Bulgaria Hysteria

In this installment of Katie and Chris conquer Europe, we visit Sofia the capital city of Bulgaria. 

Robbie is often shunned into small boxes to enjoy his death sticks

We clearly made a mistake inviting the Canadians along as their suggestions are for things like all day kayaking trips or climbing a mountain. Whatever happened to just sitting? Sitting is the best. Katie was naturally on board to climb Mount Vitosha, so without wanting to seem like the "indoor kid" I agreed to climb the beast. At the top of the mountain is a waterfall so we all brought our swimsuits along in case we had a chance to swim in the lagoon like we did in Puerto Vallarta. Spoiler alert. We didn't swim and the hike was much longer than I thought it would be so I ended up hiking up that monster in a mesh swimsuit. You know what you shouldnt wear on a 6 mile mountain hike? A mesh swimsuit. Classic stupid Chris. 

If this picture was bigger you could see the screaming agony in my eyes

On the hike we ran into two Belgians who were in town for the weekend because their 15 year old kid was in the European Junior Basketball Championships. They jokingly invited us to come along but unfortunately at the time we had a pub crawl planned for that night. After we parted ways we, of course, cancelled our pub crawl, bought five yellow shirts, and scrappily decorated them to cheer for Belgium, specifically for this high school kid (Neils) whom we had never met before. There were about 30 fanswho attended the game between Belgium and Georgia, so imagine this kid's face when 5 of them were loud North Americans, covered in black marker, furiously cheering for Belgian domination. It was pretty hard to miss us. Thanks entirely to our support, Belgium defeated Georgia. You're welcome, Neils.

Our allegiance can so easily be bought. Go Belgium! (and USA)

After our victory over Georgia we created our own pub crawl and picked a couple bars to hit up. My favorite was called Haramba and was located down a hidden backalley. The door to the bar was locked but unlike a speakeasy there was no person manning the entrance to let people in. The only way to get in was to wait until someone left and grab the door before it closed. When we finally slipped in we found that Haramba had absolutely no electrocity and the entire bar was lit by candles, even the bathroom. Every so often a flame would go out and the lone bartender would swoop in immediately to light a fresh candle for us. What a great romantic place for newlyweds Kent and Kari.....and their two friends.....and their cousin. 

I've been saying all along that we should have brought Luna with us.
Although she definitely would have set that bed on fire.

In all of our travels, Sofia was the city where we had the most language barriers, with very few people speaking more than a couple words in English. Usually you can count on young people to help you translate but that wasn't the case here. We were at an open air book market and no one could understand what "Harry Potter" was until I said uhhh "wizard" and then traced a tiny lightning bolt on my forehead. The vendor said no but then took off sprinting and returned three minutes with a handful of Harrys. Schmieg settled on the Sorcerer's Stone because it was one of the lightest. Cut to fifteen minutes later when she suddenly yelled out "DAMNIT SCHMIEG! Why didn't you buy the one that featured the BULGARIANS!" Classic stupid Katie. 

Robbie also found a bunch of comic book first editions.
Unfortunately they're also in Bulgarian

Finally many people have expressed concerns for our safety with this trip with everyone in the world being a dick to each other, but we have experienced nothing but warmth and welcome from the people around us. I think these Eastern European countries rarely get American travelers so they're interested to learn more about us. Specifically how much I can bench press. At least that's what I think they're saying, they don't speak English. 

CM