Weekending: Varna, Bulgaria

by Meg Nesterov on


Back in September, the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan offered locals and expats like me an excuse to go on holiday while our American friends were celebrating the end of summer and Labor Day. With more time to explore than a typical Weekending trip, I checked out Turkey’s most western neighbor, Bulgaria, and fell in love with modern and medieval captials Sofia and Veliko Tarnovo.

The place: Varna, Bulgaria

Varna is known as the summertime capital of Bulgaria, a Black Sea beach town that’s a destination unto itself with several notable museums, an active cultural scene, and the gateway to the coastal resort towns.

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  • Unlike many of the purpose-built, touristy resort towns that litter the coast, Varna manages to maintain a nice balance of beach town and actual city. Pedestrian streets Knyaz Boris and Slivnitsa are great for window shopping and people watching day and night, and Varna has a handful of quirky and interesting museums to visit. The Archaeology Museum is one of the country’s best, and my visit to the creepily-cool Medical History museum (with nice Bulgarian lady following me around turning lights on and off as in VT) was one of my favorite travel experiences. Strolling the Sea Garden is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, though the zoo is maybe the grimmest I’ve seen yet (I could have easily stuck my head into the lion’s cage with no interferrence) but with admission under $1, it’s hard to complain.
  • The variety of daytime diversions extends to nightlife too, with everything from sceney beach clubs to seedy casinos to dive bars. Indian Bar has an eclectic decor of Native American art and Italian soccer banners which manages to be more charming that offensive, while Saloon Bar is just the kind of place I’d love in my neighborhood: cheap drinks, good music, and a bartender that remembers you after one drink. Varna is also the birthplace to Happy Bar & Grill, a chain restaurant all over Bulgaria (and now in Spain too) that resembles a love child of Hooters and T.G.I. Friday’s, in the best sense. Happy has a vaguely nostalgic rock-and-roll Americana theme going on, a menu of Bulgarian food and pizza (they also have some sushi restaurants), and waitresses clad in miniskirts and nude pantyhose. There are several location including a tiki beach bar, and any of them are good spots to take advantage of free wi-fi, decent coffee, and as many ’80s music videos as you can handle. Varna is a bit pricier than other towns in Bulgaria but still a steal by Western standards.

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  • Lovely as Varna may be, the travel season is really limited to summer. While there is plenty to do in cool weather, there is greatly reduced transportation in and around town, many waterfront cafes will close in winter, and you’ll miss out on experiencing the summer scene. The Black Sea has been the hot weather refuge of many Europeans for decades and Varna retains some old-school (and Communist-era) flavor (see the above photo of the thermal pools frequented by the elder residences) while joining the modern world with boutique hotels and sushi restaurants popping up to serve a growing international clientele. If you visit Bulgaria in cold weather, your time would be better spent exploring the old towns and museums in central and western Bulgaria.
  • I’d be remiss in wrapping up a series on Bulgaria without pointing out the obvious obstacle: Cyrillic. Invented in Bulgaria and not Russia, the alphabet is less complicated than you think but takes some adjustment and practice to feel comfortable reading signs and maps. I was fortunate to travel with my Russian-speaking husband who could at least read the alphabet (though Russian and Bulgarian are as dissimilar as English and Spanish) but I got the hang of it quickly enough. Rather than trying to memorize the alphabet in advance, transcribe a few key and familiar words, such as your name, your hotel, and the towns you are visiting so you can begin to recognize the characters. Also, Bulgaria’s quirk is the reverse head nod: they nod horizontally for yes, vertically for no. This feels very foreign the first time you experience it but makes an odd sense after a few days.

Getting there

Most of the international flights to Varna are from Eastern Europe, though the great budget carrier Wizz Air flies from London and Sofia. Bus service is excellent throughout the country (about 7 hours from Sofia) or from Istanbul (10 hours) or Bucharest (7 hours), but train service is slower and less comfortable.

Make it a week

Rent a car or bus hop along the coast if the weather is good, taking note that if a town has a foreign name (like Golden Sands) it’s probably an overbuilt tourist town. You could also combine with other regions of Bulgaria. I fit in Sofia, Veliko Tarnavo, and Varna comfortably in an 8 day Saturday – Sunday trip, traveling between cities by bus and returning to Sofia for my international flight on Wizz Air.

Read about more Weekending trips here.

Four United Kingdom cities show what rudeness is, Manchester meanest

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Sometimes, it can be pretty hard to face facts. Nobody wants to be called rude, and many destinations make great efforts to be perceived as welcoming. Well, forget what you see in the brochures and pretty PR pictures – some places are just tough.

Like the United Kingdom.

Now, I’ve hit London and several cities in Scotland. I had no problems at all. Then again, I’m from New York and grew up in Boston, two towns with reputations for rudeness over here. So, there’s a shot I just missed it. Thankfully, The Sun picks up the trail and shows us just how rude the people of Manchester, London, Glasgow and Bristol can be.

Why is The Sun picking on these three cities? Well, it’s pretty sad, really. A 77-year-old man lay unconscious on the street for close to five hours in freezing weather. Hundreds of people walked by and gave not a damn.

Of course, this could have happened in any major city, but The Sun decided to operate in its own back yard. Let’s take a look at what the newspaper learned by leaving a reporter out on the ground in below-freezing conditions:1. Manchester: The most sympathy the reporter got here was from one woman: “I thought you were dead. Your face didn’t look good.” Meanwhile, 15 people ignored him in 13 minutes. A builder asked his friend, “Is he homeless or p***ed?” but did nothing and several shoppers stared.

2. Glasgow: At the freezing mark, a philosophy student checked to see if the reporter was breathing. Was he rude? Not at all! In fact, Marc Deane, the concerned citizen who stopped, told The Sun, “”Some people don’t want to get involved in anything out of their routine. But it’s a small price to pay if somebody’s life is at stake.”

3. London: It took six people for someone to care to roll up and say something. The rest, according to The Sun, were severe: “One man gave barely a second glance and a grunt before walking on, still chatting on his mobile. Others just looked straight through our reporter.”

4. Bristol: Like Glasgow, Bristol knows how to treat a cold-weather victim. The reporter was “picked up off the ground almost as soon as he hit.” Bravo, Bristol![pho

[photo by Lara604 via Flickr]

Budget Travel Tips for Europe

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Practical, how-to budget travel advice is indispensible. There’s something particularly valuable about travel advice that opposes the emphasis on expensive hotels and other forms of high-end consumption that characterizes the contemporary travel media, perhaps especially in regions like Europe where costs are generally quite high.

Budget-friendly travel in Europe is no impossible dream, and the following sites are good for inspiring shoestring feats, assessing likely costs, and, above all else, disproving the idea that you have to spend hundreds of dollars a day to see Europe well. For some ideas about where to travel affordably in Europe, check out last week’s ten budget-friendly European destinations post.

1. Less Than a Shoestring. Though no longer publishing on a regular basis, the archives of this blog are astoundingly helpful in their low-budget audacity. Particularly useful for anyone scared off at the thought of Europe’s cost index are the blog’s “Baring my Budget” posts, which run through budgets for various short trips in great detail: three nights in Malta for €50 (currently $66); five days in London for £85 (currently $133); four nights in Venice for €91 (currently $120), all departing from Berlin. Costs breakdowns are provided in these “Baring my Budget” posts, as are the freebies encountered along the way. The mention of freebies is particularly helpful, as it reveals how often tourist information, maps, museum admission, and various cultural performances can be accessed free of charge. Though this series ran over two years ago, it is still very relevant.

2. EuroCheapo. Disclosure: I worked as an editor at EuroCheapo for almost three years and continue to do occasional freelance projects for the site. Phew. Glad I got that out of the way. Personal loyalty aside, EuroCheapo really is an enormously helpful resource. It is first and foremost as a hotel review site with useful descriptions of hotels written by trained hotel reviewers. EuroCheapo also edits a great blog full of essential budget-oriented tips penned by correspondents on the ground.

3. Guardian’s budget travel section. To be fair, the Guardian’s budget travel section is good for destinations around the world, though the density of articles on the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and other European countries is impressive. Recent articles that showcase well the newspaper’s creatively open approach to the subject of budget travel include Susan Greenwood’s budget Stockholm journey story, indebted to insider tips provided by a local blogger; a piece on backpacking in the Crimea by Maxton Walker; and Benji Lanyado’s TwiTrips series, for which the author receives tips via Twitter about the city he’s visiting and then liveblogs his discoveries. The most recent TwiTrip series installment sees Lanyado visiting Liverpool.4. Flycheapo. This site felt buzzing and electrified back when Europe’s low-cost airlines were announcing new routes weekly. With all the route cut-backs and cancellations of the last few years, the site sees far fewer regular updates. Nonetheless, Flycheapo is still an essential place to look for route information for inexpensive flights around Europe. The site provides new route news snippets, a route index, an airline index, and a route search, all of which are helpful for figuring out potential itineraries for low-cost air journeys across Europe.

5. Deutsche Bahn. Indispensible for figuring out train itineraries, Bahn.de features Europe-wide train schedules in enthralling detail. Bahn.de is also a much cheaper place for purchasing advance train fares than US-based agents. A very helpful run-down of how much cheaper these fares can be as well as information on how to access Deutsche Bahn sales personnel in English can be found in two posts by the editors of hidden europe magazine, here and here.

(Image: Flickr / vxla)

Christmas in Afghanistan: Safer than New York City?

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Nothing beats Manhattan for the holidays. I’m already seeing signs of Christmas appear all over the city. Lights are already wrapped around trees on W. 58th Street, and gigantic fir candy cane sculptures are beginning to adorn the city’s skyscrapers. There’s no doubt that the holiday season is nothing short of magical in New York City, and if you’re looking to experience Christmas away from home, this is the place to do it … unless you’re listening to the NATO.

Mark Sedwill, NATO’s senior civilian representative, has called Kabul, Afghanistan a safe place for kids, saying they “are probably safer here than they would be in London, New York or Glasgow or many other cities,” according to The Independent.

Of course, Sedwill is already backing away from his original comment, saying, “I was trying to explain to an audience of British children how uneven violence is across Afghanistan.”

%Gallery-106020%The Independent continues:

“But, in cities like Kabul where security has improved, the total levels of violence, including criminal violence, are comparable to those which many western children would experience.

“For most Afghans, the biggest challenges are from poverty – the absence of clean water, open sewers, malnutrition, disease – and many more children are at risk from those problems than from the insurgency.”

So, is that where you’re going to go to watch the tree-lighting?

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[Via Gawker, photo by zedwards via Flickr]

Hotel booking tip: Hotwire + upgrade = deal

by Alex Robertson Textor on

There are many strategies for successfully booking hotel rooms on “opaque” booking sites. “Opaque” booking sites, for those unfamiliar with the term if not the thing itself, sell brand-name hotel rooms, among other goods, for discounted prices. The catch is that these hotels are never named in advance. The “opaque” booking sites help hotels fill their rooms at rates often far below hotel rack rates.

Some frequent travelers have developed a science out of gaming opaque booking sites. Better Bidding is one essential tool in this endeavor. It offers bidding tips and other information designed to allow users to figure out which description matches up with which anonymous hotel, thereby allowing customers to pick and choose a favored hotel.

Here’s a less crafty tip, one that can nonetheless be very helpful for finding a mid-range hotel bargain.

Twice in the past two months I’ve booked hotels in London and San Francisco on Hotwire. In both instances the hotel reservation was relatively speaking quite inexpensive: $99 for the London room and $110 for the San Francisco room.

Unfortunately, both bookings resulted in hotel rooms that were far from ideal.

In London, the Hilton London Docklands Riverside room booked through Hotwire ($99) was very cramped and not particularly well maintained. The bed was tiny and the view was of the traffic circle in front of the hotel. A £20 ($32) upgrade option gave us a recently renovated and much larger Deluxe room with a view of the foggy Thames. Our Hotwire-plus-upgrade rate ($131) turned out to be much less expensive than the lowest rack rate I found during research ($217).

In San Francisco, the room we booked through Hotwire at the Intercontinental San Francisco ($110) had two separate beds. We didn’t even take a look at it, instead inquiring about an upgrade. $30 per night later and we had a 17th floor corner king with sweeping views north and west. By our calculations, we saved almost $40 off the least expensive rack rate in the process.

(Image: Flickr / hotelkursaal&ausonia)