| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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I am not sure we would necessarily recognize copyright information if it is there but not in the format we recognize.
We headed back to the hotel on the tram. It was a little hard to tell exactly how we paid and how we validated the ticket, but other people seemed just to get on and off.
Dinner was veal served by a waitress who could really have used a bath. I asked for a Coke and got a glass the size of a tennis ball with ice and some Coke. I tried to get tap water but the hotel pretends not to understand the concept of anything to drink that they cannot charge for.
Sam ordered wine for him and Susan and gave the restaurant a hard time when he ordered a second bottle and found it to be a different wine. Frankly, with the high price the restaurant charged for anything at all to drink, I was rather pleased to see them getting a hard time over anything at all!
Then Sam asked Mojca why she was a vegetarian. Was it health or ethics? She said health, but I said to our table (Evelyn, Steve, Mary, and me) that I expect that at some point I'd go vegetarian and it would be mostly for the ethics. Mary said she didn't see what ethics had to do with it, 'since, you know, animals don't have feelings.' I said I thought animals do have feelings, and that anyone who has been around a dog for a while can see that a dog has both intelligence and feelings. Mary countered that she knew someone who had been around animals a lot and said you shouldn't consider fairness to animals at all. Though it wasn't quite the question we were discussing, she added that she thought factory methods of raising animals (calves kept in a pen where they cannot stand up and where they live in their own waste) were a good thing because they kept the price of meat down, and so the poor who might not be able to afford it can get meat. (Actually, I think these methods are more intended to keep profits up, but that may be the same thing.) Mary said that people's rights superseded those of animals because we had what she called 'more potential.' It struck me that Mary herself was rather dependent on the compassion of others and I asked her how she would feel if somebody decided arthritics had less potential and could be treated in the same way. At that point Steve stepped in to stop the discussion. Next morning I asked Mojca to switch me to vegetarian meals.
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It is pretty warm in this hotel, but somehow it does not feel so uncomfortable. The air circulates a bit better. Still, the thermometer I brought says it is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. After the Spartan high-cholesterol breakfasts in Romania, it is nice to have a good buffet breakfast. This one features fresh cherries and strawberries.
Our city tour started with one guide whose English was not very good. It turned out that we were getting a different guide. This one was a woman with very precise English diction. Each word was spoken as a separate unit. She was very easy to understand. It turned out that the Israeli president Chaim Herzog had followed us from Budapest, since he was visiting here as we were. Traffic was held up as his motorcade went by. I missed getting a picture of his car, but a little later it went by again and I got it.
Sofia has been around for about 8000 years. The area was settled in Neolithic times. It may have been around longer, but, hey, if the settlers didn't care enough to let us know they were there, we don't care to give them credit. Zagreb was like that, and Salzburg. Their foundings are considered to be the dates they first show up in documents.
7000 B.C., Thracian tourists showed up, pushed aside the Neolithic inhabitants, and set up shop. About 3000 B.C., it was the Greeks' turn. The Thracians had been people who thought that living was a punishment. They mourned birth and celebrated death. The Greeks gave them something to celebrate. The Romans fortified the city and called it Serdica. The Huns took it away from them in 441, at a time when years that were perfect squares were becoming increasingly rare. (But, then, when haven't they been?) Around the 600s, the Mongols also invaded. The Byzantines rebuilt the town and called it Triadica. The Slavs renamed it Sredec when it came under the Bulgarian kingdom. In 1018 the Byzantines grabbed it again and for a change did not give it a new name, but returned it to Triadica. In the late 1100s, the Bulgars had it again. Through continued warfare it continued changing owners and names.
In the middle of the city are Roman ruins dating from 200 B.C. to 100 A.D. As in Vienna, they were dug up as part of urban renewal and left as is, but nobody is going to dig up the surrounding territory to see what else is there. There is, however, a pedestrian underpass that has been turned into a museum with displays of artifacts and the excavated walls of the Roman fortification.
Outside, there was a stretch of street paved with yellow bricks--given by the Emperor Franz Joseph to Sofia in 1917. Evelyn is nuts over anything having even a remote connection to THE WIZARD OF OZ, so had to tell the guide about how this was a yellow brick road. I think it just indicated that Franz Joseph was a real goldbricker.
Of interest is all the buildings with reliefs of hammers and sickles. The Communist symbols are being chipped off, the hammer and sickle giving way to the hammer and chisel.
We saw the palace, a rather plain-looking building that supposedly has a problem with the ceiling falling down.
The center of political activity in the city is the Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum. G.D. was a revolutionary leader who stood up to Herman Goering at something referred to in one of the books as the 'Reichstag fire trail' [sic]. He is considered a Bulgarian revolutionary hero and when he died in Moscow in 1949, they laminated him so people could always see him and talk to him, though not necessarily get an intelligent response. He can't even suggest 'phenomenology.' (Inside joke--if you don't get it, don't worry about it.)
There is a statue commemorating 1014 when Byzantine Emperor Basil had a great victory over Czar Samuel's men and had 1500 of the blinded in the resultant merry-making. Turks are not really popular in this part of the world.
There are beggars here, more than in other places we visited (though there are a lot of gypsy beggars all over). There was one old woman who wanted to put her hands on Mary and it would somehow help her. The woman said she had 'a light touch' that cured.
There was the Church of St. Sofia that was turned into a mosque, but because this area is prone to earthquakes, the minarets kept falling. Legend says it is the kings buried in the church who are shaking down the minarets. The church was used to store ammunition by the Nazis in World War II. Of course, it blew up. Hey, baby, whole lot o' shaking going' on!
The central point of interest of the town is a church not built until 1912 but built in the Byzantine style. It is the Church of St. Alexander Nevsky. It was built as a tribute to 200,00 Russians who died winning independence for Bulgaria. Bulgaria never thought the Russians were as bad as the Turks were. It is an odd trick of fate that both the Communists and the Orthodox were revering the same man. This undoubtedly implies that in real life he was a real schmuck. Actually he was a 12th Century prince of Novgorod who fought both Mongol invaders and Teutonic knights. Probably most people know of St. Alexander Nevsky from the film ALEXANDER NEVSKY by a Jewish (!) film director Sergei Eisenstein (also known for BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and (the aptly named) IVAN THE TERRIBLE, Parts I and II). The Church of St. Alexander Nevsky is dark enough for any Byzantine fan. There is only a little light coming through the door and the dome. It is rumored to have some nice religious art on the walls.
We tried tipping the guide when she was done, but she would not accept a tip. She was one of the better city guides also. I had tried to get her picture before to remember her, but she did not want her picture taken. I guess she was just shy, which is a pity.
Next begins one of those chapters of the trip I would prefer to forget. Not really our fault, but somewhat embarrassing. The guide book said there was an exhibit of how Bulgarian Jews escaped the Holocaust in a certain building. It took us a lot of walking to find it. It would have taken longer, but somebody saw us trying to figure our way and asked to help. You are always a little wary of this sort of thing because there are so many people trying to sell something to tourists. It soon became evident what this guy's angle was, and it was benign. He was learning English from a book and from the Voice of America and he wanted somebody to talk English to. I'd been suspicious of the guy in Vienna who talked with us for twenty minutes about the Roman excavations and was wrong then also.
We found the building and it looked as if it was just an office building. We came in the front door, wheelchair and all. There was a woman behind a window who wanted to know what we wanted. 'Exhibition.' Well, she had no English, we had no Bulgarian. She called someone else over. He didn't understand either, but knew it had something to do with the top floor. There was an elevator, but it would take only three people at a time. Steve chained Mary's wheelchair and left it in the lobby. The man took Steve and Mary to the top floor and came back for Evelyn and me. On the fifth floor we found ourselves in the waiting room of an office. Here we were, four sweaty tourists standing around in somebody's office and asking for something. A woman came out to find out what language we spoke and went to find someone. Two more people involved. ('I want to get out of here,' I thought.) A young man came out to ask what we wanted. It didn't help that Steve said we wanted to see the 'exposition.' I corrected him: 'The exhibition.' 'The exhibition is closed.' ('I want to get out of here and leave these people alone,' I thought.) We started to leave and Mary said she had to use the bathroom, so we had to ask where that was. ('We come from America and we want to use your toilet.') That took the better part of ten minutes during which I felt like an interloper. Finally we were ready to leave and a distinguished man in a suit and tie with good English came out to find out what we wanted. He explained the exhibit was closed for about a year and would be moved to the synagogue. He asked about us and we said we were from New Jersey. 'Near New York,' Evelyn added. Yes, he had been to New Jersey.
That didn't surprise me. The man seemed to have the air of somebody important but I felt funny asking. Steve rang for the elevator. Evelyn and I took the stairs. On one of the floors there was a picture of a man, probably the same one we had just talked to but it looked like it was taken about 1940 and more recently blown up to about forty inches square. He probably was someone important.
Back on the street we walked a ways together, then Evelyn and I went our own way. We checked out the Central Universal Store and found it luxurious by Romanian standards and pretty dismal by United States standards. It had souvenirs on the first floor by the door so tourists didn't have to enter too deeply. There were five floors connected by escalators, many of which worked.
We went to the top floor to buy music cassettes. I brought a player and we listen in the room at night. All cassettes available in Bulgaria seem to be pirated. All the cassettes taken out of their cases look exactly alike. They are Gold Star brand 60-minute blanks. Unlabeled. One of the cassettes I bought has a poor photocopy of an album cover as the cassette's cover. It says '66 minutes of music.' Cute trick on a 60-minute blank. |
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