Black Sea

Traveling from Sozopol to Varna was a bit of a non-event.....not much to see....although i did find some wanted bulgarian Yogurt for breakfast! Yogurt in a pottle with muesli and fruit already added! Damn good! I am definitely seeing why Bulgaria is famous for Yogurt!

Arriving in Varna I had a three km walk to the hostel, I always feel like such a retard turning up at my hostels sweating like a pig, and then taking my pack off and wandering around saturated for the next hour!

The hostel was really cool! Varna is a pretty unremarkable place! I wouldn't recommend going there, but the hostel was well worth visiting! It is set back from the road down an alley and the ppl running is are sooooo cute! Really really cool, the put on a BBQ for me and we drank beer till 3 in the morning! They were telling me all about three day trips they do take in the summer to various parts of bulgaria that cost $45 NZ all expenses paid.....i am very tempted to get a group together and fly back to Bulgaria to go on one of the trips! Bulgaria has some amazing scenery and one of the trips is Kayaking a canyon that is filled with cave churches and castles in the hills!

The next morning I set off to the sea park to see what I could see, it was raining, so i didn't think I would swim, but talked myself into it once there.......found a secluded spot, stripped off and went for a wee nekid dip, I am sure I would have had a fantastic reception had the guy who came round the corner a couple of minutes later come a little sooner!

Spent the next couple of hours wandering the city with saturated clothes feeling like a drowned rat as it was raining, everyone else seemed to be rugged up and I was in wet shorts, wet T-shirt, and Jandles (not a good look on the pretentious streets of bulgaria) so i decided the only thing for it was to buy myself a MASSIVE icecream to distract myself from how idiotic I looked walking down the street!

I had a few chats with the hosteliers about vain Bulgarians, the culture seems pretty crazy! Their take on it (they are hippy type, very relaxed young bulgarians, more set on getting out there and doing stuff than looking pretty) is that Bulgaria is struggling with its identity being so young (they only came out of communism about 10 years ago) and the young ppl are looking to Americans as role models.....but the only americans they see are on TV, so that is why they all look so plastic! Apparently there is a lot of plastic surgery going on here!!! They are not interested in anything much other than what they look like, and they don't move out of home, even when they are married, parents are expected to look after them until they die. So they have really have nothing except for a whole tonne of really cheap clothes. Crazy!