I would’ve called this post simply “Balkan Express” but then there’s another Balkan Express post on this blog already! Maybe you can play the track on repeat while reading this post.
In the beginning of October, Daphne and I got a Balkan Flexipass for travelling around the Balkans as a small end-of-EVS celebration and in order to take advantage of Sofia’s good position for travelling in the Haemus peninsula before leaving, or at least for the time being; it’s “for the time being” cause I’m certain I’m going there again soon, and not just to visit the friends I made there who now chose to stay. There’s something about this country… but that’s for another post coming soon.
Anyway, the Balkan Flexipass is a fantastic way of travelling in the Balkan countries: it’s something like InterRail but it’s only valid for… you guessed it, the Balkan countries, including Greece and Turkey, but not including Croatia for some reason. You can choose five, seven, ten or fifteen days of unlimited train travel within 30 days, which is how long the ticket is valid for. The cheapest 5-day ticket, the one we’d been abusing with Daphne to travel between Bulgaria and Greece last summer, comes for 56€ for youth <26–at which age apparently young people stop being young and no longer deserve discounts.
To reiterate: you can travel from Greece to Bulgaria and back with the five-day ticket twice (if you do it in the same month) and still have a day to spare–all for the price of what you’d normally pay for the bus just one-way. It’s an amazing deal and it’s not well-known, so I would strongly, strongly recommend you check it out. Even if you’re over 26, the price would still be about half of what you’d have to pay for taking the bus.
Note: the above links are for 1st class tickets, unlike the cheap tickets we got which were 2nd class. You can get the cheaper tickets at your country’s rail service’s international offices, e.g. OSE’s office at Sina 6 for Athenians. You can also have a look at this .pdf issued by BDZ (БДЖ, Bulgaria’s rail service) that has the complete price list which is the roughly the same across all countries. Note that the price list is in leva (2lv≃1€). Some useful translations: младеж = youth, възрастен = adult, Сеньор = senior, 2 класа = 2nd class
We set out on October 9th and returned back to Sofia on the 18th. We visited Varna, Bucharest, Timisoara and Belgrade along the way, spending two nights in each city apart from Timisoara, where we only stayed a single night, and another two nights on night trains; out of those seven nights spent in cities, we couchsurfed on four of them (props go to Nikolae and Georgii for their hospitality, thanks guys!) including the night we were hosted by Mela, a Romanian girl we got to meet in November last year in the youth exchange Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in Ommen, Netherlands. It feels so good getting to see people from youth exchanges again… It’s the only way to show that it really isn’t “goodbye”, but rather “see you soon”, the way we reassuringly like to tell ourselves. Still so many people around Europe I’d like to see again as soon as possible…
A small personal observation: nobody’s good at saying goodbyes, but everyone’s comfortable admitting to the fact. Maybe it’s a dying skill, lost in everyone but few in today’s liquid life, like cursive hand-writing or film photography.
I’d like to write a lengthy post about all the things we did and all of our experiences, not least as an opportunity for me to write them down and in this way reinforce my memories of them, but I suppose it would be counter-productive and nobody would read a long essay on my travels. Instead, here’s a small list with highlights:
Varna
- The beautiful and super-long early-20th century-style beach park on the Black Sea coast (with a dolphinarium that made me sad by its mere existence). The lighthouse and the looong breakwater reminded reminded me of Mytilini; the high-rise residential buildings and the industrial port on the other side didn’t, though.
- The giant falafel place (the falafels were giant, not the place) in the central square: 400g of goodness for 4lv.
- YohoHostel–super decoration and cozy beds.
- Jasmine Tea House, where we had some of the best vegetarian/vegan food ever. There’s a surprisingly large number of such locales in Bulgaria.
- Our host Georgii, his zoo of a house (I mean that in as good a way as possible) and our discussions on the near future of humankind.
- Want to force people to buy bus tickets? Just have ticket ladies on every bus!
Bucharest
- Crossing the Danube on our way there (video in Greek).
- The Palace of Parliament, one of the largest buildings in the world, with a tragic story of comparable proportions behind it.
- The huge parks (notice a pattern here?) with black and white swans living together in relative peace. They also had an albino peacock and its multicoloured offspring (video of swans perfectly integrated in a multiculti society and albino peacock–in Greek).
- Interesting metro system.
- Grigore Antipa Natural History Museum. Probably the best of its kind in the Balkans.
- Our tech-savvy and collector extraordinaire newbie couch-host Nikolae who bought us food and tickets for getting around the city and refused anything in return!
Timisoara
Just spending the day with friendly and familiar faces was deeply enjoyable. That pizza though…
Belgrade
- Amazing people! Everybody knew English, was happy to help and… gasp… they smiled at you!
- Sun Hostel. Recommended! We have a 25% discount for the next time we stay them and for anybody we might be bringing along with us. What are you waiting for then?!
- Such history, much fortress! wow!
- The city felt a little bit like Athens, only prettier. Let’s face it: if Athens didn’t have Plaka and the area surrounding the Acropolis, it would be a bleak city indeed.
- Be careful: everyday costs, eating and going out etc can feel deceptively cheap with all the prices in dinars and 120 dinars roughly equaling 1 euro. Beware, however: it’s no cheaper than Sofia. In some cases it’s even slightly more expensive.
- Intergalactic Diner! We had dinner (veggie burgers and milkshakes) and breakfast there. Daphne absolutely fell in love with it.
- Nikola Tesla Museum. Need I say more?
- Putin visited Belgrade one of the days we were there and there was a big military parade with lots of fighter planes performing acrobatics etc. Everybody was so excited and watching it on TV. Putin’s very popular in Serbia.
- Belgrade was hands-down my favourite stop in our little Balkan tour and I’m already planning to return for millions of tiny heart-warming reasons.
Finally
- Each of us spent around 200€ for this trip–in my case less cause Sofia City Library paid for my Balkan Flexipass: the final destination of my ticket back was my home city, just like the EVS protocol says, so who cares how many stops there were in between? MANY thanks go to our hosts who fed us, gave us shelter, treated us well and helped us keep our budget low. They will probably never see this post…
- If it wasn’t for Daphne, you wouldn’t be seeing most of the videos and the following beautiful photos from this trip. She bothers with pictorial documentation when I… *gasp again*… don’t feel like doing it so much anymore. But then, later, after the trip is over and our boots made for walking are lying on the familiar floor, I’m happy that the pictures are there. And I’m even moreso because they’re pretty to boot. So… Go Daphne!
- Seriously, everything you know about the Balkans is wrong–even if you live here.
- We did a qbdp episode about this (in Greek) but who knows when it’ll be out? When it’s ready (and it’s ready when it’s ready!) I’ll post a link over here.
