Ah, Bulgaria...uncivilized, but intriguing.

I left you (in an electronic sense) in Turkey, where Jon and I had just arrived and were about to eat breakfast on our terrace at the Sea of Marmara.

Istanbul was stunning, both in terms of gorgeous sunny weather and a plethora of sights and sounds and smells. The streets teemed with vendors selling corn-on-the-cob and freshly squeezed orange juice from carts, tourists gawking at the huge mosques and palaces straight out of Arabian Nights and sophisticated Turks enjoying their day out.

We went to the Grand Bazaar, the world's oldest version of the mall, created 550 years ago in a great stroke of genius. Strangely enough, we didn't blend in and appear Turkish to quite the extent that you'd think, and we were deluged with many varieties of 'hey meeeester, come and buy my socks/watches/carpets/harem ensembles/strange pieces of jewellery the size of your fist'.

Jon was in the market for sandals, so we went on a grand search for men's shoes. Now, Jon is more than a little particular, so this became an epic quest akin to Lord of the Rings. We finally found a pair that suited him, and he cleverly haggled the propetier, eager to sell to a foreigner at probably three times the price, down to an amount he was happy with. Triumphant, we returned back to the hostel, Jon put his new shoes on, and that's where the bubble burst.



He looked at me perplexedly and said, "Babe, they don't fit. Well, one shoe fits, but the other one doesn't...?" Immediately, I dubbed him Cinderella, and once I'd stopped snickering, I looked at his feet. It was true that one shoe didn't fit very well. It was also the case that he had been sold two ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SHOES. So poor Little Jonny One Shoe and I had to trek back through the Grand Bazaar the next day and attempt to explain with our broken Turkish and the man's broken English that Jon had been given the left shoe of one pair and the right shoe of another. We did get it sorted out, but I've been calling him Cindy ever since.

We took a Turkish cooking course in order to further our cultural awareness and to learn how to roll dolmades (stuffed vine leaves). I was hoping for something akin to Home Ec class, where we would be given a pile of ingredients and a recipe, but it was more like watching a Jamie Oliver show live.



Still, the food was yummy and it was really interesting to roll the leaves into cigar-shaped tubes. And we met Holly, an American lawyer from DC, with whom we discovered a strange little bar on a hilltop, where a platinum-locked woman was seranading the crowd with "I Will Survive" in Turkish.



After four days of schlepping around Istanbul, we headed for Canakkale, a six hour bus trip away. It holds the World War I battlefields of Gallipoli and to drop into Troy and say hello to the big wooden horse. Yes, it's big, it's cheesy, and I was the first one in line to climb to the top!



We bid Turkey farewell on the night train to Bulgaria. This involved, to my sleepy-eyed irritation, a two hour exit visa procedure at the Turkish border at 2am, and then another entrance procedure at the Bulgarian immigration office at 5am. Bulgaria was a major shock from Turkey, and we staggered into Plovdiv totally taken aback by the weirdness of it all. Istanbul was cosmopolitan, tourist-friendly and well-travelled. Plovdiv is, well, none of those things. Somehow, Jon and I hadn't made the link that Bulgaria uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which is much like the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. What this meant is that we could no longer read. (nostalgic sigh) It was just like Japan - I got to be illiterate all over again.

It absolutely POURED rain, and in the cobblestone, steeply inclined streets of Plovdiv, this made walking more than a bit of a challenge. We spent the night at a tiny little hostel where the private room had a ceiling so low that neither of us could stand upright, as the lightning and thunder crashed all around and the power went in and out again. Twice.

We managed to swim down the hill towards dinner, and discovered to our delight that Bulgarian food is really really cheap. I ordered Jon a glass of the local booze, a plum flavoured brandy that tastes like turpentine and could take the skin off a camel, and he cruelly insisted that I drink half because I'd ordered it. I saw this as not appreciating my wanting to broaden his horizons, but he disagreed and apparently my face froze in a rictus of horror that was hugely entertaining after I tried it.

We saw some art before hopping the train into Varna:



We've been hanging out on the Black Sea coast for the last few days, enjoying a few days of beaching and relaxation before to mosey on to Romania on Monday to go to Transylvania and my buddy Dracula. All the Buffy watching has been in preparation for something, after all!

Will keep my garlic and sharpened stakes handy and keep you posted on whether I can take down the undead in a Buffyesque manner.