I love love love to see the nice cafes I visited in Sofia not only still around but progressing! Edgy Veggy was a tiny hole in the wall when I was here a year and a half ago, and now it's a full sized cafe with comfy seats, wifi, and vegan groceries to boot.
Veda House is as a tranquil and cosy as it ever was, and I tried a new place for breakfast - KIND - which wasn't here on my last visit but has a fantastic hearty budget all-vegan daily menu. I went to Kring yesterday too, which was here last time and I just didn't have time for - pay by weight vegetarian, super delicious and calm ayurvedic vibes.
I took the night train from Sofia to Varna. I'd read good things (it's amazing, super clean and comfortable, friendly staff) and heard bad things (you'll get robbed, Bulgarian trains are awful). One thing I was sure of is that it's slower than the bus. But overnight, that just meant I actually had the potential get enough sleep before I arrived.
I ended up with the help of a local to buy the ticket, which I left til the last minute. She strongly suggested that I buy business class so I would have a sleeper cabin to myself. Otherwise, they're a three-bunk deal shared with strangers. The price was the same as a bus ticket (~€25) so what the heck.
There are also first and second class seats for sale. Through the window I saw them and they looked plenty comfortable enough for me, tiny person, expert bus sleeper, to have been more than happy with. But having a cabin to myself was nice too.
I bought the ticket online at bdz.bg which was fairly painless. The later train I wanted said it was sold out of business class tickets, so I got a slightly earlier one. The site gives you 15 minutes to fill in all the details and pay. I timed out a few times, and when I went round again it said business class was sold out on the other train too.. I just let it time out again and try again and eventually it worked. My new local friend printed the ticket for me. The instructions about that are ambiguous, so better to be on the safe side.
I got to Sofia Central station about 40 minutes before departure (not on purpose, I was just extra efficient). The station has clear signs (as long as you can recognise Bulgarian place names in Cyrillic) and I found my train already on platform 6. The ticket had my coach and berth number on. When I boarded a member of staff took my paper ticket, cross checked some lists, and told me to go to berth 81 (which is not what my ticket said). She didn't speak much English, but was very friendly and enthusiastic with the words she did know.
The train wasn't super busy, but it wasn't deserted either. Plenty of people from all walks of life seemed to be entering sleeper cabins or settling into seats.
Berth 81 turned out to be a triple bunk room. There was a sink, and various different lights, and temperature control, and high up storage, and a little cupboard. I wasn't sure if this meant other people would be joining me after all. Oh well. I settled into the bottom bunk (as instructed) with my kindle.
About ten minutes later the train lady knocked on the door and I got out of the way from the bunk. She hoisted the middle bunk against the wall, so I could now sit upright on the lower one. "Business!" she beamed, and left. I see.
The train trundled along throughout the night. There were lots of stops, some very short, and some where it sat in a station for a while. There were no announcements. The bed was comfortable, and I slept well in between being woken up by irregular train movements, or sudden station light. Every time I woke up and looked out of the window at the passing night, and felt the rumble of the train, I was filled with joy and a feeling of adventure; this is exactly what I want my life to be like. The feeling encapsulated by night trains.
We arrived in Varna about half an hour late. Fifteen minutes or so before arrival, the train lady knocked on my door again (I was already up, having heard knocking on the doors of my neighbouring berths getting closer and closer). She told me "Varna!" and returned my printed ticket. As we pulled into the station, and the sun was rising, there was finally a tannoy announcement, presumably because the train was terminating.
I laid in bed for like 45 minutes feeling bad about not getting up and writing and also waking up too late and just letting the day waste away and anyway it turns out I can't read my watch and it's an hour earlier than I thought \o/ So yes everything is going according to plan.
Day-and-a-night bus from Cologne to Sofia. Got nothing done, because of the communications black hole that is Serbia, and also feeling grotty. Met a friendly Georgian lady on the bus though.
Spent two nights in Sofia, cafe-working. Juggling dev administrivia, recruitment, improvement team meetings, and squeezing in tiny bits of OCDS code maybe. Met Martina.
A weekend in Varna, enjoying some solitude. Also writing! And working a bit. And exploring the locale. The beach and the Sea Garden are close by, and I have about a 30 minute walk to the city center. So far t-shirt weather, so long as you don't stand still for too long.
Bulgarians who don't speak any English when you need directions or to know how much something costs tend to suddenly have enough vocab and perfect grammar when they realise they can laugh at you about Brexit.
I had a day out exploring the coast north of Varna. I tried to take the bus to Golden Sands, but the conductor on the 409 somewhat aggressively told me to get off and take the 9 (good job I know enough Serbo-Croatian to understand some Bulgarian in context!!) but before the 9 came a taxi full of people pulled up and offered to take me for the same price as the bus (3bgn). So that was handy.
The taxi dropped the other people off at different points on the route, and then offered to take me all the way to the top of the hill for Aladzha monastery. Saved me a climb! The monastery is closed on Mondays in winter obviously so I didn't get to check out the cool place carved into the side of the rock or its catacombs.
I did go for a walk through the woods though, which was very serene, and had nice views through the trees over Golden Sands.
I walked down and from the woods entered a slightly dystopian ghost town. Golden Sands is a resort, so at this time of year, no surprise. The hotels were empty, the supermarkets boarded up and the cafes deserted. Plenty of stray dogs, and occasional people sweeping leaves into piles.
The beach truly was golden, and pretty enormous. I imagine in the summer it's packed. There are bars and restaurants lining it, and some tacky fairground stuff. I wanted to walk along the beach all the way to Sv Konstantin & Elena, but some of the more immediately beachfront hotels fenced off their bits of the beach and I had to take the road for long stretches.
Sveti Konstantin & Elena was much nicer than Golden Sands. It felt less tacky (though still had a hotel with a giant pirate ship on the roof) and a bit more alive. I guess people other than holiday makers actually live there. The beaches were still almost deserted and very beautiful.
I had some time before the next bus back to Varna, so I popped into the Botanical Gardens near the bus stop. Also tranquil and beautiful! And full of lovely autumnal colours.
I walked ten miles, mostly along beaches, and was pretty exhausted by the end. Unfortunately RunKeeper seems to have lost the evidence.
Unable to resist the the lure of the headland I can see across the bay from my balcony, I took the bus to the nearby town of Galata. The route isn't really walkable, as it involves a giant highway roadbridge across the bay. I had the impression Galata was kind of fancy, but the parts of it I saw seemed run down. I walked to the tip of the headland, which had a completely abandoned concrete viewing platform that was falling into the sea, and an old lighthouse. It was very cool. Then I headed around to the nearest beach, climbing down a thousand steps through a hillside wooded park. The autumn colours are in full swing, and the sun was hot. There were only a few other people around. I sat on a rock by the sea to write.
Writing with a pen and paper is helping a lot with getting the words out this year. And has fewer distractions than the laptop. Two A4 pages is reliably 750 words, so that helps too. Two pages three times a day, I'm all set.
On a hill near where I'm staying is an enormous concrete monument to Soviet and Bulgarian Friendship. The views from the top are good. I sat up there to write for a bit, and I caught a nice sunset. Then I went into town for curry at Vege Joy.
TFW you don't remember what you wrote about a character seven years ago but you just need to keep writing right now to move the story on, and then when you go back to check you've managed to keep complete continuity entirely by luck. (Or my subconscious firing better than I thought. But I can't remember the names of animals or countries I invented like yesterday so? I think it's luck.)
Fantasy world building is so hard how do people remember all the stuff they made up?? I'm trying to take notes every time I pull a new country/food/animal/side character out of the air so I can reuse things and be consistent but wow it takes a lot of work.
A day out in Varna. I walked into town through the Sea Garden, and went to the Archaelogical Museum. It's big, and covers the area from prehistoric times to the arrival of the Ottomans, then stops abruptly. Varna has a cool history as Odessos though, home to Thracians, Greeks and Byzantines(?) before the arrival of the 'barbarian' Slavs and Avars.
Burger at Vege Joy. Then a swung by the Roman thermal bath ruins, which was also bigger than expected, and full of cats.
I took the bus back to Chaika so I could walk to the beach at Sveti Nikola in time for a beautiful sunset.
The moon kept waking me up last night. It's almost full, and was blazing through my window with the light of a thousand suns. Then I kept having moon-related dreams.
Moved down the coast from Varna to Obzor, and settled into a cosy apartment with an excellent chair, 2 minutes from the sea. From my balcony I can hear the sea, and not traffic, but sometimes construction. But not hearing traffic is important and nice. Obzor is a resort town with nobody in it at this time of year. Only a couple of very small grocery stores are open, but I'll survive. The bus links both north and south down the coast are pretty good if I need to go emergency vegan cheese shopping in Varna or Burgas.
My new place has a smart TV with Netflix, but I think it must also be connected to the NaNoWriMo API or something..... it won't connect, even when the TV's network connection is fine, netflix isn't blocked on other devices on the same network, YouTube and Amazon Video connect fine... Netflix won't even let me log in, just says there is a problem. So obviously it knows my wordcount is under.
My hosts kindly dropped me in Byala, the next town over, at the top of the track that leads to Kara Dere beach. Kara Dere is wild. There's only a dirt track from the outskirts of town, and there's no infrastructure of any kind. Not even phone signal. It's backed by dunes and behind those are vinyards and other farmland. As soon as I set off I felt the tranquility. There were a few locals fishing from the beach, but nobody else for miles. I found an empty spot, and sat in the sun to write for an hour.
Then I started to walk south. My hosts had told me that it was possible to walk all the way back to Obzor along the beaches.. maybe I'd have to get my feet wet, they said, but definitely doable. Most of the route was easy actually. The tide was far enough out that there were a lot of beaches. Along the base of the great white cliffs that give Byala its name (probably) were beautiful stretches of different kinds of rocks, pebbles, sand. Some places had epic slanting stretches of stone. In only a few places did I need to squeeze between the sea and the cliff.
Until I reached the headland south of Byala with the fort Sveti Atanas. It seemed like it might be possible to get around, and I waded into the sea to reach the next rocks. But they were pretty slippery. The kicker was not knowing what was around the other side. If I knew for sure I'd reach accessible land again soon I would have gone for it, but I had no idea. So I backed up, and climbed approximately ten million steps to reach the top of the cliff. Then I passed through a suburb of Byala, stopping at the Information Center to use the wifi to tell my host I would not in fact be back in time for the internet-fixing people. There is a fort on the headland but it was gated; worth investigating another time.
I descended back to the seafront as soon as possible, through a small district called Chaika, and found a pier and a fishing port. I carried on along the beach, then, all the way to Obzor. There were some truly beautiful deserted spots there too. By this point I just wanted to get back before dark, otherwise I would have hung around for longer.
On the outskirts of Obzor is a large resort hotel. They paved over a chunk of the beach in front of that, but it was kind of a relief after miles of walking on sand. They'd also unearthed an ancient kiln, and put it in a glass room with some signs about the history of the area, so that was cool.
Writing is blocked by pressing need to work out solar orbits so nations on my planet can have interesting timekeeping mechanisms and seasons based on the two suns and a moon but aaargh physics hard i don't know anything
After falling potentially irrecoverably behind last week, I caught right up to less than a day behind, and now I'm feeling all blaze like yeah sure I'll write later no big deal
My host's doggo is sleeping over at mine tonight cos their baby is sick and they need to be in a different town. We went for a walk on the beach and he's so fast for such a tiny thing and made me run. Tomorrow we're going to climb a hill. I suspect I might end up with him for the rest of the week which is AWESOME
A full day walk with Archie through Kaleto and the hills near Obzor. It was beautiful and foresty. There was a clearing with swings. bbq area and a natural spring. I found a big decrepit tower and Archie was a good sport and waited while I climbed to the top.
It's blustery and overcast and a bit rainy, and forecast to be like this all week. I love it because I can hear the sea more clearly, and my flat is super cosy and I don't feel bad about not going on giant beach walk adventures. But I also still have the dog and he gives no shits about the weather and wants out. Probably good for me.
I took the bus from Obzor to not-so-Sunny Beach, then walked along the dunes to the ancient town of Nessebar. It was a grey cloudy day, but the deserted resort of Sunny Beach was beautiful without any people, and Nessebar is super cool and full of rambling alleys and Byzantine ruins. If you count the number of submerged churches, it has the most per capita in Europe (or something). I had an unexpectedly good lunch at one of the three open restaurants (all in a row), and went to the Archaelogical museum, which is very small.
The part of Nessebar on the mainland is a functioning town, so I also managed to pick up some decent groceries before heading back.
The internet went out for about an hour yesterday, and besides some time spent trying to debug the problem I wrote about 600 words before it came back on. There's a lesson here but I can't quite place it...
Yesterday I lost about 200 words because computers, but I logged them anyway, and today I'm going to rewrite that paragraph and claim it again as compensation. I think this is fine.
Tired of writing dialogue? Have your protagonist end up in a place where nobody speaks the same language as them for a while. Describing conversations this way also helps with wordcount, at this late late hour.
Did it! 50,029 words in 30 days of a fantasy adventure novel that now has over 60,000 words in total. I'm about 2/3 of the way through the story I think, or a little under.
If I write 201 more words I can beat 2009 buuut maybe I'll just watch TV now.
