In a brief moment of insanity, I went over the strings for WordPress Mobile iOS and translated most of them. They are getting more and more difficult as the translation percentage approaches 100%. No surprise there that the people maintaining the Canadian language were unable to translate the final 2% 😜.
I may be able to get that number to 98 as well but 100 looks out of reach. Some strings in the app mean absolutely nothing to me and even the translations to other languages make no sense. I’ll post an update once the next Jetpack Mobile appears with these translations. Really curious to see if I got it sufficiently right to make the UI feel Bulgarian. Bulgarian has lots of gendered words, transliterated terminology, plurals where one expects singulars and so on.
Bulgaria celebrates its independence day today. There were no large crowds because Bulgarians tend to use the national holidays as a reason to go somewhere else.
22nd of September was recognized by the mayor of Sofia, the dude with the red tie. There was a small ceremony with guardsmen, orchestra, and folklore singers. The mayor spoke for a few minutes and said something, although not sure what.
And I captured some Bulgarian flags with landmark and not so landmark sites on the way to the event. The 2nd photo is the St Sofia church, which gave the modern name of our city.
We did our first true hike since we had children. I know we’ve been to Vitosha many times but Vitosha is almost a city park, it has lots of visitors, easy access, and is a low-effort adventure. Rila, on the other hand, is more remote, higher, and more scenic.
Our starting point, Kartala, is a small ski resort, 28 kilometers away from Blagoevgrad. The asphalt road to it is in a fine condition., Hut Macedonia is about about 9km further up in the Rila mountain. It should’ve been an easy 2.5h walk, according to all the websites we found. It might be 2.5 hours but you need to be in a good shape for it. For people like us, 3-4h is more realistic.
The path looks like this:
The trail is also accessible by vehicles with permit. It is used for supplying the hut and the nearby maintain rescue group. There are 3-4 well marked shortcuts that can cut maybe 2 kilometers from the total walk but are steeper and we only took them on the way down.
It starts as a continuation of the road Blagoevgrad-Kartala, however I would advise using the free parking at Kartala. The part of the road accessible for the public is maybe a few hundred meters and not worth breaking your car.
Took us 3h 10 min without any breaks for a total of about 26000 steps both ways, which is very close to my personal best since my phone started tracking in 2015.
We didn’t have any food so we were very happy that the hut keeper cooked for us and fed us well. The food was great.
The area is full of tiny creeks that all go to this small river, called Bistritza. I’d say it was moist. Lots of berries everywhere, still green, but once they’re ripe, the path will become even more challenging 😃
The altitude gain of this route is about 730 meters.
Bulgaria got invited to join the Euro today. Bulgarians are not united on the subject if they want the Euro and the anti-EU political parties are capitalizing that. I witnessed their protest today.
The gathering was lead by a young lad who yelled with full force, like he’s dictating the attack in the Braveheart movie. The hot sun made the movement sluggish.
Asenovets is a famous building in the city center of Sofia. Two similarly designed large residential buildings sit on the two sides of Ivan Asen II street, the area with our co-working space. I go past this building almost daily. The area is nice.
The police took out 48 dogs from an apartment in this historic building yesterday. I’m speechless. An apartment in such a place can be a pricy AirBNB that’s never empty, and someone hoarded dogs inside, and somehow managed to lock in 48 of them until the authorities stopped it and took the dogs and the owner away.
I hope the dogs find better accommodation and the neighbors – some peace and quiet.
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