Sofia, Bulgaria

I get off the freezing train from Belgrade, into the freezing Sofia train station. I really want to get out of here and to my CouchSurfer host's place. I need to call him, so I go a newspaper booth at the train station to buy a Bulgarian SIM card for my phone. When I ask if a card is available, the woman nods. Great, I found a SIM card on the first try! Oops. Turns out that in Bulgaria, a nod means no, and a horizontal head shake means yes. It's REALLY hard to get used to. Especially since when Buglarians speak to you in English, they use Western Yes/No head shakes, but when they're in Bulgarian mode they switch it up. Anyway, I eventually find a card and head to my host's place.

My host is a Bulgarian ethnic Turk. He grew up in Bulgaria, but in the 1990's the Bulgarian Communist government started to make life very difficult for ethnic Turks. According to Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, "every 'Mehmet' was made to become a 'Mikhail' and so on". My host's family moved to Istanbul to avoid persecution. In the 1990's Kaplan interviewed a Bulgarian official who explained that "when Bayezit [a Turkish Sultan] rode in here in the fourteenth century ... thousands of Bulgarians were forced to change their names. Where was your Western press then?" Here, it seems impossible to separate history from the present.

Eventually I went to downtown Sofia to check out the Alexander Nevski Church, named after a Russian warrior to honor the Russian liberators of Bulgaria. We saw a brief service. When the priest spoke, his voice eerily and powerfully echoed throughout the church. I felt a certain mysticism that I hadn't felt in any other church. Bulgaria is the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet, which was created by Cyrillus and Methodus - two priests that came from the Byzantine Empire to convert the slavs. The Cyrillic alphabet is most associated with Russian, but it came from here.

From Sofia, Bulgaria

From Sofia, Bulgaria

As I have gotten in the habit of doing, I posted my Bulgarian phone number on the Sofia CouchSurfing group inviting people to meet up for drinks. Eventually I was hanging out with a huge mix of locals and travelers at a really cool underground bar where you have to ring the bell to get in and wait for someone to let you in.

Next I'm going to Lisbon for a CouchSurfing meeting called Lisbon Invites You to meet up with my Portuguese friend that I met in Slovenia.