immobile in sofia

when kristen and i were on the train from istanbul to bulgaria, i looked out the window at dawn and saw bulgaria for the first time. what i saw was a vast green field with two bushes. so my first impression of bulgaria was as flat, with two bushes.

when we were in our little abandoned town on the black sea, i asked kristen what words she would use to characterize bulgaria. they were something like empty, depressing, and prom. mine were something like empty, green, and vast.

now we're in sofia, and my impressions still include the color green, but now they also include graffitied swastikas, yellow brick roads, and the gates of hell. sofia is by far my favorite place in bulgaria.

i don't like all the nazi stuff all around, obviously. it is very distressing, in fact. we see swastikas scrawled all over signs and monuments and sidewalks and walls all over this city. and we went to a street with a row of vendors, and one of them was selling a little box with a flattering portrait of hitler on it. kristen bought a picture of a funeral from the vendors. i bought some crazy earrings. but neither of us bought anything from the hitler vendor.

the vendors were right next to a statue park with images of people dragging dead people on their shoulders, or screaming in agony whilst breaking free from some sort of cube-like prison, and, of course, a giant pillar with a swastika spray-painted on it.

the statue park was right next to the alexander nevsky church, which is sofia's main attraction, and, after seeing this church, i can honestly say for the first time that a church deserves to be a city's main attraction. this place was INSANE. it was giant and empty and utterly creepy. there were candle-light chandeliers (now electric candles, but they were once certainly wax), that hardly lit up the immense space. there were small windows surrounding the tall domes, but no light came through them. there was an alter with painted images of saints on the panels, but the saints looked so so sad. they were not dramatically sad, but they were more, like, just subtly and deeply sad looking. they all had mostly neutral expressions on their faces, but i couldn't even look at them. there were also lions with pillars coming out of their backs that also looked very, very sad. sad lions. and there were monks singing. and kristen and i were thinking that we'd entered the gates of hell. this was the most sinister church i have ever seen. when we came out of it, the sky looked like it was about to crush us.

the worst thing about being in bulgaria is the fact that i can't move when and where i want to because i'm on crutches. and unreasonably uncomfortable crutches at that. i'm worried that my immobility is going to dramatically decrease my quality of vacation for the next few weeks. adn i'm worried that there might be something seriously wrong with my ankle that should be attended to before a few weeks from now. but there is no way to know and getting home would be so depressing and also expensive. i want to see some things here before i go back there.

anyways, we're changing our itinerary a little bit. we were going to go to macedonia tomorrow, because the lonely planet description looked really good, but now it looks like we'll be going to belgrade, because it is more central (meaning there are more buses going in and out of it than skopje) and the macedonians we met said that skopje wasn't all that interesting. so we'll go to serbia and then we'll stay there for a night and head on over to sarajevo. then croatia. then italy. then home. oh, the other thing is that if we went to skopje, we'd have to bus through kosovo (and maybe albania), which sketches me out a little bit, although i'm sure it is safe as long as we stay on the bus and etc. it's a non-issue anyway; it's just inconvenient.


some guy told kristen that canadian girls were even more beautiful than polish girls; she was flattered despite the fact that we're not canadian.