Bulgaria – a beautiful country!

  Our new daughter-in-law, Lili, was absolutely the best tour guide and did a wonderful job showing off her country to us. I hope there will not be a test on it though, because my memory is not nearly as good as hers and I don't remember half the names of the places of interest that we visited. It is very unfortunate that we lost many pictures we took the first few days there, due to a computer glitch.


 The first two pictures are taken from their terrace and the next two are the hotel we stayed in. This is just a small sample of the many pictures we took.

The city of Sofia is surrounded by mountains, green with trees, that were very nice and still had snow on them. We had several shopping trip in Sofia and trips to the mountains, villages, churches, museum and a monastery. We enjoyed the food, the wine, beer and the people. We couldn't speak the language but the people were very happy and friendly.

 These were taken from the terrace of the hotel we stayed at.  Very beautiful!

 We went on a country trip to the city Plovdiv and got our exercise doing a lot of walking with most streets being uphill and paved with cobblestones. It was difficult to walk but had a beautiful view. They have a large city fair twice a year there. Plovdiv is an hour and a half drive southeast of Sofia.

Sofia from the air.

 The Rila monastery is south of Sofia and is a very isolated site in the mountains. There are many people who visit there. We had a monastery tour guide to take us all through and explain the exhibits to us. The Church was beautiful with paintings on the walls and ceilings. It is an active monastery. One of the monks was gracious enough to let us take his picture.






 

  Lili took us to her office where we met her colleagues who were kind enough to fix us a snack and drink before taking us to tour the office. We also drove to the mountain where their satellite dishes used to be located before they moved them into Sofia.

It was all very interesting. We saw the Alexander Nevski Memorial Church, the St. George Church and the Russian Church. A museum was also a place of interest.





There were huge fruit and vegetable markets. Fresh fruits were very good, along with fresh bread for breakfast. Fresh cherries were for sale along the roadside on one of our trips and were very good. We went to several very nice restaurants and the food was great I particularly enjoyed the salads. The basic salad was made with chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onion and cheese. One restaurant, called The Spaghetti Company Italian restaurant had the absolute best spinach lasagna. Of course we tried out a SMALL order of fries that proved to feed six people and the beverages were very good as well.

Of course, I can't leave out the delicious dinners that Lili and her Mother, Toni fixed for us. The day we got there, Lili had a very good dinner of salad and baked chicken with mushroom sauce (her secret recipe). The next evening, staring off with a toast of Rakia (brandy), Lili's Mom fixed salad, sliced meats and cheeses and lamb with rice for us. It was all very good.

 One very interesting (crooked)  building we saw in Sofia really caught our eye. Take a look at this:

It was a wonderful trip and something we will never forget. The wedding, the trip, everything about it was great!