Sofia!

A quick update from Sofia, Bulgaria.

I walked around the city today and I really like it. It reminds me a lot of Vienna - beautiful old buildings, lots of public parks with really interesting statues, the streets are full of trams, there's even the equivalent of Mariahilferstrasse (Vienna's shopping street, here called Vitosha) and a market area that was a lot like the Naschmarkt where I had delicious little meat patties for lunch. Unfortunately the ice cream here isn't as good as in Vienna, or at least I didn't know where the good stuff was. The foreign art museum was interesting; it had great African and Indian art but its European art was kind of comical - a bunch of unknown artists imitating masters and some unknown artists doing god knows what.

Even though I'm further east than I've been yet, Sofia feels more like central/western Europe in a lot of ways. It's a bigger capital, it's got the public transit down, I saw less in the way of knock-off designer clothes worn for the designer name, etc.

I tried to go out last night with people from the hostel but we were rather unsuccessful at locating anywhere to go that wasn't a gentleman's club, casino, or out of our price range. The night was not made better by the fact that I didn't realize I'd switched timezones to GMT+2. Oh well!