Tag: Travel

The devil is in the details

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I spent a few days in Kyoto and have enough photos to flood the blog. But there were only 3-4 things that truly shocked me and they were not the ancient temples, the kimono, or the alphabet.

First was the rotating seats in the train. Simple and clever. Why do we not have that?

Second was the smart toilet and shower. Waking up at 2am personal time was only possible because of the steamy waterfall in the bathroom that I could unleash with a button.

Third was the cleanliness everywhere. It is not an easy task to not have a single piece of garbage anywhere. Requires a society that can do it.

I hope to come back with more time to explore.

Bean soup

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

It’s been awhile 🙂 I post photos of the bean soup that’s sold in the Cherni Vrah shelter as a mark of achievement that I managed to get there one more time.

The mountain was moist, slippery and foggy today. It rained a bit and I even had a chance to walk in hail for about a minute or two. Thankfully, no thunders. Found some berries.

The Morning Walk

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I keep insisting on reaching an annual average of 10K steps per day. Over the 2 years, I crawled to the goal by slowly replacing car time with walk time. The rule of the thumb is that 30 minutes of driving in the city can be replaced by 1h of walking, reducing the overall time cost of walking. However, I fully eliminated the city driving without even reaching an average of 8K.

I also do weekly hikes. These started with weekend walks in the park. Over the summer, we switched to doing hikes with my wife. The hikes can easily exceed 20k steps and move the average significantly up. However, it’s not possible to do that every week. Weather, babysitting, and health issues seems to make hiking unreliable.

The system I experiment with right now is the morning walk. Start the day with 7-8K, and then it almost doesn’t matter if I move at all, or if I do the weekly hike. The 10K average gets achieved. This approach is not without problems as well and I’m not sure it can be sustained.

  • It’s 8 am right now, 2°C outside, it’s cold
  • Dogs walkers everywhere. Stray dogs have not been fed by their humans. It feels unsafe. I was attacked once already, thankfully by a slow pug of some kind
  • Rush hour traffic – toxic fumes near the streets greatly limit the possible paths
  • It hurts. I’ve not figured that part out bit there’s pain.

The morning walk has other advantages – I can process the news and requests I received overnight, think about who does what and when. I feel like it slightly improves my productivity.

So, although the system with the morning walk consistently moves the average over 10k and adds processing time, I feel like I can’t sustain it. I’m not sure if it will be the cold weather, the darkness, a dog bite, or something else that will end it.

Accidental Hike

~ Veselin ~ 9 Comments

It was supposed to be a quiet day. We went to IKEA, had meatballs, got a teapot because one of our kids is drinking lots of tea. Tested all the couches. Comfy. All of that amounted to less than 5k steps, which is pretty poor for a weekend day. How do we get to 10k?

So we dropped some options, like “Let’s just do some steps up there in the mountain, take a horizontal path for just half an hour.” But it’s cold today, maybe go higher up where it’s more open and sunny.

One thing lead to another and we reached the top.

The weather was perfect, cold enough to not sweat. Warm enough to not need winter clothing.

Slaveykov Square, Sofia

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

We went to Slaveykov this Sunday because of @knotty‘s comment about their visit to Sofia in the 90s. Back in the day, the square was a book market. My high school was 15 minutes walking from it so I visited it almost daily for many years. It had crowds of readers and piles of trash. The municipality reformed the area a few times, slowly pushing the booksellers out and to the surrounding buildings.

The building in the back of the first photo is the Sofia Library. The first floor is a ДКЦ – 2nd Diagnostic Center. Go there in case you have non-urgent health issues.

The fountain on the second photo has a sad story. Same spot had another fountain that electrocuted a person and was named “The Killer Fountain”. It was demolished and rebuilt after that.

The McDonalds in the back is the first one opened in Sofia in 1995. The queue was hundreds of people long. I liked it very much, it was a favorite spot in the center before Covid. It has a secret second floor where you can chill over your large Coke and nobody will bother you. One of the few McDonalds that operate somewhat normally, most of them are a shadow of their former glory.

The third photo is the Slaveykov monument. The father, the poet Petko Slaveykov, lived around that place, and the monument is with his son Pencho Slaveykov, also a poet. The heavy use of the bench for photos damaged the shadow, which is now replaced with a more durable but much uglier copy.