Sofia, Bulgaria Pt. III

Harkening back to our group trips last spring, I decided this morning to do the hostel's free walking tour. After two days of walking around the city, I figured that I would have already seen most of the sites, but usually on those things the guide tells you a bunch of quirky stories and little nuggets of history that you couldn't find on Wikipedia. At the hostel beforehand, I met this 25 year old guy that went to the University of Wisconsin, so we had some common ground and ended up sticking together for the majority of the day.

The walking tour was good and finally gave me a reliable opportunity to ask people to take pictures of me and the sites - praise Jesus! No more spewing it broken Slavic trying to get a local to snap one of me: try your hand at "Suhzahlyavam - Ne razbeeram Bulgarski; govoreete lee Angliski?" and see how that goes.

After the tour, I milled around with the Wisconsin guy, Mike, in the flea market outside the big St. Alexander Nevski cathedral. I wanted to buy an Orthodox religious icon or two as interesting art pieces for my - knock on wood - future library room, especially since so many of my books are on medieval history and I have a three-part map of the Byzantine Empire already. Althogh there were countless options, I don't really have any connection to any Saints, so I just got a nice wooden painted portrait of Christ. Also, for their connection to history, I got a second icon featuring St. Cyril and St. Methodius, the two Byzantines sent to Bulgaria to come up with an alphabet for the Slavs (Cyrillic) in order to accelerate their conversion to Christianity and promote the Orthodox church there. All the pieces this guy had are copies of icons in monasteries or churches somewhere around Bulgaria - not that I'd seen the originals however. But, in sharp contrast to the $200somethingplus I paid for my big Arabic painting in Cairo, I was able to get these two pieces for 40 euros; an excellent bargain and further proof of Bulgaria's fantastic price disparity. No wonder its top tourist destination for Europeans right now.

Mike and I grabbed some lunch on one of Sofia's biggest shopping streets and then hopped in a cab to go to the suburb of Boyana, where the National History Museum is. They had a pretty good collection of Thracian, Roman, and medieval Bulgarian stuff and it made for a good hour and a half worth of exploring. After that, we just went back tithe hostel. I had the free spaghetti dinner again, and then we went out to a club with some Brits and New Zealand guys also staying at Hostel Mostel.