This is Veliko Tarnovo.
Time to change landscapes. I took a morning bus from Plovdiv to Veliko Tarnovo, a little mountain village in central Bulgaria. The ride sucked due to some old European tourist lady waving down the bus right as it was about to leave, and loading it with enough luggage that it took 3 grown men two trips to bring it from her taxi. The luggage included a box with what looked like seedlings in it. Botanical tourism? Maybe...
At any rate, I arrived at Veliko Tarnovo close to noon, and was not in the best of spirits. I didn't sleep well the night before due to mosquitos, and couldn't sleep on the bus due to being crammed between the old lady's four suitcases and seedling box. I was tired, but wanted to take advantage of my time so I decided to visit Veliko Tarnovo's fortress.
The walk to the fortress.
The fortress is quite something, perched upon a hill overlooking Veliko Tarnovo, and the two rivers/bridges around which the village is built. I'm not sure if building a village on four sides of two gorges is necessarily the most efficient idea, but it sure makes for a good tourist destination. The fortress itself has very well preserved walls, which snake around the hill. In the fortress itself the ruins are less spectacular, but the church at the top was pretty awesome. It was recently re-painted with very modern, and I would argue creepy, murals.
View from the fortress.
Creepy murals.
Realizing I was in no physical condition to continue doing anything else, I returned to the hostel and chilled out with an army of Swiss tourists, OK four young guys, and an even younger Dane. The Dane walked around shirtless the entire time and had a mohawk. Somehow it seemed very fitting. The Swiss were extreme sport mountain bikers who insisted upon biking to hard-to-reach places in 35+ degree heat (yeah the cool temperatures didn't last very long). That also seems very fitting. We had a nice discussion about football, and how to become a knight. Our conclusion is that we should start our own knighthood, and when we become famous enough by recruiting enough of our own knights, we can become official British knights and abandon our knight empire.
We had dinner at an enormous restaurant that could probably seat half the village. The restaurant specializes in putting Bulgarian food on pizzas. This basically means the pizzas are humongous, dense, and cheap. I managed to fit a large "pork hock, cabbage, and potato" pizza into me, along with a few beers. It was like $6 or something.
I had a rather sobering moment today. I realized that today marked the official half way point. Moreover, I had to register for classes. A bit of real world inserted into an otherwise very otherworldly experience.
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