I say Barry, you say White

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Well, Burgas... There's not too much to report as most of our days followed a similar pattern - get up late, get lunch, go to beach, get dinner, go to festival, go to bed etc. However, we shall endeavour to elaborate as we can...

On the first full day we actually decided to go and arm ourselves with some reading material. As usual, when you find an bookshop with English literature you are somewhat restricted to the Penguin/Wordsworth classics. So, between us we have two Thomas Hardy novels - Far from the Madding Crowd and Fair Blue Eyes... a good old bit of tragic love story to depress you on the beach.

As for the beach, well, how much can we explain? It had sun.... sea.... and sand! Altogether quite a nice beach, in fact, on the second day, Miguel showed us that further up the beach there was an area with parasols which was indeed quite welcome and it was next to a bar which pleased him.

Later on during the first day, the hostel began to fill up. New arrivals included another four Spanish guys who were friends of Miguel's in Romania and a group of six English guys and an English girl - all in town for the festival! The hostel being somewhat overcrowded, it all became very sociable and along with another two australian guys who turned up we all went out for dinner. Now, any normal tourist resort would love such a huge group of foreigners turning up at their restaurants, but we rather got the impression that they would prefer us to be elsewhere! It took SO long to get a menu, then SO long to get a beer, and then the food just turns up haphazardly and you're not even sure if its what you ordered. We could easily have had three rounds of beer, but gave up after the first fearing that we might be there the whole weekend.

We didn't in fact go to the festival the first night, and dropped the others off at the entrance. The headliner that night was Faith no More (apparently they did a cover of that Easy like Sunday Morning tune?) and we were around long enough to see the mass exodus of people when they had finished playing. We stayed in the park nearby where there seemed to be a bit of a chill out session going on with a few beers and drums and plonked ourselves there with some locals (and bizarrely Italians) for a bit. In the end we had somewhat of an early night in preparation for the big two ahead.

Festival Time

Spirit of Bourgas Festival

As we said, the actual daytime of the festival isn't really worth writing much about - we only ever walked down the road to the beach, which was the same road as to the festival...

Anyway, the first night of the festival had Fun Lovin' Criminals headlining, which were ok, but we were mostly waiting for the one or two songs that we recognised.... The other stages included a dutch stage, salsa stage, jazz + blues stage, reggae/dub stage.... During the Fun Lovin' Criminals, since we were getting a bit, well, bored, I (Fiona) started a kung fu beach fight after having a challenge from a fellow festival go-er. Long story short, this dude turned out to be the lead singer of some Bulgarian band (Sepuko 6), and in the end, he gave me his artist pass for the next day as he no longer needed it which was kinda cool. That's pretty much all that's worth mentioning for the first night!!

The second night of the festival had The Crystal Method headlining and they were pretty awesome (vicky-debatable depending on your music taste), although to be honest it took a while for the crowd to warm up but once it got going, it was great! That night, we spent a lot of time around the Dutch stage and also headed back to the main stage to see a DJ set by Alexander Kowalski. Other than that, a pretty standard festival night... Although, festivals on the beach are really tiring for your calf muscles and your shoes get destroyed - never will the sand be emptied... Even now, a few days after, sand still magically pours out of our shoes when turned upside-down, like some kind of weird beach portal. 'Fraid they may have to be dumped in the bin...

So, the festival was over, and on the Monday we said our goodbyes, to head to our next destination - a spot of mountain recuperation in the medieval Bulgarian capital of Veliko Tarnovo...

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Comments

[Dr]

...you turned back from seeing the legendary Faith no More.....jesus....worth it just for Epic!

[fionavicky]

who is this anonymous faith no more fan? Declare yourself...