aforementioned train, and have about 2.5 hours left. We’re in the only room that doesn’t have a working light so it’s heaps dark in here and therefore hard to type. Hopefully we can work out when we are at the right station.

NEWS FLASH - We just noticed that it’s snowing outside the train carriage! Hooray for travelling in a train through snow.

Well, I’ve already watched 2 episodes of Dexter on this train trip and I have exactly enough battery power for 1 more episode. So chao chao. Oh, by the time I publish this we’ll be back at Elly & Stu’s commy flat.

La revedere!

1) EVERYBODY smokes EVERYWHERE. Cafes, pubs, restaurants, the street, toilets, and everywhere STINKS like cigarette smoke. My clothes consistently smell of the stuff. I wonder what their lung cancer rates are? I definitely won’t miss being able to go out for a coffee and not have to breathe in 10 peoples cigarette smoke. Oh, and it seems totally ok to smoke in front of children!

2) Beer is CHEAP, generally of a better quality, and can be bought anywhere — The supermarket, KFC, the fridge at the backpackers hostel, corner shops, and just about anywhere. It’s often cheaper than water, and always cheaper than Cuke! Of cause, there is (apparently) a much bigger problem with alcoholism here. I wonder why?

It’s great to go out to some trendy place and be able to grab a pint (~500ml) of some tasty European beer for less than $1AUD. Wine is cheap too. A couple of nights ago we were drinking a fantastic pinot noir that cost about 12 lei ($4.71AUD) for a 1.5 litre bottle. Although it’s not as cheap for the people here (who have a much lower average wage than us Australians). Here’s a picture of a German beer sitting on a supermarket shelf.

3) Power points don’t have on/off switches. Every time I plug in my computer I get a big blue arc!

4) Music in Bulgaria is terrible! 50% of the music Bulgarian cafes, pubs, buses, etc play is the English music from the 90’s. On the plus side Romanian have a good taste in music — I’ve heard Coldplay, Franz Ferdinand, and The Living End (Yes, Australian music in Romania!).

Actually, this leads into a funny story: Today, we walked in a shop and we all heard Eskimo Joe playing. After we all commented on how cool it was to hear Australian music in a shop, we realised that I had accidentally hit the play button on my phone!

5) Wires go everywhere. Nobody seems to hide wiring inside cabinets or walls. The installation of internet at Elly & Stu’s flat involves an Ethernet cable hanging down the side of the apartment complex from the roof, and coming into the flat via a freshly drilled hole. Here’s a picture of a bunch of wires that are right next to the front door of Elly & Stu’s communist flat.

6) Electric buses — YES you heard me right. They look like normal buses, but have big arms that reach out to the overhead wires. I’m still yet to catch one though. I wonder what happens if they decide to not follow the wires and take a different street.

7) ATM’s don’t appear to charge fees. I could be wrong, but none are appearing on my statement except for the ones that my bank charge :-)

Internet is cheap as chips. Yes, I’m serious! You could get a months worth of internet here for less than a bag of seaport chips. I was talking to a Bulgarian about how ridiculously expensive Australian internet is. It was quite an effort to explain the concept of a download quota. They all just have unlimited downloads here.

9) Pedestrian lights & zebra crossings don’t mean a thing. They more are just a suggested place and time for you to considering crossing the road. Most cars ignore zebra crossing completely, and it’s not uncommon for a car to run a red light and almost knock over a few good looking Aussies.

10) There are just 3 kinds of cheese — yellow, white, or blue.

So that ends part one of the quirks of Eastern Europe. I have a list of about 20 more, that I hope to finish putting to together over the next couple of days. So keep posted. And remember to comment or I’ll shoot you in the head with a quality Romanian paint-ball gun :-P

The Bansko Train

A couple of days ago we caught the super narrow gauge train from Plovdiv to Bansko. Now when I say super narrow gauge, I actually mean, “The train track rails are so narrow compared the width of the train that I’m surprised it stays on the rails.” This is a really really old line that winds its way up through mountains. This train is definitely, definitely, definitely, the coolest and most scenic way to get to Bansko. If you are ever in Bulgaria I absolutely recommend it. It was well worth the 7 Lev (~$6AUD)! Actually, we were supposed to get a group discount of about 1 Lev, but couldn’t ask for it since we can’t speak Bulgarian :-P

What: Old-school train trip through the mountains
Where: From Plovdiv to the Bansko ski resort (actually Bansko is the 2nd last station)
How Much: About 6-7 LEV Each.
How Long: About 6 hours in total
How Often: 3 times a day, in both directions.

Here’s a VERY rough map of where he train goes. View in a larger map

Here’s what the train looks like:

And check out how narrow the rail gauge is!

Oh, and the diesel smoke looks and smells awesome.

Scenery

It was the scenery that made this train trip the best train trip ever. The track winds its way up many mountain valleys, through tunnels, across open plains, alongside rivers, through traditional Bulgarian villages, farms, & woodlands. This is definitely the best way to see Bulgaria at its most authentic!

Life in the Bulgarian mountains is so different to that in Australia. Fences are almost non-existent. Instead the locals were mostly sitting out in the fields watching their cattle, sheep, or goats graze. Farmers working in their fields would sit their kids up on the bank to wave at us as we chuffed on by.

There was a great mix of old and new technology. We often saw a near new car stuck behind a horse and cart on the roads. Somer farmers seemed to have some high-tech, diesel powered grass cutter, but were still using horse and carts to get around.

There were many farms along the way too. From cotton, to hops, to grapes, to tobacco, to corn (& for you Tom, indigo & coffee :-p) Looks like a really traditional way of life.

So, if you want to get a good look at genuine Bulgaria away from the touristy cities and see some beautiful villages, forests, and people I highly recommend this train trip. It was a bit disappointing that our stop was a town that has recently been developed into a ski resort. If I ever to do the trip again, I would love to get off at one of the small villages along the way. Maybe try to find some lodging with some of the local Turks? Maybe hitch up the road? That would so push me out of my comfort zone, but would be awesome to the max!

Occupational Health & Safety

Occupational health & WHAT? This is a phrase that you would have a lot of trouble translating into Bulgarian. It’s not that the words don’t exist, it’s that there is absolutely no concept of public liability on this train (or even this country!) The train is definitely safe, but they let you do whatev! Ok, this train was travelling pretty slow (no faster than 30-50km/hr), but still. Here are some examples:

1. At most train stations there is no overpass, you walk across the tracks to get to your train.
2. On Australian trains you are not allowed to “ride on the gap” — that is to travel on the step between carriages. I would have travelled for at least an hour standing outside between carriages. It makes the scenery (and ground) feel so close!
3. Nobody cares about what percentage of your body is hanging out the window while the train is moving. It’s a “poke your head out at own risk” kind of thing. The windows opened up a long way, so I spent most of the 5.5 hr journey with my head (and camera) poking out. I think I got a mild case of wind burn from this trip, maybe? Could be sunburn, but this ranga doesn’t appear to get burnt in the Northern Hemisphere sun.

Back to the train… You learn very quickly that you need to keep an eye on what is coming up. I remember having to shout out “ROCK, ROCK!!” or “TUNNEL, TUNNEL!!” to Elly a couple of times Also, the telegraph wires were sometimes a bit too close to the carriage for comfort.

4… Why close the carriage door when you can leave it open and look out? It was quite relaxing to sit in the step of the door and take in the scenery. I love how the conductor standing on the platform just gave a friendly wave to Elly & Stu while they sat in the doorway as the train left one of the many stations.

Elly suggested that next time we should try and ride on the roof. Although, I wonder what would happen when the train goes through a tunnel :-P

I’m going to miss this lax of heath and safely when I get back to Australia. I hate how pedantic Australians are about safely. Although, it’s not really safety, but more a fear of being sued. Here in Bulgaria it appears to be more of a “do anything at your own risk” policy. Although, I do think they have taken it too far. Like the guy this morning who was chain-sawing firewood in the play area of a local kindergarten while the kids were enjoying recess only metres away. Although, I guess kids here have a much better danger-o-metre here!

But don’t worry, the train was moving really slow and nothing really felt dangerous. It was more that we could do the things that we actually wanted to do without getting in trouble for it You should be so jealous Dan!

Blogologue

I hope to do some more blogging soon! We’re hoping to catch an overnight bus or train to Romania tonight (Update: we’re on that train), so if my netbook battery lasts until then, you might have some more blog posts to read soon :-)

Remember that people who comment on blogs are ridicuously ridiculously good looking, and people who read blogs without commenting are the scum of the intertubes and should have their fingerprints burnt off with a Bulgarian cigarette lighter. Only kidding… Or am I? :-)

Oh, and here are some more cool photos of the trip:

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded a heap more photos to facebook here.

Firstly, I was the only English speaker on the whole bus. So that was the first time in my life I wouldn’t have been able to talk to anybody around! The driver could say a few words in English, as could the hostess. Yes, you heard me right — the bus had a hostess. Who regularly bought us refreshments of water, tea, coffee, crappy packaged cake, etc. Also, this 5.5 hour bus trip only cost me 35 lira ($26.15 AUD) — BARGAIN! Oh, and that was with a good quality company — there are some dodgy looking ones out there! I couldn’t even get from Launceston to Hobart on crappy Redline for that.

So why was the bus trip so awesome? Well the bus companies slogan describes it pretty well — “Crazy Holidays”! The scenery was really intriguing because this was the first opportunity that I had to see what regular Turkey & Bulgaria looked like. There wasn’t anything super super amazing about the Turkish scenery, but everything was slightly different enough to keep me wanting to look out the window. Here’s a picture of one of the many pictorial road signs. Many cool points to the first person who can explain what the sign means. Also, notice the nuclear cooling tower in the background.
You should also be able to infer what side of the road you drive on here.

Nuclear Reactor #1

Two or three hours after leaving Istanbul, we drove past an actual nuclear power plant. This is probably a non-event for the locals, but a first for me. Back in Australia I was recently wiki-reading about the Chernobyl & Three Mile Island incidents. If you don’t know much about them, I really suggesting looking them up! I was almost speechless after reading in detail about Chernobyl — how it melted down, and what they did to “fix it” is so crazy! I’m guessing this one is ok though?

The Border Crossing

I’ve often seen border crossings on TV, but I’ve never experienced one myself until this bus trip. Since I was on a respectable bus company, the crossing was almost uneventful. Although, my passport took the longest to process. Everybody on the bus in front of us, had to stand with their own bags outside of the bus. But not us. The Bulgarians opened the cargo doors, had a really quick look from the outside, closed them, and we were on our way.

Humphrey, the tobacco smuggler

The most bizarre aspect of the crossing would have to be, what I’m calling, “no-mans-land”. That’s the area between the Turkish & Bulgarian borders. All it is a big car park & a big duty free shop that sells cigarettes & spirits. I think the only reason we stopped there for 15 minutes was so that everybody could buy duty free cigarettes. Everybody smokes over here, but I’ll probably write more about that in another post.

I think there is a limit to how much goods (ie. cigarettes, spirits, coffee, etc) each person can bring into the country. I’m pretty sure that I was already well over the limit for how much coffee you can import, but whatev! Since I didn’t smoke, I had three different people ask me to take tax-free cigarettes into Bulgaria for them. I had no idea what the first lady who asked was saying, so I walked away from her.

Then the bus driver asked me. By now I had worked out what these people wanted me to do. The driver handed me 66 euros ($108AUD) and a big armful of cigarettes. There would have been about 25 packets of cigarettes in my arms — so they were pretty cheap! Later the hostess also asked me to do the same, but I managed to explain (by doing the arm actions of driving) that I already had done that for the driver. So, I’m pretty sure that we didn’t “technically” do anything wrong, but those cigarettes so weren’t for my use :-P

My passport took the longest to process, but it still only took a minute. I was the only one who passport got stamped, and got asked questions: “Where are you going”, and “How long for”? Except for what it says in Loney Planet, I have no idea what my entry conditions are. All I know is that there is a stamp in my passport with Cyrillic characters on it. But whatev, I’m here now :-)

Bulgaria

As soon as we crossed over the border, EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, looked different. The quality of the road was worse, there were falling down buildings everywhere, there were people in farms farming, all of the signs were in Cyrillic characters, and everything just looked older and less maintained. I instantly decided that Bulgaria was a much cooler (in a weird communist Chudleigh way) than Turkey :-P.

So that was the bus trip. It was awesome to see Elly & Stu standing at the bus stop waiting for me. Hooray! I could finally speak English again! Heaps more has happened since then, so I hope to write more soon :-)