Archive for September, 2011

We weren’t able to get a seat on the overnight train from Sofia to Istanbul, so we decided to try the overnight bus. We had read on the internet that many people prefer the bus anyway, and the bus we went for (Metro) was supposed to be pretty nice. Turns out we had been completely spoiled as far as buses go by the deluxe buses in South America. The timing of the trip also turned out to be pretty awful.

We left Sofia at something like 11:45 pm, and tried to get some sleep. Around 1:30 am we pulled into the border between Bulgaria and Turkey. About two hours later we finished all the border business and were able to get back on the bus. We fought to get back to sleep, but had a pretty restless trip and arrived in Istanbul shortly after sunrise at 6:30 am. Of course, this was way too early to check into our hostel and we were exhausted from a very disturbed night and had a pretty daunting task ahead of us in navigating a new, huge, chaotic city to navigate.

We were saved by a very kind local who had been on the bus with us. He saw that we were looking a bit lost and not only explained how to get where we were going, but walked us to the correct tram, and insisted on buying our ticket so that we didn’t have to use the bus station ATM. This immediately put us in a state of mind to love Istanbul, and we were not at all disappointed. We made it to our hostel after a fairly long, but very scenic tram ride and a short walk, dropped off our bags and headed back out into the city for a few hours until it was late enough to check in.

Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing wrong with the bus (except that the entertainment system they advertised didn’t work), but it was nothing like the overnight buses we got used to in South America. Those have big, comfortable seats, movies, snacks, and a fairly quiet, undisturbed night. In fact, those you can count as a night saved on accommodation. This experience was much more like staying up all night traveling, but missing all of the scenery.

All I can say is that the bacon I had at our pricey breakfast near the Blue Mosque while we were hanging out waiting to check in to the hostel was one of the best things I have ever tasted.

Istanbul in the early morning

Not so much to note about this one.  In our walking around Sofia we passed by a fabric shop.  There were very few bits of fabric that were suitable for quilting, but we managed to buy one we liked from a very nice lady who spoke no English whatsoever.  Thank goodness for sign language!

It's one piece of fabric, but has several different designs

After our extreme adventure getting to Sofia we were happy to find our hostel and get settled in. We arrived late at night and then took it easy most of the next day. One of those laundry, blogging and recovering kinds of days. We went out for lunch at a kind of Italian-ish restaurant and were completely amused by the constant flow of weddings going on. I’m not sure what it was, but we must have been sitting outside a registry office or something because every ten minutes or so another wedding party would pull up with decorated cars and a big bridal party. They would go inside this shabby building for a few minutes, come back out and leave. This went on the whole time we were eating lunch (and in fact, we saw weddings going on all over the city the whole time we were there).

One of the many weddings we witnessed

It was quite an experience being in Sofia – they use a Cyrillic alphabet, but our map had the street names written in the Roman alphabet, so we couldn’t find ANYTHING.

Pretty useless map if you ask me!

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