Hot Love: Bulgarian Style!

One of the bears at the park. They are very comfortable with people being around and tended to ignore us once they realised we didn't have food.
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Bansko is a small ski resort in the middle of Bulgaria. It is the third most popular ski resort in Bulgaria and is hoping to get the 2014 Winter Olympics. Over half the streets in town are dug up at the moment as they are trying to re-lay the cobblestones before the delegations start to arrive. There are lots of snow covered mountains surrounding the village but we couldn't see much of them because of the low cloud.

We arrived in the early evening from the monastery and carted all our stuff up the stairs into the hotel. It was not a bad little family run hotel, with small rooms but private bathrooms. It was freezing when we arrived because they hadn't put the heaters on before we arrived. It didn't matter much though as we headed back out almost straight away.

One of the more normally behaving bears.
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We headed to the library for a local concert that the hotel people told us about. It was an odd collection of local youth and a woman who  I think is famous on Bulgarian TV and was a bit of a diva. The kids were really quite good. There was a girl who sang some traditional Bulgarian songs and some other kids who did a collection of traditional mixed with modern dances. The woman came on later in the evening and sang some traditional folk songs while some other people danced in the background. She also did a couple of duets with a man. We left after a couple of her songs as we were all very hungry and keen for dinner. We were also very cold as they didn't seem to have any heating on in the theatre.

This bear seemed particularly well adjusted and spent most of the time we were there rooting about in the bushes looking for food.
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We slipped out and walked back to one of the local pubs and had some dinner. It was a great pub with a roaring fire and was toasty warm. They had great traditional Bulgarian food and a band that played local music. The music was a little overwhelming when they came and stood next to us for a while. I think that it was because we clapped them and the locals didn't. The waitress was really funny and kept telling us what we could and couldn't order. She made Kate get the giant kebab (which had most of a chicken on it) because the small kebab was for children. I had fried zucchini with yogurt sauce and then chicken (she did let me order the children's size which was still 100g) and potatoes.

Another of the ex dancing bears.
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After dinner we walked home in the dark (Bansko isn't big on street lights!), picking our way through the potholes and uprooted cobblestones. Unfortunately, I had put my torch in my other bag. I decided to wash my polar fleece when we got back to the hotel because it was getting to the slightly stinky stage after two and a half weeks without a wash and there was no washing machine in sight. They aren't the easiest things to wash in a sink without a plug and are even harder to try and wring out by hand. I got there in the end though and put it on the heater to dry. Unfortunately they turned the heater off about 30 minutes later and it didn't go back on again at all overnight so it was still damp in the morning. An hour of work with the hairdryer pretty much sorted it though.

These two bears looked particularly sad and both had very damaged noses from the rings.
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Lisa and I couldn't get our TV to work as some idiot had programmed a code into it and we tried all the obvious ones and then a large number of less obvious ones and didn't get anywhere. So no reruns of B grade American TV shows for us!

Breakfast in the hotel was really good and we got normal toast, french toast and cheese and meat. They even did hot milk to go with the coffee. After breakfast a group of us were going to go up to the snow line and play in the snow but it was still raining so we decided to stay in town instead. There isn't a huge amount to do in town in the inbetween season but we wandered around for a little while. There are a couple of museums all in Bulgarian about a couple of famous Bulgarians who came from Bansko and of whom we had never heard. We went to the church which is quite pretty and has some great wall paintings and a huge iconstasis. Strangely enough most of the seats in the church face away from the altar and the pulpit. Obviously they didn't like having to look at their priests.

Looking down on one of the enclosures from the lookout. There are currently five bears living together in it. It extends down the hill with large amounts of trees.
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We went and did a bit of shopping along the main street and I got a pair of polar fleece lined ski pants which are really really warm and I expect that I will get a great deal of wear out of them. They aren't the most flattering of pants but they definitely will be very useful. We wandered around some of the craft shops as well before heading to the internet and then off to grab some lunch.

We went to a local pizza/burger place and got some pizzas. They were working really hard and must have been making a fortune. The Bulgarians also seem to like putting ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise on the top of their pizzas which is a little odd. Some of the others tried it and said it wasn't as bad as it sounds.

I particularly loved the colour of this bear's coat.
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We then raced back to the hotel to get in the bus to go out to the Dancing Bear Park. This is a poorly named place that is actually the home to former dancing bears that have been resettled in a nature park to live out the rest of their days in relative comfort. There used to be lots of dancing bears in Bulgaria and they were owned by gypsies who used them to make money from tourists. It was a horrible business and involved putting rings through the bears noses, pulling out their claws and torturing them to get them to dance as it is not natural for bears to dance. When it was outlawed in the 1990s there was a problem with what to do with the bears that were already in captivity as they aren't able to be rereleased into the wild. A animal welfare group from Austria came to the rescue and raised money to buy the bears from the gypsies and make them a new home in the forest near Bansko.

Okay so there aren't many pictures of Bansko itself. But that is because it's not the most photogenic of towns since it is only a ski resort.
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There are 24 (23 former dancing and one mistreated one from a zoo) bears living in the park at the moment. Some have adapted to life there very well and are living together in enclosures and even hibernate (the ranger told us this is a sign of good mental health in the bears), others are much more traumatised by what has happened to them and continue to pace around and look unhappy. Lots of them have very damaged noses from the nose rings that they used to have and struggle a bit to breathe. Lots of them can't find food for themselves so have to be fed all the time. It costs 10,000 euros a year to look after each bear and they don't get any government funding. It's all paid for through the foundation.

It's not a particularly happy place but is well worth going to see what they are doing. You have to get out here by private transport as there aren't any buses or nearby villages.

That night we went out for dinner at another local pub that is on the main square in the middle of town. I think that it is called something like Momini Dvori (that's working with my translation of the cyrillic). This was the home of hot love in Bulgaria. The food in this place was fantastic. I had some fantastic local chicken dish (of course with loads of potatoes) followed by some 'hot love' which was icecream with hot raspberry puree. It was really good.

The next morning, the rooms were freezing again as the heaters hadn't been on overnight. The people in the hotel seemed to have something against leaving the heaters on overnight. We had another fantastic breakfast before getting on the bus and heading onto Plovdiv.