I don't know how many of you have tried doing a full food shop in a foreign country? From long and varied experience, I can tell you it's not easy. Back home in Blighty we're used to having our culinary laziness and incompetence indulged in the form of pre-cooked ready meals, sauces in jars, etc etc. Whereas in most other countries there is a general assumption that everyone knows how to cook properly from scratch, and this puts someone like me at a distinct disadvantage. It was therefore a bit of a godsend to find an British expat shop in Sofia called Little London, where I was able to pick up Oxo cubes and Bisto, albeit at grossly inflated post-Brexit prices. My apartment here only has a microwave and a single hot plate, but with a bit of forward planning I was still able to assemble a respectable chicken dinner. Go me.
Sofia's main street for wining & dining is Vitosha Boulevard, named after the mountain to which it leads and which overlooks the whole city. There's a good mix of venues: you have the generic tourist traps and Irish bars, but you also have smaller, quieter places for grumpy old men like me. It strikes me that Sofia could be viable for a long weekend away with all the other grumpy old men (at my age I really need to renounce the phrase "lads' holiday").
On the whole I think I prefer Sofia to Bucharest. It's a bit airier and fresher here, partly due to the altitude, which is 600 metres above sea level. It's nice and compact, very walkable, so much so that I literally didn't use any public transport at all until the metro to the airport for my departing flight. The airport itself gets a two-star review, because check-in didn't open until 90 minutes before departure, and then it took a full hour to get through to the gate. But these are mere quibbles.
Also I should add that all the public transport in Sofia uses an impressive London-style contactless payment system, where you just scan your phone or bank card whenever you get on a bus or tram or metro. Costs are capped at the equivalent of about two quid a day.
I've probably missed out on a lot by restricting my Bulgarian itinerary to just Ruse and Sofia. I'm told that there is great skiing to be had up in the mountains, and by all accounts the east coast is nice too, particularly Varna. But I'm an international jet-setting globetrotter and there's only so much time I can devote to each country. Two new ones ticked off so far on this trip, and a few more to come yet.
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| National Palace of Culture (1981) |
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| Vitosha Boulevard |
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| Puppies confined in the pet shop window all day long. This is despicably cruel. |
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| Monument to Soviet soldiers. I can't translate the graffiti, but by now we all know what the blue & yellow stripes mean. The council has recently voted to move this monument elsewhere. |
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| Alexander Nevsky cathedral. There's a cathedral of the same name in Estonia. Been there too. |
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| CSKA Sofia 1 Krumovgrad 0. Bit dull. At least the ticket was cheap. Attendance roughly on a par with what Gateshead get on a Saturday. They've been European Cup semi-finalists twice, but those days are now very much in the past. |
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| Sofia apartment. A bit ramshackle, but it serves. |
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| Edd vs Food #116 Turkish kebab from Mezza |
