Last Weekend in Bulgaria

We're leaving. Soon. It's pretty hard to believe. Our two years here are almost up. Classes are through, and I gave my final exam last week. Now all we've got left is a LOT of grading, end-of-year paperwork, packing, moving out, and plenty of goodbyes. We've had some difficult times here, to be sure, but lots of amazing ones as well, and I think a lot of experiences that we'll still be processing for years to come. Next Sunday we're heading out for our month-long European adventurefest, so this was our last full weekend in Bulgaria. Many of our friends went to a big outdoor music festival, but it wasn't really our thing. I wanted to go to the Black Sea for the weekend or do an overnight hike. The reality that we were leaving in a week intruded on these plans, and we settled for one day in the mountains, and one day to get stuff done, which led to a busy weekend.

There's plenty of good hiking nearby on Vitosha (theoretically we could walk from campus, but a 30 minute drive is better), and an hour+ away are great hikes in the Rila mountains. I always like to go to new places though, and there was one major mountain range in Bulgaria that I hadn't hiked in yet: the Pirins. Situated between the ski-resort of Bansko to the north and the little wine village of Melnik to the south, they have Bulgaria's second-highest peak (Vihren at 2914m) and are delightfully rugged due to their glaciated past.  It's a 2.5-3 hour drive down to the Pirin range, which is why I haven't been hiking there yet (well that and the fact that during almost all of the school year there is too much snow for easy hiking). This was my chance.

Driving down after work on Friday, we spent the night in Bansko so we could get a morning start on our hike.  Our decent hotel room including breakfast was only 40 leva (off-season prices)!  Meanwhile our acceptable dinner at a schmaltzy and touristy mehana was 75 leva! Rarely have I paid twice as much for dinner as for lodging in the same town...oh well.
We drove over to the nearby village of Dobrinishte, which has a single ski lift that also provides access to some great hiking. 30 minutes on the lift carried us from deciduous forest at Hizha Gotse Delchev to sub-alpine krumholz and the beautifully situated Hizha Bezbog. Very nice.

Hizha Bezbog, in the Pirin Mountains near Dobrinishte, Bulgaria

We hiked a few hours through excellent mountain landscapes.

Djangal Peak, 2730m, in the Pirin Mountains

I wish we'd had more time. The lift stopped running at 4:30 in the afternoon, which is reasonable in the winter but dumb in the summer when it is light out until well after 9 o'clock. If we missed the last lift, we would  add 2.5 hours of steep (and fairly unattractive)  downhill walking on a ski access road.  The timing of the lift meant we had a farily short outing, but it was still excellent.
At the turnaround point for our hike we decided to go skinny dipping in Big Valyavishko Lake. This is not the coldest water I've swam in, but at 2280 m (~7,500 ft) it wasn't exactly tropical. At least there was no ice floating in it. Luckily it was windy and overcast, and we had nothing to use for a towel. :)

Big Valyavishko Lake, with two islands. Nice.

View East towards Djangal Peak from Big Valyavishko Peak

Swimming in the lake. It was chilly. I swam to the island, just 'cause.

Zoom in of above picture. You can perhaps appreciate from our faces how cold it was.

 
After our dip and air-dry, we realized we had 1:50 to hike back to Hizha Bezbog (and the ski lift) or we'd miss the lift down. It took us 2:30 to cover on the same distance on the way here, and we hadn't exactly been lollygagging.  Unfortunatley, the Hizha was only about 250 ft lower than our lake, meaning we couldn't even enjoy much of "it'll be faster going downhill" speed boost.  Time for a forced march. We hustled up the hills, and cruised on the flats, even running a bit on the downhills until Shannon's feet screamed at her to stop. Neither one of us really thought we could make it. But somehow we did...sweaty and breathing hard but with 10 minutes to spare. Woot!

The rest of the day was uneventful...30 minutes down on the lift, 20 minutes driving down on a windy mountain road, then 3 hours drive home, mostly on neglected and pot-hole ridden Bulgarian "highways." Note to folks living in BG: Google Maps will suggest that it is faster to go to Bansko via Velingrad (instead of Blagoevgrad). Don't believe Google. I didn't really, but I was curious to see the other route. The Velingrad route is about 30 minutes slower but much more taxing driving. The roads are in much worse condition and a lot windier. On the plus side, the Velingrad route has little traffic and is quite scenic, especially in the gorge between Velingrad and Septemvri. The portion west of Velingrad was interesting also, as it seemed like an area of Bulgaria that time forgot, with (I think) Pomak villages (mosques and all) old hunched over ladies in kerchiefs working the tobacco fields, and old men wasting away the day on a bench in town. Interesting byway, to be sure.

Today we had a productive day. I got up early (for a Sunday) and did laundry. Then we went downtown and did some shopping. We wanted to pick up some last minute Bulgarian souveniers. We went back to the Ladies Market, which had been the seen of some very frustrating cultural faux pas and/or "neither of us speak the other's language" miscommunications when we first went there in October of 2009. Now we understand the culture better, and our Bulgarian is as good as it will ever be. For no particular reason, we ended up at the shop of the same woman that refused to sell to us 2 years ago, after we offended her in some way. We were more careful this time. We bought pottery from her. We also bought pottery from her neighbors, but we were sure to wait until we completed one sale before we started another, lest it appear that we were trying to play one saleslady off another.
Then we headed over the gift shop of the Bulgarian Ethnographic Museum, where we bought some more pottery (more expensive, but we like some of their styles better). We also bought all kinds of other Bulgarian trinkets that suddenly seem important now that we're leaving. Last item on our souvenir agenda: art. Mike and Kate have lots of paintings from a local artist, and we've admired their work for 2 years. Yet whenever we saw the art sellers by Nevsky Cathedral, we never saw anything we liked. We were determined today. Past the booths selling old Bulgarian war medals and Russian/Bulgarian nesting dolls, we found the painting stalls. We eventually found Stoyan, dealer of some nicer work, including our favored artist, Rusalina Mihailova. We didn't find the exact thing we were looking for (a landscape of a cute Bulgarian village that we had visited...all of her works on sale today were of places we hadn't been), but we were both taken by a nice oil painting (framed and on canvas for only 50 leva) of some rowboats, so we have some art now. 

Sunny summer day in downtown Sofia.

The souvenir vendors near Nevsky Cathedral (the gold domes of the Cathedral are in the background).

Enough shopping...time to get to work. [Well, after a burrito (shannon) and duner (Jeff).] We found ourselves a table at an outdoor cafe in the park near the National Theater "Ivan Vazov" and I busted out all my final exams. Shannon graded multiple choice questions (THANKS SHANNON!) while I worked on the short answer. After a while a classical music quartet set up and played an hour-long concert at a summer festival stage right next to our cafe. It was about as pleasant a day as you can have while grading final exams.

The National Theater from our cafe.

Shannon, wielding her red grading pen.

Fountain in the park.

 It was a little less fun when the second act turned out to clowns. Seriously. Clowns aren't any less creepy when they're speaking in a language you don't really understand. Eventually the clowns drove us away, off to another favorite place, Pizzaria Ugo, where we graded and ate pizza and salad.
Hiking, shopping, grading, and even some laundry. It was a good, productive weekend.

We topped it off with yet another item that I really wish I had a picture of. We were waiting to turn left from the Billa corner onto Malinov (a very busy intersection), waiting next to the meager excuse for a carnival that was currently occupying the vacant lot formerly covered by the Balkanski Circus. As I got ready to turn, I saw a horse headed my way. Half-starved horses are not so rare in Sofia, but usually they're pulling a horse cart. This horse was was running free, running fast, and running at me. It came from across Malinov, near the Shell station, from the lane of on-coming traffic. It careened around idling cars, then bolted across Malinov, heading straight for us. I quickly dug for my camera, but only managed to capture this shot. Notice the blurry leg moving out of the frame to the left. I don't think I've ever almost been run down by a stray horse before while sitting in my car at a major urban intersection.

There's a lot going on here. Foreground: crappy carnival. Background: Vitosha mountain. Far left: A HORSE running down the street.