19 May

Ww woke up a little earlier than intended so we decided to attend to some emails.  That took longer than expected.  We suddenly realised that we won't have enough time to put everything away properly before we left our room.  We tossed everything into the bag for safety, locked it and then headed out to catch the train to Sofia University.  We stopped where we did the day before to pick up a pastry and coffee and then headed to Alex Nevski Cathedral.  For some reason we felt a little lost in front of the Parliament.  As soon as we become familiarly comfortable with the route to Sofia University, it will be time to leave the city. 

We got to the meeting place for our morning tour 30 minutes early, and had a short chat with Albert, a fellow traveler on the tour, from Switzerland.  He was drinking beer and it was not yet 9 am but he was sober and he was providing good tidbits of information about traveling. Interesting that when we are travelling, we are less ready to be judgmental.  Our tolerance of things unusual in our definitions increases.  Our driver cum guide, Martin picked us up at 9 am.  There were 7 of us, including two from Japan, an English couple and an African American from Chicago studying geology at Columbus University.  Martin told us about black storks some 100+ km away that he saw on a bird watching tour on a different day.  Darn, had we known about the existence of bird watching tour, we would have arranged to go on one.  Oh well.  Next time.  The mini bus has free WiFi, which was a pleasant surprise.

We explored Boyana Church first – it was a steep 10 LEV unlike all the museums downtown which had cost a flat 6 LEV.  Guess an ancient church museum would cost more.  Maybe it is because this is an UNESCO site.  So is Rila Monastry.  Boyana is a tiny church and we all barely fit in all at once but the frescos were interesting and beautiful.  There was strict No photography in there.   As it was a weekday and early morning – probably the first group since opening at 9 am, we were able to enter and see it without queue.  The session rule was a max of 8 each time and only for 10 minutes. Layers in church paintings was explained to us. The church had gone through three extensions.  Each extension meant that new painters paint over older ones.  It was not a restoration, but a do over with totally different images.  All three layers associated with the extensions could be observed in the oldest part of the church.  A queen is buried in the compound of this church on the right side.  And on the left, legacies of pagan blood rituals in stone can be observed.  Also planted in the compound are three great sequoia trees.  The mix was eclectic,

From, Boyana church which is located in now what is an affluent neighbourhood, the jouney was 1.5 hrs to drive to Rila Monastry.  On the way we passed through two villages, first Kocherinovo, then Rila itself.  The cross country highway was in good condition but once we start towards the villages, the conditions of the road were challenging at times.  Unmarked "sleeping policemen" (speed humps) and potholes appeared from time to time to surprise us.  I had the privilege of sitting on the dashboard this entire trip as my travelling companion was in the co-pilot seat.

The villages looked rather abandoned,  Many young folks had left to go to the city.  The houses here have grape vines as roof for their balconies, the same way the Uighur folks do in China.  Was this an Ottoman Empire influence?  The scenery along the way was serene.  Beautiful green valleys with the tall mountains in the background.  Traditional farming methods are still practiced.  A farmer and his wife worked the field by hand with a hoe.  A shepherd stood leaning on his staff, as he watched his sheep graze.  Another watched his goats and yet another watched his cows.  We spotted a small tractor in the field.  Generally, the farms are too small to use much machinery.  In one field, a "regular" stork was observed.  It was observing the farmer and his wife working the field, an amusing sight for us.  The bus moved too fast for my travelling companion to capture that poignant scene for posterity.

The last 35 km climb up the mountain road to Rila Monastry was the most impressive - The road wound through forests, past  numerous waterfalls, until we reach the Monastery itself.  At the end of that climb, the Monastery was a great punctuation mark to the journey

It once housed 800 monks but now there are only 8 in residence.  It is a UNESCO Heritage site boasting this exquisite double faced altar cross carved from a single piece of wood (the job took the carver 15 years to complete).  That cross alone would qualify Rila Monastry as a UNESCO site.  The main church also house the frescoes, relics in a “book” and the heart of a king.  No photography was permitted inside.  Eastern orthodox church tend to be dark and soot from candle flames tend to coat the icons over time.  Even then, the images remain rather impressive.

The surroundings outside was impressive too.  The black and white bands on the arches throughout the compound and the exquisite paintings which popped up randomly to accompany those strips.  Besides the Church, we found the door to the underground cellar, the residence of the monks – where the novice has to serve 7 years as a servant to a master monk before he can become the monk, George (the resident cat), and the bakery outside the back entrance.

There is an international ATM just outside the front entrance.  It was a saviour for us as we were once more running out of LEVs.  We withdrew enough for the restaurant and a little more in case we need to tip Martin.  At the restaurant, we had grilled trout with steam vegetable washed down with sparkling mineral water for 15.8 Lev.  The trip back was a little tiring probably because we was sleepy from the nice lunch.  During lunch, the Japanese gentleman wanted to ask Martin some question so he used the translator on his phone and then showed Martin the question in Cyrillic.  Martin answered him in English as he could not speak Japanese.  Technology assisted communication has been enabled!

 



















We stopped in Kocherinovo for that old car collection place which Albert had spotted on our way up earlier.  It turned out to be a collection of everything place.  So much money is tied up in that place.  Be careful what you owned as it owned a little of you too.   None of us could figure out the business model for this business, nor could the owner from the sound of her answer. 

And as we were looking at the interesting car, someone passed by in a cart with a donkey. It looks like the villagers still use them here.  

War?  Communism?  The rise and fall of great civilisations, monarchies, kingdoms ... when regimes fell suddenly, a country could retrograde by quite a few years.



The quiet party arrived back at the starting point at 4.45pm.  No one tipped Martin which was rather odd for us.  He appeared in a hurry to get away as well and he did not appear surprised.

Throughout the trip, I sat at the dashboard and saw all that passed.  We made a stop at the Sofia University and found that we have free fast WiFi there  when we paused to have a cold drink.  Then we headed to a supermarket near the metro there for essentials before we head back to our hotel to pack.  Back at the hotel, we found that the WiFi there had enough bandwidth for us to make a Whatsapp call.  My travelling companion called her best friend and chatted for an hour.  Then we packed in readiness for the next day’s departure.  Finally, we were able to chat with Roy.  It was good to chat with Roy, even though the conversation was short as he was getting ready to go to work and we needed to go to bed in preparation for an early start the next day.

Note to self : we need to learn at least some Cyrillic alphabets so that we can spell the name of places even when we cannot speak an entire language.  The difficulty is not just the spelling of a name but the pronunciation.  Nomenclature of a place may also be different in different languages, eg.  Papaoulis in Bulgarian may be something that mean Grandma Paoilis.