Sofia

The French girl, the Spanish guys and some other people who were riding with me in the same seater compartment eventually all left the train in Pleven. After that I had the whole wagon completely for myself only sometime people coming in to walk through. So I fell asleep and woke up when it was already dawn, kind of panicking that my laptop got stolen and that we were already in Sofia and the train was about to leave again before I could get out. In reality we were just at a really deserted train station waiting for them to detach a few wagons from the train. 

More and more people got on the train after that which was awkward, because I smelled badly and kept dosing of and everytime I opened my eyes other people were sitting around me and I was a bit confused. 

The last part of the journey really seemed to last forever and we arrived 2 hours later than I had thought we would. I immediately went to the international ticket office (that I would have never found without the description on the wikitravel page) and bought a ticket for the same night to Belgrade. For the first time someone recognized my surname because it's a Bulgarian seaside town. Nice!

In a tram that had clearly seen its best days a long time ago I drove to the core of the city center to go to a hostel for a shower and a nap. My Serbian skills that I had expected to be very useful in Bulgaria didn't help me at all, I asked one man at the train station in my bad Serbian where those tram lines that I search are leaving and he didn't seem to understand a word of what I was saying. It was refreshing that almost all signs on the streets were in cyrillic, no matter if commercial or official...so it gave me the chance to practise reading it.

In the hostel I had to wait a long time before I could get a bed for the day. The common rooms of the hostels I saw on this trip were not what is always praised as a meeting hub for fellow travellers to socialize, but more a place with free wifi for people to pass out on the internet in front of their smart phones or laptops. 

The staff were really helpful though, she gave me an awesome map of Sofia so that after the shower I wanted to try one of the restaurants that they recommended on that map. Walking in the blistering cold I saw a blue sky and the sun for the first time in a few months. It was a really beautiful day and I enjoyed the bustle on the street and had a fantastic fish meal in a stylish restaurant.

After that I made a big walking tour of the circularly arranged city center, seeing beautiful churches, a mosque, a really nice synagogue, some government buildings as well as large parks with unique monuments. 

Maybe it can all be blamed on the weather, but Sofia made such a better impression on me than Bucharest, even though everything else indicates that Bulgaria is poorer and less developed than Romania. The architecture is a surprisingly tasteful mix of really old buildings mixed with communist buildings and here there was a little more Turkish influence. Gypsies speaking in Turkish on the market (mainly mothers telling children to cadge cigarettes for them) and the mosque which is so centrally located that it coins the picture of the city and gives it a charme of a little sister of Istanbul. 

I must say it was one of the best hostels I've seen in eastern Europe, providing a plate of spaghetti and a beer for every guest every night and fruit snacks on the tables for everyone. I did eventually talk to some fellow travellers, a British guy and a Californian girl who didn't know each other but incidently picked almost the same overland route to China, two Korean sisters who barely spoke English, a Canadian who just worked for 2 years as a teacher in Riyadh.

Expecting the worse from the train ride I went to the train station and together with two Japanese girls found the right train and discovered that I had a whole sleeper compartment with 6 beds just for myself. It was the most comfortable train ride I ever had, with sheets, pillows and a lock on the door so that I didn't have to worry about the luggage. When I asked the conductur how long the train is stopping at the border and whether I could go outside to have a cigarette he looked at me as if I was retarded and says in Serbian "Just smoke in the hallway or in your compartment". You can tell that you're not in the EU anymore, I like that and the relaxed friendliness of the Serbs. 

Unfortunately I only had one day, but I will definitely go back because the Vitosha mountain with a 2290 meter peak is only 20 kilometers away from downtown Sofia and you can go up with a cable car. That plus the city that gave my family the surname on the black sea cost, I can't wait to go back to Bulgaria!