Andrea Hearts Traveling

Rila Monastery... a MUST visit while in Bulgaria!

Rila is only a 2 hour bus drive from Sofia and although it took a lot of time to research how to get there and back on our own I was able to figure it out and was ready to see the beautiful Rila.

Not many people know about the fact that one can actually sleep in Rila Monastery for almost the same amount of money than at the hostel and you get to be in the Monastery when everybody has left... sounded cool to me!

After the free walking tour I walked the city with Nicole and it took very little convincing to get her to join me to the monastery and spend the night.

Our journey started by taking tram #5 to the West station (Ovcha Kupel) and getting on the one and ONLY "direct" bus to Rila at 10:20am, costing 11leva ($6). I say "direct" because we stopped for like 30 minutes in Rila town and when we were about to leave the driver decided to go a little bit of bus wash!

Ehhhhh... What time is the bus again?!? I don't read Cyrillic! (But I'm smart so I can figure it out!)

Front entrance of the monastery!

By 1pm we had arrived at the monastery but had to wait until 2pm to check in. At 2pm one priest opened the office and Nicole and I went in to get a room. The priest took our passports and checked us on and proceeded to give us a receipt for 50leva and a key for a room but I immediately jumped! Two different people had told me they had paid 26 for the entire room for two people and he was trying to charge us double. Of course I complained and told them my friends stayed there for 26 and I lied and said my hostel had called (they didn't but they told me it would be no more than 15leva per person.) The priest looked at me and he said that it wasn't correct, I still kept complaining, so he made us "an offer!" He said we could have a room for 20leva each with the bathroom in the corridor. I am not sure if he thought I would say no, but even without asking Nicole I said "ok!" because I didn't want to keep bargaining with the priest.

We paid the 20 each and left... with the same key he had originally given us, so who knows... was he just bluffing about the room with the corridor bathroom?

I'll never know but the room was pretty nice for a monastery, and better than a top bunk, for sure!

As we walked in the monastery from the bus we met one of our roommates from the hostel in Sofia and told us how to get to a cave near by so after dropping our bags off we decided to go find the cave!

We went down the main road and then found the beginning on a path and both Nicole and I decided to go on the path instead of the street.

What started with a scenery from the sound of music transformed into a non visible path through many muddy and slippery streams. I felt bad for dragging Nicole into this as she was wearing sandals and getting her feet covered in mud!

"Look, there's a path!"

The hills are alive with the sound of muuuusic...

After getting a little lost (many times) and re finding the path we finally got to the cave and it wasn't that impressive and we didn't even know what we were looking at! Thankfully on the way down I met a guy from Sweden who knew the whole history of the area and told me that St Ivan of Rila used to live in the cave. Good! Now I know what the cave was about!

Inside of the Cave

To go back to the monastery Nicole and I decided to make a smart decision and walk on the street! The way back took us about half the time and no with mud!

Back entrance to Rila

Once we got back at the monastery all the tourists had left and we spend way too much time taking pictures! They are all so repetitive!! haha

Picture with tourists

There's Nicole!

The one advantage of staying overnight at the monastery is that you can go up and down the many floors and explore as you wish. The view from the top was the best one!

Loved the snow capped mountains on the back!

What makes Rila very special are all the beautiful frescos!

how crazy are these paintings?

One of my favorite pictures, in the morning before going back to Sofia.

What the heck is going on here?!?!

At 8:10 am we took the bus back to Rila town and it felt like out of an episode of Rick Steves! There we were in a Bulgarian bus playing super loud but beautiful Bulgarian music and then we stopped and two jolly Bulgarian grandmas came in laughing and loudly speaking Bulgarian to each other, it was just too great!

From Rila Town we took a bus to Blagoevgrad, waited half an hour and changed to another to Sofia, by 12pm I was seating on the bus on my way to Plovdiv!

More company in the bus!

The only reason I went to Budapest was to be able to get a cheap flight to Sofia since I couldn’t pass through Serbia because I needed a visa. So, my first time in Sofia was a quick night stop on my way to Macedonia but still managed to go out and check out a little bit of the city. My hostel was like 2 km from the main area so I decided to walk and see what I could find.

I walked along a main road until I got to a beautiful park with a nice fountain, people walking around and teenagers skating. I found a small piece of the Berlin wall, and a communist monument.

When I got to the end of the park I was very impressed by what I saw, at the top of buildings there were big Coca-Cola, Subway, and Mc Donald’s signs and I wondered if this was going to be a western fast food influenced country and guess what? It was.

On my second visit to Sofia I took the free walking tour and was able to piece together what I had seen on my first day and understand Bulgaria a little bit better.

There was a lot of history and blah blah blah about the different empires that came to bulgaria such as the ottoman, lots of dates, and a lot of information that came into one ear and went out the other. The two things that I remember are that Bulgarians kind of didn't care about their old buildings and just constructed things on top of other and it wasn't until recently that they started kind of preserving and re construction some of it. For example, the found some ruins and still decided to build a metro station on it, or how a hotel found an old Roman Amphitheater and instead of stopping construction, now you can find a small piece of the amphitheater at the bottom of the hotel.

The new metro station is on the left!

Part of the Roman Amphitheater

The other thing that I remember, and my favorite part about Bulgaria, was that during WWII there were zero Jews killed! The government kind of didn't want to send people to the concentration camps and every time that Hitler called to see when the Jewish people were going to be sent the government made excuses to keep them such as they are working on the rail roads etc. At the end of the war no Jews from Bulgaria were killed, making them the only country that preserved their entire Jewish population!

The photo below is from the square of Tolerance; we did a 360 turn and we could see a mosque, a synagogue, and an orthodox church, meaning that all religions are accepted and tolerated.

Near the square of Tolerance there was a statue of Saint Sofia (no, that's not why Sofia is called Sofia, it has nothing to do with this lady!) but where she stands used to be a statue of Lenin, I guess there is no tolerance for him!

From there we kept walking and seeing the different sights that Sofia had to offer, we even drank some hot spring egg smelling water from where the baths used to be!

This used to be a Bath house!

And stopped at the St Rotunda Church, one of the oldest buildings in the world!

National Theater

We finished the tour at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, probably the most famous place in Sofia. On my first stop in Sofia I accidentally ended up in front of it and I had no idea it existed so I was just so impressed by the beauty of the building. I got to go inside and it was, as any other Orthodox church, full of beautiful frescos. It was late in the afternoon and they were almost closing but I sat inside there for about 20 minutes taking it all in when all of a sudden the choir started practicing! It was beautiful! I closed my eyes while I sat on the bench and listened to the choir's angelic voices, it was such a nice experience!

At the tour I met Nicole, my roommate at the hostel, and decided to go together to the local market and have some food. Of course I ended up buying almost a kilo and cherries and eating them all! The fresh produce is just so good!

As always, I just loved walking the streets with no set direction and open to being surprised.

I just loved the look of that building!

From my hostel I followed the tram tracks and ended up in an edgier neighborhood with a lot of street art and reminded me of San Francisco!

Apparently they love to paint the electricity boxes!

This is by far my favorite!

Many people said Sofia wasn't all that great but I thought it was a nice place to visit :)

After spending 5 days in Kosovo I headed back to Macedonia and visited lake Ohrid.

Apparently Ohrid is the most beautiful part of Macedonia and a local’s favorite since Macedonia is land locked and this lake is the only body of water around.

My first day I spent inside the hostel hoping for the rain to go away but had no luck; thankfully the rest of my time in Ohrid was rain free.

During my time in Prishtina I decided to do two day trips to Prizren and Peje, both of them around 2 hours away from Prishtina which made it a better option as a day trip than moving my backpack around and finding a place to stay.

My first outing was to the town of Prizren.

When I arrived I had no idea where the main part of town was so I decided to just walk along and figure it out as I went. Soon after I started I noticed some old boards with the city map and although they weren't in english I knew that if those board started showing up I was somewhat going the right way.

I got on an empty bus heading to Prishtina, Kosovo, and two guys (probably in their 30s) decided to sit next to me despite the whole bus being empty.

I put on my headphones and fell asleep. After 30 mins or so I had to write down my name and passport number in order to do the border crossing so it was the perfect time for them to break the ice.

One of them handed me the board and started a conversation by saying he was from Kosovo and said "I'm black" I looked at him with a puzzled face and I said "sorry? What did you say?" And he responded by touching his skin and saying "I'm black, and ugly", I didn't know where this conversation was going but I said "mmm... you are not black" he was barely any darker than me. Then he said "this is my cousin" and I responded "... and he is white?" And he said "yes, white and handsome" haha I really didn't even know where to begin! It really makes me angry when people base their opinion of others (or their self worth) based on their skin color or their physical features! When are we going to learn to go beyond what meets the eyes? The most striking thing is that he introduced himself by saying "I'm ugly" I would never ever do that! I think in general the most attractive part of a person is his confidence... zero points for this dude!

Rila Monastery

Sofia

Scenic Lake Ohrid, Macedonia

Prizren and Peje

Welcome to Kosovo!

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