Leaving Bulgaria, we didn’t want to go back through Romania and everyone confirmed that the road back via Serbia was good, so we booked a hotel in Trieste and planned for a long day of driving. The road from Sofia to the border and from there onwards about 100 miles or so wasn’t so great, but from there on it was full-on autostrada and we made excellent time through Belgrade, across the rest of Serbia, and across Croatia back to Ljubljana. My friend Liz and I had been trading text messages to see if our trips might intersect, and we managed to rendezvous there in LJB for drinks and dinner. We showed her the cool kids bar and the excellent restaurant, where we had another (identical) Slovenia feast, and then Loren and I drove the last 120km or so to Trieste, arriving at about 2am. I’ll post more about Sofia itself in a bit…

PS: I’ve been putting together a map of the trip; it’s not quite done yet, but you can check it out here: http://maps.google.com/?mid=1185862802. Photos are gradually being uploaded here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdwelle/sets/72157600934673287/

I switched to GMail during my trip to Europe, and overall I like it, but I just ran into a nasty bug. Not with GMail itself, but with the Textarea Backup Greasemonkey script: the script “backs up” and therefore fills in the hidden Cc: and Bcc: fields, resulting in emails addressed to one person going out to all sorts of other people. Not what one wants *at all*. So if you’re using Textarea Backup, be sure to add an exclusion for GMail. See http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7671 and search for gmail for further detail.

I’m in the movie theater. The guy in front of me is playing with his new iPhone. Ahead of her is a woman working on her laptop. In the mosques in Istanbul I took pictures of everyone taking pictures of their families and walking around staring into their video cameras. At my friend Will’s wedding last weekend, I caught one photographer taking a picture of another photographer shooting the party, and a third person videotaping her. I took a picture of the three of them, maybe. Clearly, humans are interested with each other, but why is it that we are even more fascinated by seeing each other on screen – any kind of screen? There is something about a screen, or even a photograph, that transforms the real, the actual, the moment, into an event, a thing, something somehow different from what passes before our eyes unmitigated, even if of course it’s exactly the same thing.

The next day we drove the short distance to Sofia, stopping for a snack in Ihtiman (which I of course called AHitMan), and yet again still managing to arrive late in the day just as the booking agents and tourist offices were closing. We found a couple of hostels, a crappy “one-star” “hotel” in an old apartment block, and newer several four-star business hotels, but nothing in the middle. Finally one of the nicer places pointed out a three-star around the block that we hadn’t noticed and we got a room there for €65, I think.

The following day we began our return trip, leaving Ayvalik to drive back north and west into Bulgaria, intent on staying the night in Plovdiv. I’m not sure what held us up, or if we just underestimated a bit, but 400 miles, a car ferry, a border crossing, and whatever else put us into Plovdiv just as night fell, with an outdated map and no real idea of where we were. As it happened, they had pedestrianized a whole bunch more of the town since the map we had was made, and so we were engaged in the task of trying to drive to a hotel which — if it was even still in existence — was entirely impossible to drive to. At least in the dark, hungry, and tired. We eventually found an alternate place (no lift, but just fine otherwise) and _ran_ to the nearest bar for a drink. And this is where we discovered Bulgaria. Booze is usually fairly expensive in all of Europe, and name-brand American booze can be ridiculously overpriced. On top of that, prices are often essentially at the bartender’s discretion, especially in places like Romania and Turkey. We ordered two Maker’s Marks and two beers and the kid _looked up_ the correct price and rang up a total of something like €7. Basically half price, and an honest price at that. Welcome to Bulgaristan!

Plovdiv was bustling downtown, with a nice pedestrian mall (in the urbanist sense, not the American Mall sense) and a very high-tech internet cafe built right into the old Roman stadium. I walked around the old town and saw some nice paintings by a post-war Bulgarian painter who was popular with the Party bosses for his sympathetic representations of peasant life.

We stayed two nights in Ayvalik, wandering around the smaller streets in the old town just off the waterfront, eating and drinking in various cafes, and trying to find a decent beach. The latter wasn’t to be had, really. The closest beach was crowded and a complete ashtray, and the next day we searched for two or three hours and ended up 30 miles to the south on a slightly nicer stretch, but still nothing all that great. I guess it’s just not a super beach area. Clearly if it was, there would be hordes of Brits, Germans, and Americans for that matter, as I imagine there are in Izmir and Bodrum and along the southern coast. No matter, I enjoyed the town quite a lot and it was a worthwhile stop for sure.

The next day we got the car on the 11am ferry across the Dardanelles, along with mostly locals and a few truckers. One guy must have parked his truck engaged in reverse, as it was emitting that beep-beep-beep that trucks make when they’re backing up. Nobody on the boat wanted to hear that all the way across, but nobody really said anything either… I simply walked up to the cab, smiled, and asked him nicely if he wouldn’t mind turning it off. Ah, I forgot about that, he said, no problem, and switched it off. I said thanks a lot buddy, and took his photo. Sometimes I’m good at that sort of thing. I assume he was speaking Turkish. Nice guy.

We landed on the other side and drove a little ways south to the site of ancient Troy (Troia). Spent an hour or so looking at old bricks and fragments of greek lettering, and then drove on southwards. Ended up about 120 miles south in Ayvalik, a mid-sized town that happens to be the closest Turkish ferry port to the Greek island of Lesbos, just across the water. It was clear that there had been quite a bit of development in the place since my guidebook had been updated, and the main street was no bustling and not particularly pleasant. We almost drove on through, but thought twice and decided to explore around to see if any of the the very nice sounding pensiones and the old town described in the book were still in existence.

Sure enough, with just a bit of walking, we found several old houses (”mansions”, in relative terms, I suppose), converted into pensiones, eventually settling on the one that was most spacious and welcoming. It was a big old wooden house – very much like a San Francisco victorian in many ways – built up into the hillside with several terraces and rambling staircases and rooms every which way. Clearly a place where some people had been coming back to for years, and would come to stay a week or more at a Time. Very comfortable. Nice breakfast. Funny Bulgarian girl working the desk who apparently really didn’t like Turkey that much at all despite having come there to work for the past 6 or 7 years… A big strange, but once we got back to Bulgaria (that’s *Bulgaristan* in Turkey!), we understood why – despite the fact that the country seems to be doing quite well, the Bulgarian currency in undervalued and so even working in Turkey is much more lucrative.

Left Istanbul and drove back west along the northern short of the Sea of Marmara, passing lots of hot, narrow, anonymous beaches. We stuck with the coast road, aware that it was due to get much smaller based on the map. Sure enough, it turned to a “C” road, winding through several villages, and then we came to a gate and what appeared to be a forest preserve of some sort. We asked the guy at the gate if this was the way to whatever town we were headed for, and he said sure enough, straight on. Straight onto the dirt road, that is. A “D” road for sure. As it turned out, it was 40-some miles back to the pavement, and there was a fair bit of traffic on the road. This was the first time an unpaved road had showed up on our map of all of Europe. We made it through and headed south on the peninsula of Gallipoli, at first intending to catch the ferry across the Dardanelles and stay back on the west side, but (thank god) deciding to stop short and at least grab something to eat in Gelibolu, the smaller of the two port towns on the west side.

I though Gelibolu was great – a small, only slightly gritty little fishing and minor ferry port with an old-style enclosed inner harbor and four or five or six cafes and restuarants on the quay. Nothing fancy _at all_, but a place full of life and right on the water. I could have stayed there a couple of days, just reading and writing and drinking and eating. We had a late lunch (perhaps dinner by then), found the right hotel (two-star, €45 or so), sat around, and I fell asleep at the rooftop “disco”. Perfect.

We spent two nights in Istanbul so we could see a couple of the major sights and try to get a feel for the city. Our hotel was right up in the historic center, which made it easy to get to the Blue Mosque and the Aga Sophia, but hard to find anything decent to eat. Our middle day we went quickly enough through those two landmarks, and then wandered down to the ferry terminal and caught a random boat. Unfortunately it didn’t go far and where it went wasn’t that thrilling so we went right back the other way and then walked across the bridge to the other part of town, with some vague idea from my outdated guidebook that we’d find a cluster of decent restaurants. Instead we found marine supply shops (cool, but you can’t eat old main bearings), guarded alleys of prostitution, an entire neighborhood of wholesale lighting fixtures, and then when we finally made it back down the hill to the bridge, the fish market. As with so many other times, if we had just turned left instead of right… fair enough, we found it in the end, and had a nice lunch of fresh fish at a makeshift little joint owned by a friendly young guy.

After lunch we walked back across the bridge and ended up in the bazaar, which spills out downhill from the formal covered market into the open streets. The strangest thing about this sort of market is that you have clusters of shops selling the same sort of thing, for example dried fruits or underwear, … they all appear to be selling the exact same selection of things, displayed in a similar fashion. How (or why?) would you decide to buy from one or another? Especially for regular local shoppers, the prices can’t vary much from vendor to vendor for the same product. Makes you wonder. In the covered market I (of course) immediately gravitated to one of the pricier textile shops, a modern, branded place selling hand-made organic fibers. I hung around and bought a few things and had a cup of tea with the guy running the shop. Business was good.

That night we tried to find a real feast, but ended up back in the tourist district. The food was much better than our first night in town, but still nothing really special. We totally failed to find the good part of Istanbul, something that I’m usually very good at. In this case it was due to the simple fact that the city is *so big* and that we didn’t have much information to go on, and that which we did have was often a bit suspect.

The name of the beach town in Bulgaria was Lozenets. Did we stay there one night or two, now I can’t remember…? I guess it was just one. We had driven to the end of the road again here and found a rather bleak, wind-blown town on a bluff, had a beer, turned around and found a place with a few more people and a nice, clean friendly pensione. We had a good dinner, although we still hadn’t quite learned that “Pectopant” wasn’t the _name_ of the restaurant, but the word “restaurant” itself… In the morning I walked across town and down to the beach and did my exercises and had a swim. Although this was the same Black Sea as in Vama Veche, and only ~200 miles to the south, here it was clean and blue, and the beach was much nicer and nearly clean as well. We learned later that Lozenets is a popular weekend beach destination from Sofia.

We took off around mid-day and drove backroads towards the Turkish border, cruising slowly up and over a range of green hills. This was our first non-EU border crossing and it took some time. We had to get stamped by four guys in four different offices, in a specific order. Even so, everyone was friendly and the English-speaking turks waiting in line with us helped us along. Once across the border the road got a bit bigger and we made it to Kirklareli for late lunch. My first impression of Turkey was *so* much different from anywhere else we had been. Much busier, everyone out on the streets, a million little shops, clearly prosperous enough, lots of commerce everywhere. We got money and found a cheap and clean looking place to eat, and the owner welcomed us iand brought over his daughter to practice her English. The food (basically mini-hamburgers) was nothing to write home about, but the experience was notable. These people were happy and open and having fun.

After lunch we got on the road and hightailed it to Istanbul, making good time once we hit the autobahn and hitting town about 7 or 8pm, I guess. My Turkey guidebook was ten years old and all the hotels had changed, but we found a good one without too much trouble. Loren and I had slightly (but not hugely) different ideas about what made for the ideal place to sleep, but the basic idea was two-star with A/C and a lift in cities and pension or agriturismo outside of cities.