They do really good icecream here

We arrived in Plovdiv after a couple of hours on the bus and the driver didn't know where the hotel was. Peter had to give him directions of the Lonely Planet map that he had. Luckily the hotel had a large sign which made it easier to find.

Plovdiv is a large city of half a million people that is on a large flat plain. It only has a small centre that has all of the attractions. It's one of the oldest cities in Europe and has quite a collection of ruins. There has been a settlement in the same place since at least the 5th century BC.

The hotel was really flash and had lifts and everything. The rooms weren't huge but the bathrooms were quite nice. The strangest thing was that when I flicked on the TV to see if they had an English language news channel and found out that the only english speaking channel was Hustler. Not quite what I was expecting as I went through the cartoons and music channels.

We all got changed because it was warm and sunny in Plovdiv, before heading into the centre of town. We had to walk through a few backstreets before walking through the park into the main street. We stopped at a bakery to grab some cheesy pastries for lunch before looking at some of the sights.

The old town is on the top of a hill that is above the main street. We stopped along the main street and had a fantastic icecream. They sell the stuff by the hundred grams and they had really good flavours. The caramel with the toffeed pecans was definitely the best.

We started at the roman ampitheatre which is still used for performances in the summer. We didn't bother paying to go into the ampitheatre but just walked around the top and looked through the fence. It has the beautiful backdrop of communist apartment blocks.

We wandered around for a bit looking at the old houses. Some are looking pretty good but some are a little worn around the edges. Various famous Bulgarians have lived in some of them. We skipped the museums as it was a lovely day and we thought that we should enjoy it. We continued up the hill to the Thracian ruins which are on the very top of the hill. Unfortunately, it is covered in graffiti as it seems to be the favourite hang-out of the local teenagers. It has some good views of the city though.

We wandered back down into the city and had some coffee at a local cafe. The waitress was quite impressive and managed to remember all eight orders and got them all right as well. After coffee we went our separate ways with some people going to the internet, some going shopping and the rest heading back to the hotel.

In the evening, we went to a restaurant called Central park that was in the park. They didn't have any english menus but our delightful waitress very thoughtfully translated large sections of it for us. We all ended up with wonderful dishes and as always huge amounts of potatoes. We left her a huge tip because we were so grateful not to have had to randomly chosen dishes and ended up with something gross. Unfortunately she wasn't working the next evening or we would have gone back again.

We headed back to the hotel bar and had some cocktails after dinner. The hotel had really cheap drinks and Erica got picked up by some random drunk Russian guy in the bar as a bonus.

The next morning we had the fairly ordinary hotel breakfast (saved only by the presence of toast) before setting off into town. The museums in town close for two hours at lunchtime so we decided to wait until the afternoon before going to the Ethnographic Museum. We headed to the internet (that would have been very hard to find if the others hadn't been there the day before) while we waited. We then had some more of the delicious icecream before heading back up the hill to go to the museum.

The ethnographic museum is in an old restored house that must have been quite the place in it's day. It is very grand with an enormous entry hall and a ballroom upstairs. All of the rooms are now used by the museum and have a collection of clothing, furniture, jewelry, religious items, farming equipment, pretty much everything that the people in Plovdiv have ever had. There were some very creepy costumes which are used in parades to scare off demons. They look not unlike possessed scarecrows in KKK hats and are very off putting. It took us about an hour to walk around the whole museum. It has some labels in English which helped a lot.

We then walked down into the new town again and met up with some of the others and set off to find a supermarket to buy some food for the train. There is a deli in the main street that sells cheese, snacks, wine and meat so most people got something there. It is not a place to take small children though as it has some unusual deli items. I thought the whole smoked pigs head was good until I saw the sheep's skull with the eyeballs still in but all the other flesh removed but also with the tongue, throat and intestines still attached. It was the stuff of childhood nightmares. I wanted to take a photo but I thought they might get offended.

We set off from there to find a mini-market so that we could get some proper food like water and fruit. We eventually found one a few streets away from the hotel. So I got some sensible food so that I had something for breakfast in case the train was late. We were getting a bit bored waiting for the train by this time so some of us headed back to the hotel and played travel scrabble for a little while and waited for dinner.

For dinner we went to a place called Diyana, which had english menus (making ordering so much easier). They also have enormous sizes. The salads are so big that you can eat for 10 minutes and look like you haven't started. They also have the mixed potatoes that comes in at a hefty 560g. We all ordered up big because we had excess leva to spend but we still didn't get rid of it all. I had the fried zucchini with yogurt sauce again as it is one of my Bulgarian favourites.

We wandered back to the hotel after having to miss dessert because we ran out of time. We grabbed all of our stuff and walked the five blocks down to the station. When we arrived in the very closed looking station we found out that the train was running 90 minutes late. We headed up to the right platform and decided since it was a nice evening we would wait up there. I sent Alex down to recheck the time after about 30 minutes as I had experienced the frequently changing time in Budapest Station before. And I was right. The train was now running 145 minutes late.

At this point the wine bottles came out and we started to look for things to do to amuse ourselves for a couple of hours. Peter dragged out a couple of conkers that he had been carrying around since he had last been in Croatia and challenged Kate to a conker fight. Now Kate being a Canadian from an area that doesn't have conkers, didn't quite understand the point and thought that you just had to hit the other conker. She definitely would have won anyway if that was the point. Once she mastered the aim of the game, she started to do much better and ended up winning, despite having lost her conker onto the train tracks at one point. After that amusement, we moved onto group charades which ended up degenerating into who could do the best topic that involved the other team making a fool of themselves on the public platform. Alex got Deliverance which was a toughie as  I couldn't work out what he was on about and I knew the answer. We did give a lot of random Bulgarians some amusement while they were waiting for trains too.

The train eventually arrived about 2.5 hours late and we piled on board. Luckily, Lisa and I got a cabin to ourselves as there wasn't a huge amount of room. It was a much flasher train than I was expecting and even had Western toilets instead of squats.

Some of the others decided to stay up for the Bulgarian border check as the notes that Peter had from the previous guide said that it was only an hour away. I went to bed as that didn't seem quite right and I was tired. It was more like four hours away so they sat up for quite a while. The guard woke us up for the border check and for some reason really woke me and Lisa up. We thought that it must have been the Turkish border where you have to get off the train and get stamped, so we got up and got dressed. After sitting around waiting for ages, we both went back to sleep (me sitting up as I couldn't get into bed with my shoes on). Eventually, a Bulgarian border guard came and checked our passports and we realised where we were and got undressed and went back to bed. About an hour later we had to get back up and get off the train for the real Turkish border crossing. It was cold. It was dark. And I'm not good in the morning when I haven't had enough sleep. There was one man checking the passports and he was slow as. I would hate to think how long it takes when the train is actually full.

Finally we got back on the train and then went back to bed for a couple of hours more. When we got up, we were well into Turkey and there wasn't much there. It was flat and sandy and had some scrubby looking bushes. There wasn't anywhere to sit up in the cabins unless everyone was up so we had to sit in the corridor.

The driver was really flogging the train to try and make up time (either that or they drive trains like they drive cars) but we still made it to Istanbul 4.5 hours later than scheduled. We chatted to an American who was on the train and he said that when he bought his tickets, they told him that it would be at least 2 hours late and always is. I don't know why they don't just change the timetable.

Read on about the trip in the next entry.