Tag: evs in bulgaria

Things you don’t mention when people ask you what your day was like

You absent-mindedly stick your pinky finger in your ear to scratch it, happily chilling in Slaveikov Square, when a middle-aged colleague from the library passes you by and whistles at you to catch your attention and greet you. You essentially just nod a hello back, finger still firmly lodged in your ear. You’re left thinking that she greeted you just to let you know that she was there to witness you with digging for gold with your pinky.

There is a Dutch princess – apparently the patron for libraries or something similar to that – visiting Sofia City Library’s Children’s Department to present the fresh Bulgarian translation of the children’s illustrated book she recently finished writing. You tremble at the idea of actually having to meet her, because you’re simply clueless about how it would be proper to address her: “would Your Highness be too strong?”, you think to yourself. “Would shaking her hand without, err, kissing it or something, be too… normal?” It even occurs to you that, maybe, if you greeted her in just her first name, no titles or anything attached, you would do what no-one had ever dared to do before; talk to her normally, for what she really is; just another human being. For that she would deeply admire you – just like in the movies. In the end, you don’t get within 5 metres from her.

You see in the distance the guy who met one of your roomies in a big party the previous night, with whom he stayed out for the whole night and with whom they apparently hit it off quite well. He’s probably waiting for your roomie, judging by the three red carnations in his hand. By coincidence, it’s the same spot you’re supposed to meet another, completely unrelated, friend. You pretend you don’t see him; the least you want is an awkward exchange in the spirit of :

-“Hey, how are you?”
– *obviously aware of the fact that you noticed the flowers and still at the stage of deciding whether he should address the small scarlet-coloured elephant in the room* Good… eheheheh, good. And you?”
–“….”

Good. You avoided that. For half a minute or so all he can see of you is your back. You doubt he can recognise it as it being yours or, even if he can, if he would be willing to make the fact known to you. When you discreetly turn around, your roomie has already arrived and met up with the guy, is holding the flowers and is vividly exchanging with him whatever it is you’re supposed to say in such situations –  I don’t know what it is, sorry. You pass them by and greet them both; now there isn’t just a single person sitting there, it will finally be both socially appropriate and desirable by everyone for you to just say hi and continue walking with no further questions, exclamations or general interaction. You start moving towards them but not exactly; you know, in an angle from which you they can see you but you’re not actually walking in the middle of the air holding them apart.

Neither of them notice your very briefly outstretched hand somewhere in their vicinity.

You do not change your course of bipedal locomotion.

All of your groceries have run out and you’re too bored to actually buy more.  But is it really all of them or was that just a matter of speech? Not quite – you still have eggs and potatoes left. Your hate for eggs has been stuff of legends before, but you’ve somehow been forcing yourself to eat them in the past few months. It begun when you needed extra protein in order to hopefully see that exercise you’ve been putting your upper body through have some tangible results. That dream has been left in the orphanage of abandoned dreams (that was a horrible image, I’m sorry);  you don’t life your weight around at a rate where extra protein would be of any use anymore – let’s just put it like that – but the “fake it till you make it” part has paid off at least psychologically speaking and now eggs don’t sicken you as much as they used to.

The frying pan is hot. You reach for an egg but your fringers go through the shell as if it was yogurt. You curse everything that’s holy (and not so much) that made it normal for people to eat chicken menstruation. You empty the contents of the egg spilled in the carton into the pan. You check on the potatoes that you fried before and left wrapped in paper in order for it to soak the excess oil, the way you’ve always seen your mother do and you yourself do but your flatmates strangely mocked. You immediately decide it wasn’t such a good idea to use toilet paper instead of the normally used paper towels: the majority of the potatoes are now covered in filmy, greasy tree pulp. You spend the next 10 minutes removing chewy stuff from your food. The sensation of futility is comparable to peeling apples with your bare hands – no, not normal apples, that’s not so bad – maybe the candied ones you’d buy at the πανηγύρι. You resign and end up eating maybe half of them, paper and all, and throwing the rest  out, something for which you are not at all proud.

While writing these lines you’re still unconsciously picking out little pieces of paper from between your teeth with your tongue.

Three Months in Sofia

It’s been three months and three days (correction: one week by the time I got to actually finish writing this) since I first set my foot in Bulgaria for the first time. I tried writing something lengthy but it just didn’t come out right. My ability to write lengthy, journaly posts that might be of any interest to readers has become worse with time, especially during this year and the one past. Part of it may be that I started writing my morning pages last July, so the canvas for my thoughts put into words ceased to be The Dimension and became The Page.

I’m also suspecting that I have got more used to writing creatively on paper than doing so on a computer, exactly because the ritual of the morning pages allows me to write freely. Conversely, whenever I write a post, I feel restricted: by the context, the medium of the blog, by what I know I’ve said before, even by my readers’ expectations. I have also noticed a distinct difference in style between when I write longhand and when I type. I remember reading something about that in The Shallows and how Nietzsche also noticed he started writing differently, less eloquently perhaps, when he began using his typing ball. Maybe I should have my posts as scans. :O Anyway, I digress – which wouldn’t be a problem if this wasn’t a post!

So, let’s get to the point.

Sofia, Bulgaria
Sofia, Bulgaria

Things I thought back in January I would be doing now :

    • mainly reading books borrowed from the library;
    • practicing languages by playing games like Okami;
    • refining the Extended Tandem website for the Sofia City Library, my personal project idea for attracting readers;
    • meeting with my tandem partners for Spanish and German;
    • doing Memrise exercises every day for Bulgarian;
    • be able to have a basic conversation in Bulgarian;
    • cooking every day, or at least every two or three days;
    • continually improving my English conversation class workshop;
    • reading American magazines;
EVS dinner prepared by Hilal, Christina and Niina - Miro and Boyan's place
EVS dinner prepared by Hilal, Christina and Niina – Miro and Boyan’s place

What I’ve really been doing:

  • realising, not without a little embarassment, that us volunteers are being effectively paid more than actual library employees;
  • going out a lot – and I mean a lot, as in I-need-some-time-alone-guys! a lot – together with all the other volunteers we met in the on-arrival training a month ago;
  • due to above reason, not keeping in touch with Daphne as much as she deserves, but trying to keep it as real as possible all the same;
  • exchanging packages with Daphne filled with cookies, books and other goodies – positive aspect of doing your EVS close to home: the possibility of using the coach companies to send packages for dirt cheap;
  • saying yes to as many proposals as possible;
  • hosting multiple people pretty much every week, mainly volunteers who work in other cities in Bulgaria and come to visit (we’re hosting Christina, Niina and Hilal as I’m writing these lines – as I’m finishing up the post, my friend from Heterotopies Myrto took their place in Hostel Shar Planina 55);
  • abstaining from alcohol for fifteen days – my digestion system went completely crazy for that period of time, but I felt great (and rich!) – now I’m back to drinking as usual;
  • postponing/avoiding to find tandem partners;
  • failing to study Bulgarian almost at all and improving much slower than I would have liked, especially after our classes ended;
  • hardly playing any screen-based games at all;
  • playing Dixit with Rian – excellent game;
  • going on excursions;
  • made a Prezi together with Zanda for an education day in the German embassy about the library’s activities (click on the link if you’re okay with Pharrell William’s Happy playing in the background);
  • going running less often, but also trying to integrate bodyweight lifting in my makeshift fitness program, which includes changes in diet – discovering what vegetarian foods are rich in protein is a fun procedure all of its own;
  • shaved my head;
  • enjoying the amazing weather in Sofia – seriously, there was no winter this year;
  • saying dobre a lot;
  • eating ice cream from Confetti – to think I’d have to come to Sofia to try the best ice cream I can remember having;
  • reading much more than what I’m used to ^^J (you can see the number of book reviews I’ve written in the past few weeks), but no books from the library, apart from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test;
  • watching Breaking Bad with Daphne (yes, through Skype/Steam direct connection!) extremely slowly – watching Battlestar Galactica slightly, but not significantly, faster – preferably with Bulgarian subtitles;
  • sucking at watching series;
  • started the Easy Readers workshop, which is looking more and more like it will end up like another Engish Conversation Group – many more people want to practice their spoken English than their reading skills, apparently;
  • I’m not reading American magazines, but I am trying to find new and exciting ways to use my Kindle.
Paula's Farewell '80s Party - Rasa, Niina, Zanda, Florian, Maria and Freddie Mercury
Paula’s Farewell ’80s Party – Rasa, Niina, Zanda, Florian, Maria and Freddie

What I’ll be doing soon:

  • weekly English classes/activities for refugee children and teens from Syria;
  • tandem(!!!) – actually I think I already found a Bulgarian guy who wants to learn Greek – perfect;
  • filling out my 100 Obekta passport – I’ll write something about that soon;
  • finding ways to make living together with three (usually more!) people sustainable in the long medium run;
  • making that library-centred Tandem website;
  • making some more qbdp episodes – it’s time;
  • spending lot of time outside – the good part of climate change, or just call it spring;
  • visiting more of the surrounding countries, including more places in Bulgaria – good thing we have lots of volunteers to host us all over;
  • that includes Greece, and I hope I’ll get at least some of the volunteers to join me!

This post is well overdue but at the same time I feel like I’m missing something crucial. Ah well, let’s post it anyway.

Spanish Reading Room in Sofia City Library, complete with siesta-ing Spaniard. Will this be what our remaining six months will look like? The answer depends more or less on our initiative; such is the nature of the EVS project...
Spanish Reading Room in Sofia City Library, complete with siesta-ing Spaniard. Will this be what our remaining six months will look like? The answer depends more or less on our initiative; such is the nature of the EVS project…

EVS in Sofia City Library: The Quest for the Seven Lakes

Repost from EVS at Sofia City Library Blog, originally posted on 25/3/’14.

It was in our on-arrival training, from Nasko, that we first heard about this place, the Seven Rila Lakes:

There aren’t seven of them in this picture
but you’ll just have to trust us.

Our Lithuanian EVSer friend Rasa, who we also met on the on-arrival, really wanted to see the lakes, so she motivated us to go see them this weekend. Maria and Vicente were unavailable in one way or another, so it was Rasa, Zanda and me who set out to visit the lakes. The decision and “plans” were made only the day before. We met up near our house in Opalchenska, but then had some problems figuring out how we could: 1)  make the first step out of Sofia 2) get to the lakes in the first place. Googling around for help wasn’t so useful, either… Sometimes it is like this in Bulgaria: the way to get to any given place is not so obvious, and often even Google isn’t enough for a clear answer, or, even if it is, things can always turn out to be very different in reality, as you’ll soon realise from this “little” story.

The beginning of our trip was just a taste of what was to come: we lost some time in changing buses and getting lost in the outskirts of Sofia that were closest to where we thought the bus or train station of Ovcha Kupel would be, but found no station. Somehow, mostly thanks to our luck and unexpectedly understanding hurried directions in Bulgarian, we got to Gorna Banya train station, where we got our train to Dupnitsa for 4,5lv each.

Gorna Banya railroad lady.
Picture by Zanda.

1.5 hours later, we were sitting outside Dupnitsa’s train station eating shopska salata and kartofi sas sirene (4,5lv for both), mulling over what we should do next. Our original plan for visiting the lakes, after all was said and done, was to be home not too long after sunset, because Boyan (another EVSer we met in the on-arrival who lives in Sofia) would be having his birthday party that night and we really didn’t want to miss it. It was already 2 o’ clock, however, and we had no idea how much longer it would take us to actually get to those lakes. Finally we discovered a bus to Sapareva Banya, the town closest to the lakes, and hopped on for another 1,40lv, which, contrary to all our previous experience, we paid before getting off the bus, and with no physical ticket left to us to prove it.

Obyadvam v Dupnitsa.
Composition by Zanda.

So there we were. Sapareva Banya. Home to the Balkans’/Europe’s hottest/something-est geyser (as we briefly had the chance to discover through the bus’ windows) and other hot-water-related activities – it really is a thing in Bulgaria. We were there, but the lakes were still a long way away. If you looked at our relative position using Google Maps, you’d think we were rather close, but we had to also move vertically and somehow climb that imposing mountain right in front of us… We knew there were ski lifts involved, but that was about it. We looked for help and directions in a nearby government building, where after looking around for a bit we eventually found the guard (I had to struggle to keep a straight face while writing that). We asked him “how go seven uuuuh, lakes”, or the equivalent in Bulgarian, and he replied that there was no minibus (as we had let Lonely Planet make us think!) and that the only way up was by taxi. “Where taxi?” He pointed towards the entrance of a shop.

The “taxi” was actually the telephone number of the taxi driver, stuck on the window of the shop. We decided we would ask the man to help us call. We went back and this time there was also a woman there. When we asked her if she knew English, she replied “Deutsch!” I happily started talking to her in German (I wasn’t expecting I’d have to do that when I got out of bed that morning) and explained the situation. She called the taxi for us, offered us coffee, and warned us that the ski lifts might have stopped working soon. We agreed on the price with the driver (18lv to the ski lifts) and rode off for the 15km or so of winding road to the ski lifts.

The taxi driver was a peculiar but funny guy: in his late-thirties, wearing a Metallica t-shirt and having a Beatles song I’d never heard before playing on his taxi’s sound system. I think he misunderstood my saying at some point “mnogo barzo” (very fast): I meant that our visit to the lakes would be very quick, as a reply to something relevant that he had asked me, but he probably interpreted that as permission to start racing up the mountain. He didn’t miss a single opportunity to tell us, in a mixture of lively Bulgarian and very bad English and even German when we didn’t seem to recognise the words in Bulgarian, all about Sapareva Banya -in which he apparently had the monopoly of taxi driving- and the mountain up which we were riding the taxi. He kept repeating the words skala and kamak. At some point he stopped to show us a rock in the shape of a turtle, which when seen from a different angle also looked like a human face. Apart from that, the view was breathtakingly beautiful, on a mountain side dense with forest.

Turtle Rock

After we almost crashed on the way, we finally reached the ski lifts. It was 4 o’ clock. 2 hours before, Zanda had said that “she had forgottten there had been a winter this year”, because the weather was so warm that day, all the trees had already blossomed etc. 2 hours later, we were surrounded by snow and people were actually taking the ski lifts for their intended use. We were greeted with the announcement that the ski lifts would be working for just another half hour. That meant that we had to make the decision there and then: give up and go home, cursing our luck, or take the ski lifts and stay on the mountain for the night in a ski lodge we were assured would not cost more than 15lv per person.

We went up.

 

“No time to explain – hop on!”
View from the ride.

So we reached the “base camp” for exploring the lakes. But guess what? None of us had expected that our little excursion would involve getting anywhere near snow. Yeah, 2200 or so metres above sea level in March? Never would have guessed… It was still relatively warm (or should I say, not too cold) because the late afternoon sun was still shining and making everything look beautiful, but we were nowhere near prepared enough for this. Thankfully, we all had at least a jacket of some sort wtih us, but no ski boots or anything for hiking in snow. Because the other thing we didn’t really know was that in order to reach the lakes from the hotel/lodge/chalet you had to walk for at least an hour or so. We tried walking up the mountain outside the lodge in our normal shoes before it would have got got dark and found out for ourselves that it definitely wasn’t such a good idea. Still, we had great views and it felt really good climbing this winter wonderland.

Migla, migla, rasa, rasa.
Composition by Zanda.
Lodge in the mountains.

What didn’t feel so good was how we had just decided to not go to Boyan’s party. People started calling to see where we were, because we had told mostly no-one that we’d be visiting the lakes, and absolutely no-one that we’d be staying there for the night, and thus miss the party. It felt bad, especially because we just knew that people would believe that we didn’t care about the party… But we had to make a choice. There will hopefully be many more parties in our lives still. Chances of visiting this extremely beautiful place, on the other hand? Hmmm… Still, even when you make choices like these consciously, you can’t help but feel a little bit of regret.

Anyway, the lodge/chalet had all of its cheaper dormitories booked, mostly by annoying little children *Gargamel face*, so we had to take the 100lv per room per night three-bed one, which we managed to haggle to 90lv. But that room… that room! Its biggest problem was the heating – or the lack thereof. Zanda even resorted to using her Russian, which I hadn’t heard her speak before and I gather she doesn’t want to as a matter of principle, to complain to the manager about it. He came to the room and “turned on” the heating, which meant making the radiator from freezing cold to pleasantly warm to the touch. Yes, our room flirted with temperatures not much higher than zero for the duration of the entire night. But at least we had a television to forget our shivers with. Switching the batteries from one remote control to the other, we managed to tune to Animal Planet – the only channel not in Bulgarian or dubbed in Bulgarian – and had baby pandas, the Summer of the Sharks and Aina the elephant lull us to sleep. Meanwhile, the other animals in the room were about to transform into butterflies in their barely warm enough blanket cocoons.

Fortunately, the next day was much better. We woke up early, had breakfast, rented some ski boots from the basement of the hotel and headed out, ready to find those bloody lakes! The skies were clear and deep blue, the snow was blinding white and deep, the view was magical… It was perfect. And then it happened: we discovered the first lake.

Pointing at it, in case you missed it.

It hadn’t seriously crossed our minds that the lakes could  have been frozen. When it did, we comforted ourselves by thinking that if they were, somebody of all the people we met on the way would have told us, or would have tried to stop us from going there. But then it made sense: why would anyone want to stop us when we were showing such determination and conviction? The locals must have thought that we must have known that the lakes were frozen, and that we simply didn’t care.

An hour and a half or so after we started hiking from the lodge, we reached the second lake (we even walked over it) and another lodge next to it. There we had some tea and cherished our moments in the frozen wilderness. Yes, the lakes were frozen, but we had made it, and that was the only thing that counted.

Tea for two, and two for tea… ♪
Composition by Zanda.
Composition by Zanda.

To cut this long story short, by the time we had reached the ski lifts to begin what we thought would be the long way home, we were already happy and satisfied with the way things had turned out.

But the cherry on the cake had yet to come.

Even though we had the taxi guy’s telephone number safely in our phones, we really didn’t want to strain our wallets any further, and so preferred to try our luck with hitch-hiking all the way back, which was the original plan actually. So we signalled to the first car which was looking like it was about to leave the area of the ski lift, ran to it and asked the couple -that could have been our parents- if it would be okay for them to take us to Sapareva Banya. Not only did they take us there, they got us lunch at Hotel Panorama in Panichishte -some of the best food we’ve had while we’ve been in Bulgaria – and told us that they could also take us all the way back to Sofia, since that was their final destination as well. If they were chainsaw murderers, they kept their hobby to themselves.

Another thing that made me personally proud of our contact with this couple was that 90% of our communication with them, like in most of the trip actually, was in Bulgarian. When all you want to do is express you gratitude, you don’t care about how correct your language is; you just blurt out whatever you know, even if it’s just words, phrases, or saying mnogo mnogo vkusno, mnogo mnogo blagodarim vi!

2500g of guyvetch-y goodness for five people…
Only later did we realise that this picture
Zanda took was of the couple that would
buy us lunch and drive us back home to Sofia…
We decided that we should send it to them
to show them our appreciation.

This was our Sedemte Rilski Ezera adventure. It was a very inspiring trip to us, as you can probably tell by the length of this story and the compositions by Zanda (here’s a link to ther facebook album of our trip). For me it captured nicely the spirit of EVS and travelling in Bulgaria: international friends, looking for spontaneous adventure and a more deeper understanding of their host country, at the same time discovering all of its treasures and short-comings and that in the end it’s the people that matter the most. We might not have exactly found what we were looking for, but what we got in return proved to be just as valuable, if not more. And in the end we also got to see Boyan and tell him happy birthday, for his real birthday was two days after the party. Τέλος καλό, όλα καλά.

Oh, and another thing before I sign off that I keep having to learn again and again:

if in doubt, always ask.

EVS in Sofia City Library Blog: EVS On-arrival training in Hisarya

Reblog from EVS in Sofia City Library.

Part of every EVSer’s life is the on-arrival training, a get-together with all the fresh volunteers in the country and a familiarisation with everything he or she needs to know about his or her voluntary service: the personal project, his or her rights and obligations (and those of all involved), how the health insurance works, etc etc. But it’s not just that; if it was, the on-arrival probably wouldn’t be etched on every volunteer’s mind as a definite highlight of the EVS project and some of the best days in his or her life in general.

Some people thought we were actually trainers!
Who else was provided with t-shirts by their
awesome hosting organisation, eh? 🙂
Picture by Petar Markov.
Posing with the library shirts.
Picture by Petar Markov.

Agne, the volunteer who was working in the library before us, had this to say about their on-arrival last year:

All EVS volunteers have to undergo training. On 19-24 July we had our ‘on-arrival’ at the Black Sea resort of Albena, organised by the Bulgarian national agency.There
have been nearly sixty trainees in total – EVS volunteers from projects all over Bulgaria – some of them ‘on-arrival’ like us, others ‘mid-term’.

Four trainers were giving us workshops, supported by several other people from the national agency.

The training, of course, is not just about partying. A typical day included a couple of three-hour sessions, separated by a two-hour lunch break – the latter typically spent at the beach.

I was not the only one thinking the sessions were fun but intense. We did: ice-breaking games in order to get to know each others, our projects & countries of origin; psychology workshops (personality types, negotiations, conflict management); classes about practicalities of
doing an EVS (volunteerism, AXA insurance); plus creative tasks such as designing posters, shooting short films & running for quests all over Albena. […] (full post here)

Presenting Sofia City Library and our project to the group.
Picture by Petar Markov.
Everything’s better with posters and sketches!
Picture by Petar Markov.

In our case, the place was Hisarya, (warning: musical link!), an old town well-known in Bulgaria for its hot springs. It took place from March 7th to March 13th, making it one of the longest trainings ever – lucky us! Our accommodation was Augusta Hotel, a renovated communist era hotel built close to one of those springs and using the water to fill its swimming pool, spas and saunas. Apart from the food, the experience of staying in that place was quite… interesting. Hotels always give me the impression that they exist sort of independently from the rest of civilisation, like places that belong nowhere specific. But that’s another topic entirely.

 

That’s us. Kuba and Ula from Poland; Anna from Austria; Florian from France; Anna, Christina and Dimitris (that’s me) from Greece; Bojan from Serbia; Miro from Slovakia; Veronika from Czech Republic; Corinne from the UK; Niina from Finland; Elena, Paula and Vicente from Spain; Rian from the Netherlands; Zanda from Latvia; Maria from Denmark; Gabriele and Rasa from Lithuania; Hilal from Turkey; Susanna from Armenia and our two trainers Nasko and Maya from Bulgaria! A truly multicultural, European group!

Our trainer Nasko and the EVS project cycle.
A session on intercultural communication, they said…
Picture by Petar Markov.

Meanwhile, there were another 40 or so EVSers having their mid-term training in the hall next door. The “evening activities”, in which we could all mingle together after the tough sessions of the day, were pure pandaemonium. Let’s just say that by the end, our socialising limits had been tested.

Shot from the Uglies Party the mid-terms
prepared for the on-arrivals.
Guess what the dress code was.
All bowed to the superiority of the post-it game!

I’d love to be able to convey at least part of what makes these kinds of things like youth exchanges, and in turn this training, so special, but I find it very difficult to do so: while I was thinking about writing this post, I realised that I have actually avoided writing about such experiences in the past. Being stuck together with complete strangers for a week and by the end feeling you’ve known them forever, doing things that an outsider would probably find silly or weird but you’re greatly enjoying, is not an easy feeling to explain. A friend of mine says its false intimacy. Maybe in the case of youth exchanges it mostly is: after the exchanges, I’m sad to say, it’s impossible to keep contact with everyone. Even the  people with whom you thought you could be great friends, the people you would genuinely love to keep in touch with, are in time forgotten…

This training, however, was happily different in this respect. After the final day of the training, after all the parties were had, all the games were played, all the informal education was, erm, unleashed, all the projects were presented and all the friendships made, we all knew that we would see eachother soon, or at the very least had the possibility to do so; we were all volunteers in the same country, after all…

Indeed, on the weekend after the training, more than half of the group almost magically ended up in Sofia (most of them don’t live here) and what followed was a crazy couple of days. It was also Zanda’s birthday then and everyone was invited to the party. That night we hosted 5 people in our tiny little flat! But for every person that wasn’t in Sofia for these moments, a promise to visit had already been made. A promise we can’t wait to keep.

We all had a secret mission assigned to us
by the trainers in the on-arrival, which we
had to work on throught our days in Hisarya
and presented to the group on the last day.
Zanda’s was to create a collage of everyone’s
national flags. After the training we took theposter
home and this is a picture of it with Florian
in our kitchen. Proof of the impact Hisarya
had on us and our relationships in Bulgaria…

So what did we all take away with us from this experience? Personally, I had the chance to come closer to my own personal goals for the EVS as a whole, got many ideas for improving my own experience and work in the library and of course met great new people. I’d really like my friends and colleagues to include their own versions and impressions of the on-arrival, so the following space is for them.

(SPACE!)

 

This one is the product of  Corinne’s secret mission.
It, too, is hanging on our kitchen wall.

EVS in Sofia City Library Blog: Veliko Tarnovo

Repost from EVS in Sofia City Library Blog.

The first time I heard about Veliko Tarnovo was a few months ago at a Youth in Action exchange in Greece. Two Croatian girls, Lily and Iva, were talking about this Bulgarian city, “the old Bulgarian capital”, in which they had done their Erasmus. I knew even then, before I knew whether or not I’d be coming to Sofia for certain, that if I did, Veliko Tarnovo would not be a place I’d want to miss. The pictures sealed the deal.

And so it happened. Two EVS projects, ours and that of Smart Foundation, the people of which, incidentally, we have our Bulgarian classes together with, we decided all together to head out to Veliko (Bulgarian for great) Tarnovo for the weekend – 4 hours from Sofia by train and 25lv each for the return ticket.

Everybody was sleeping and missed the fantastic winter viewoutside the train window. Well, not exactly everyone…

It’s very difficult to describe this city’s beauty. Imagine a river having created a canyon, and that canyon having its ridges built with fortresses, walls, churches and other old buildings generally accepted to be impressive and grand.

The problem with these stunning locations is that it’s almost impossible to convey with pictures the feelings of awe they inspire you with their multiple layers, bridges connecting their sides, how impressive the fact seems that they even exist. The above picture might look good, but the view to other side looked just as good, not to mention what there was to the side of that and even directly behind me. All I’m trying to say is that I could definitely see why someone would want to build on this spot in particular and then call it his castle and capital. It awoke something ancestral in me, something like the pride of being king of the hill, master of my domain and watcher of all.

We spent Saturday night in Hostel Mostel which turned out to be a fantastic choice: 20lv each for a shared bedroom + light dinner (a kind of curry rice) + a free beer and breakfast. But that’s not all. What really made it stand out for us was the very cheap local beers they had in the fridge in the common area, free for all to pick at will and pay for at check-out for the very low price of 1,30lv per bottle. Let me just say that some of us took better advantage of this deal than others.

 

Hostel Mostel. Innocent enough during the day…
…but a haven for evil drinking games at night!
Raditsa’s baba’s surprise pickled vegetables -great for beer munchies.

In the hostel we met other travellers from around the world who happened to be in Veliko Tarnovo at the same time as us. If we were a multinational group before, all of a sudden we became truly intercontinental: our group of three Spaniards, a Greek, a Latvian, a Dane, an Italian, a German and two Bulgarians was joined by two Argentinians (who had met earlier in their travels and decided to stick together) and an American from New York. We spent the rest of the night together, went out together and didn’t separate until when we had to say goodbye the next day, probably never to see eachother again. Those are the bittersweet moments of the world of travelling by staying in hostels, but also doing youth work and being involved in youth projects, I would add…

The highlights of our two days and a night in Veliko Tarnovo would be:

• Visiting the City Library, home to many old publications and books and staffed by people really keen to show us around:

 

April 1st, 1933

 

Our mentor and trip manager Boris with
the kind and helpful employee of the library.

 

The library doubles as a museum.

•The train from Sofia doesn’t stop directly inside the city so you have to take either a bus or a taxi from the station of Gorna Oriahovitsa for about a 10-minute ride to reach Veliko (the railroad going through the city connects Plovdiv to Ruse and is a different line from the Sofia – Varna one). In the station we saw something no-one else in our group had ever seen before but which all of us found very amusing: a free call-a-taxi service embedded into a coffee vending machine. We’re living in the future!

•Visiting a restaurant recommended to us by the very sweet people of Hostel Mostel, a spot called The Artchitects’ Club. While in summer it might be nice and cozy sitting in the terrace outside as advertised in that embedded link, visiting it at this time of year made it necessary to order more rakiya than we would have otherwise. We filled our grumbling traveller bellies with Chiushi biurek (stuffed peppers pané), parzhieni kartofel c kashkaval (french fries/chips with grated cheese), various forms of meat in giuvetsh, kavarma and kebab forms and other if we left freezing our socks off, at least we left satisfied! The greatest moment of the afternoon? The ringtone of the owner/waitress that served us was The Imperial March.



•Tsarevets, the old fortress of Veliko Tarnovo and probably its most iconic symbol.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Again, the pictures don’t do the place justice, so here’s my suggestion: you go there as soon as possible and experience “the city of Tsars” for yourself. We know we will; just imagine all the above in brilliant green!

A truly international party.