Sofia

Today is unfortunately the last whole day we will spend in Bulgaria. I think every one have had an amazing experience and have mixed feelings about going home. We woke up in the church in Dimitrovgrad where we had spent to nights in a row at, at 07:00. I don´t know about the others but i thought 7 was very early. (Some even woke up at 6 am, but I like sleeping right up until we leave). We had a 3 and a half hour ride until we reached Sofia the capital and where we are gone take our flight from tomorrow.

If you´re driving from Dimitrovgrad to Chirpan, most of the road looks like this, choose another direction!

But any way enough about our litlte adventures and over to Sofia. Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria and has an population of 1,2 million. We took taxi form our hotel and into the city center. We ended up outside the Hilton hotel, and from there we split up in several groups. I ended up for an hour long mission with both of my teachers for finding a Starbucks so Torstein could buy over 5kg of coffee. He apparently likes it alot, and who can blame him?

After we had some coffee and Torstein bought about half of the reaming coffee beans, our little group split up. Both our teachers and Morten were determined to find a music shop so Morten could purchase an  acoustic guitar. Which I just found out they did and managed to buy a nice guitar that was way cheeper here compared to Norway. There are some pictures below of the proud owner and his new guitar.

I ended up going with Alida(another student) and our gold was to find a huge mall that hopefully could offer any thing we desired. We decided to try to not be the most stereotypical turist ever and decided to walk and eventually ended up sneaking on a bus.(which is something you should not do at all..)We ended up some pretty weird places one of them was a music merchandise shop that was located in a kinda treating ally up some old stair. Everyone had long hair and were dancing openly in the brought daylight. After that we quickly found our buss and ended up at the mall. The buss ride was pretty exciting we ended up actually seeing some culture and not only big turist attractions. But when we arrived at  the mall it was a little disappointment, the mall was kinda boring and expensive. The only thing we purchased was some coffee and a candle as a present. We shortly ended up taking the taxi to our meeting place but, manage to end up at the wrong place. After a difficult and long conversation with our taxi driver, who only spoke Bulgarian, we came to the ritght place. We ran into out teachers there at Zara and ended up taking a taxi home.

Over all was a god experience and I think everybody enjoyed it, not only for the Starbucks, but for the special culture that I really can not compair to any other place. 

I though it would be intresting to mention a little fun fact before I end this. But did you know that when you are nodding and shakeing your head, it means the oposite than it does pretty much any where else? So when you nod it means no, and shake it means yes. I have found this very troubeling when 90% of our comunication here is body language. We were told that it had something to do with tricking the turkish people during their 500 year war, but we´re not quite sure. If anyone out there knows anything, please leave a comment, because I´m very curious.

Bastian