Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
I visited Rome on a work trip last week. Couldn’t experience too much of it because the trip was brief and the schedule – tight.
I liked their inner gardens and pretty, well dressed people. The food outside of the tourist centre was superb.
I hated the car culture, the swarms of tourists. Almost got run by a motorcycle on the sidewalk. Didn’t see a single cat. The Sistine Chapel was so packed that I wandered if I’ll get out alive.
Had Gelato every day. It was fantastic 🍧
Bansko is changing.
It used to be a small town with an old city. Then the ski zone came with thousands of new hotels, growing faster than the infrastructure. It had lots of people in the winter but was a muddy ghost town in the summer. Now the central area is expanding with paved walking streets that make it a summer resort as well.
The digital nomads and hipsters have found it. It has multiple co-working spaces. An abandoned hotel turned to a co-living space. The central square has daily events. People everywhere.
The success infected the nearby villages as well. Banya has multiple 4 and 5* hotels with mineral water.
I can see us going back with the goal to climb Vihren again. Not sure when. The summer season is over.
The path from Hotel Moreni to Aleko Hut is so good these days that I saw a baby in a stroller on this bridge. Babies are usually carried in special backpacks by their parents. Was too shy to take a photo so here’s the bridge sans people.
You can get there by taking bus 66 to the final stop, then walk 200 meters back. Take the alley to Cherni Vrah. There will be a sign pointing to Aleko about 10 minutes later. The path is very easy.
The Petralona Cave is a nice place to visit in Halkidiki. We went there on a hot weather day rather than on a rainy day, which was the original plan. The kids wanted to see a Minecraft cave and didn’t want to wait for the rain. They were right, it didn’t rain.
I’ll bring them to a wilder cave somewhere in Bulgaria.
It has to be my trip to Alaska, which took place in 2004 or 2005, when Bulgaria was not yet a member of the EU, and our passport strength was quite limited. At that time, I had never visited another country, and out of all the places in the world, I traveled to the USA, and from all the places in the USA – to Anchorage and Fairbanks. The trip was memorable enough that a photo from it remained a header of my previous blog for about a decade.
It had to be Alaska because my girlfriend went there for a work-and-travel trip and I missed her, so we had a vacation at the end of her work duties.
Things that made it memorable:
All of that doesn’t sound too exciting now that I’m older but it was a great adventure for my younger self. Basic things like airplanes, car rentals, motels, and diners felt like magic.
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