Sofia

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The night train to Sofia was a surprisingly good night's sleep briefly interupted at 5am by the border crossing. Sofia is a small city, easy to walk around in a day with churches and mosques scattered between lots of normal buildings. The surrounding countryside is green, green, green which, along with the rain, reminded me a lot of Scotland. I spent a day wandering around the city and diving into The Russian Church, Alexander Nevski Catherdral, Natural History Museum, and a Paper Art exhibition in Sofia City Art Gallery to avoid the rain. The next day I headed out to Rila Monastery, a two hour drive from Sofia and even colder and rainer than the city! I stayed at Hostel Mostel which is excellent and deserves a mention - 8GBP will buy you a night's stay with breakfast and dinner + a glass of beer. It's within walking distance of the city centre and has very friendly staff. Due to a failed postcard-sending attempt and a confusing tram, I missed my train to Belgrade the next day and spent 8 hours relaxing in the sun outside the train station waiting for the next one!

When you're a tourist you can get away with wearing flip flops in the rain and taking photos of your food among other things. The photo below is possibly one of the foulest things I've ever eaten. While waiting for my train I decided to get some dinner and pointed at the last slice of some tasty looking rice pie. What looked like mushroom and / or aubergine mixed in with the rice turned out to be definitely not vegetables, and more likely cubes of kindey (or something else with a vile offal-like flavour). The supposed pie crust on top was soft and white, and I'd seen mention of tripe too many times over the last couple of days for this not to be a serious possibility. After a few mouthfuls I could go no further and took the plate back to the waitress with a friendly explanation for my food dilemma, at which point her eyebrows went up and I scuttled off to what must be the world's smallest McDonalds for take two of dinner. Due to it's tiny size they didn't sell veggie burgers (understandable) but rather more alarmingly, they didn't do fries!! I finally settled on borek (cheese in a pastry roll) for dinner (40p) and then returned to the smallest McDonalds for coffee and donought (85p)!

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