A QUICK trip down the road to Greece can jumpstart an expat's experience - transforming a Sofia-centric perception of Bulgaria into something full of nuances. My recent journey on the E79 was punctuated by an unwitting tour of the post-industrial city of Pernik, an up-all-night chalga party in Blagoevgrad and a tranquil visit with a monk in the Rozhen Monastery.
Me and my two pals from Brussels rented a compact car at the Drenikov rental agency at 55 Oboriste Street for 50 euro for two days, along with a 100 euro deposit. We were a little leery about renting a car, having never driven on Bulgarian highways, but our fears were misplaced. We never had a problem. Or, that is, we never had a problem with the car.
As soon as we set out, we got lost. Our maps didn't especially highlight Kulata, the endpoint of the E79 at the Greek border, so whenever signs announced we had to choose between turning for Pernik or a town I couldn't find on the map, I mistakenly told my pal to take the road toward Pernik, which leads west to Skopje, Macedonia.As a result, we got a cursory tour of a depressed city. Gone to seed with the collapse of the Bulgarian coal industry, Pernik reminds one that outside Sofia, Bulgarians struggle, and some of the country's woes aren't going to be solved by the European Union. I wouldn't recommend Pernik to a tourist, but we gained something from not shunning it.
Once on the right track, and marvelling at how Bulgarian drivers pass one another on a two-lane highway - sometimes squeezing in between cars in opposite lanes - we stopped off at the Rila Monastery. There's no point in harping on this tourist site, except to say we were lucky enough to follow a group of monks into the church, so that a drawer revealing the shrivelled, leathery, thousand-year-old hand of St. John of Rila was opened for their - and our - benefit.
Our next stop was Blagoevgrad, an ideal city for an overnight visit. Downtown is a pedestrian walkway lined with shops and restaurants, a piece of urban planning that works to create a pleasant experience the world over, so long as it has plenty of foot traffic. With the American University of Bulgaria nearby, it does.
We stayed at the Hotel Kristo, at 30 leva a night apiece. It was a clean, recently renovated hotel on the outskirts of town, but still only a 10minute walk from the centre. Blagoevgrad has loads of excellent restaurants and bars. We ate at a restaurant on Dr. Hrista Talachev Street, where the best dish sampled was the chicken in honey sauce, a choice made because of the many beekeepers selling their product on the side roads around town. Asking where the best place to have a drink was, our waitress told us to go to The Old House, behind the Vaptsarov Chamber Opera. It was a fantastic suggestion. AUBG, my guidebook tells me, has a ratio of seven female students to every male. It seemed as if those numbers were accurate in the mehana. Young women danced to chalga on chairs and tables, with only the occasional male blemishing - from my perspective - the party scene. We stumbled home at four in the morning, my pals slurring chalga lyric mainstays - "iskam te" (I want you) and "obicham te" (I love you) - the whole way.
Rising at noon, our next stop was the Rozhen Monastery and Melnik. It's not often one encounters rock slides while driving a compact car up a mountain, but slides we witnessed as we headed to the monastery. Luckily, they tended either to pass by, rolling further down the slopes, or stopping short enough for us to pass.
The trip was worth it. In mid-March, we were the only visitors. The whole wide-angled view of the Pirin mountains and the 12th century monastery was ours alone - until a little door in the building's courtyard opened. Out stepped Barnabas, a black-robed, bearded monk who said he was doing paperwork and wanted a break. Barnabas told us about the icon of the Virgin housed in the monastery. In the 8th century, he said, iconoclasts tried to destroy the icon, but a young man, seeking to save it, threw it into the sea. There is stayed for years, during which time the young man became a monk.
After the iconoclasts lost favour, and the church once again accepted icons, the painting rose from the depths. Other monks tried to claim it, but it would fly away from them. Only the man who threw it into the sea, now an old monk, could grab hold of it. He did so by walking over the water to reach it.
Inviting us to his study, Barnabas served us rakia and stewed figs. He was making an inventory of everything the monastery owned, he said, because a group of breakaway monks, believing the current patriarch was unfairly appointed by Communists when they ruled the country, had taken some of the church's property. He was trying to figure out what was missing, and, as evinced by a stack of old documents, the job was giving him a headache.
Later we sampled, and purchased for around seven euro apiece, a few bottles of wine in the sleepy town of Melnik. Not a bad deal.
In fact, the whole trip hadn't been a bad deal. The return journey to Sofia illustrated how easy it had been. It took around five hours to get back to the capital all the way from the Greek border. Yet we'd been a world away.