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.