Bulgaria Part 1: Belogradchik Fortress

September 10, 2016: 

When given a week in Europe to do whatever you wanted, not very many Americans would say they wanted to spend their time in Bulgaria. Many wouldn’t even know that Bulgaria is in Europe, and some may even ask what country it’s in. Bulgaria has a particular significance to our little family because Carli spent 1.5 years living there as a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She lived there from summer 2013 to the end of 2014, and is now fluent in Bulgarian. She lived for a few months at a time in Sliven, Blagroevgrad, Stara Zagora, Plovdiv, and Haskovo. While Carli was on her mission in Bulgaria, I was Living in and around Novosibirsk, Russia as a missionary. Thanks to my two years there, I speak Russian. Russian and Bulgarian are closely related languages, and though not very many Russians speak Bulgarian, there are many Bulgarians that speak Russian. Since Carli didn’t do a lot of tourism while living here, we wanted to go and see some of Bulgaria’s gems, as well as visit some of the people that she taught. I did most of the research and navigating, and Carli did most of the translating.

Our Rental Car! We even returned it in one piece. 

We returned from Athens on Saturday morning and the plan was to get the rental car right away and take off to Belogradchik for the day. I hadn’t packed my driver’s license in our day bags that we brought to Athens, so we had to make our way back to the mission home to get it before going back to the airport and taking off. We haven’t activated our phones for international use because AT&T doesn’t have a good international plan. This means we’re restricted to WiFi use so when we are driving, it would be like living in the MapQuest era. We reserved a Chevy Spark (or similar), and when we went to pick it up, they guy who helped us said in a Bulgarian accent (If you don’t know a Bulgarian accent, a Russian one will do). “Oh! I have nice surprise for you”. They had upgraded us to a 2015 Ford Fusion. It had Bluetooth, and more importantly, it had a GPS. I think God just knew that without a GPS, we would be a lost cause and end up in Turkey or something. After they moved 5 cars that were parking ours in, we were off.

Not the front gates...

The Belogradchik fortress is something I discovered while researching Bulgaria and places that we could go… I found it on Instagram and thought it looked cool. I won’t pretend to remember anything about it, or it’s history, and I’ll just show pictures of it and how awesome it is. 

Carli's not scared of heights! 

The Belogradchik fortress is probably the coolest castle/fortress that I’ve ever been to. There were literally 4 other people in the whole place when we went. Entrance fee was something like 2 Bulgarian Lev, or $1.20. a person. Thanks to the lack of traffic there, there was no tour guides, or safety rails, or rules, so we could climb all around on top of the big rock towers right on the edge of the cliffs. Carli had to do a handstand for her sister Lynsie because wherever Lynsie goes, she always does handstands. We enjoyed the early evening exploring the fortress, and then drove back to Sofia for some much needed sleep.

This one is for Sister Lynsie Udall!

I need a tripod.

Athens, Greece

September 9, 2016

On September 7^th, Carli and I left Curtis and Shannon’s place in Burbank, and took off on a big jet plane. For real, it was a jumbo jet with a second floor for the premium class. You never would have known though because they wouldn’t even let us common people up the stairs. We flew from L.A. to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Sofia, Bulgaria. We arrived in the evening, and got a taxi to the Sofia, Bulgaria mission home. Carli had helped the current mission president with Bulgarian before they left to start their presidency there, and after they learned we were going to be in Bulgaria, they kindly invited us to stay at the mission home. We got to bed late, and were up early the next day to catch a flight to Athens, Greece.

We found a cheap flight from Sofia to Athens a few months back and jumped on it. We had exactly 24 hours on the ground in Athens so we hit the ground running. Once past passport control, we made our way to the Metro station and rode into town. We came out of the metro at Syntagma square where the Greek parliament building is. Since we left Sofia so early, and had been traveling all day the day before, we were already exhausted, and very hungry. There is a café right on the square, and were surprised at how cheap it was. We got a Greek salad, a Greek sandwich with a side of olives and bread, with water all for 12 euros. It was just what we needed to start the day.

Lunch at Syntagma Square

Because we only had one day in Athens, we got tickets for a hop on, hop off bus. As it would get us to the big attractions that we wanted to see, and we wouldn’t have to worry so much about finding our way around. Our first stop was the Acropolis. We walked all around it, but didn’t bother to get tickets to go inside because the line was a mile long at the ticket counter, and it wasn’t worth the 20 something euros a person entrance fee. We saw it from a lot of different angles, and from a nearby hilltop.

 

Dinner we thought was at the Plaka

 My favorite part of the day was at the ancient Olympic stadium. Since it was already September, the bulk of the summer tourism was done with and I guess the tourists that were in town didn’t care to see it because there were only like 10 people in the whole place. There was an audio tour that talked about the history, and usage of the stadium which was cool. We had to get running and podium pictures of course. Carli was nice enough to let me share the 1^st place podium with her.

Through the entrance tunnel in the back left of the stadium, is a museum that I didn’t know was there until we walked into it. They had a big room with a display of every Olympic torch from the modern Olympics. They even had a Rio torch already. The brass cauldron in the middle of the room is the source of the Olympic torch’s flame. I was expecting a flame to be burning, but I suppose that’d get expensive. So sadly, there is no eternal Olympic flame that is burning in Athens.

We saw lots of other stuff, and according to my phone walked over 12 miles during the day. Carli’s parents had been to Athens before, and told us we had to eat at the Plaka, and go the top of the hill with the white church on it for sunset. We thought that we ate at the Plaka, but it turns out that it wasn’t actually it. We did make it to the Hill with the white church though! They had mentioned something about a cable car, but I couldn’t for the life of me see or find it on the outside of the mountain. So with all our walking around the mountain, we ended up just hiking up the whole thing. It gave us a spectacular panoramic view of the city. There happened to be a wedding in the church while we were up there, so there were a lot of people up there for that. Carli was very excited about that, and turned to me and said, “It’s a big fat Greek wedding!!” The wedding group threw rice everywhere as they exited the church. We were up there until dark, and made our way down the mountain and to the metro station. It was a long and exhausting day and we were happy to be back at the hotel to sleep for a few hours before flying back to Bulgaria. 

Saturday morning flight back to Sofia.