Day 36: Heading back to Sofia

This is a picture of our Fulbright group with several teachers from the English Department of Plovdiv University, who we met with today. (I'm on the left side with the pink shirt and green skirt)

Today we had a tour of Plovdiv and journeyed back to Sofia. When we toured around the old part of Plovdiv, I realized that I wished we had more time here in this city. It is a fascinating place with a very ancient and complicated history. The city used to be named Philipopolis after Philip II (whose tomb you saw a picture of when I was writing about Greece). Philip the second, as you will recall, was the father of Alexander the Great. People in Plovdiv will still call the city Philipopolis occasionally. 

Plovdiv was badly damaged, as were all other cities, during the Ottoman invasion. The Turks called the city Phiibe. Fortunately, though, several ancient landmarks are still around. One is the amphitheater which is in the middle of the town square. This theatre was used for lion battles during the Roman domination period!

When we got back to the hotel to pack up our luggage into our bus, we realized we had a different bus than the rest of our tour -- a small little red bus, which we nicknamed Little Red (Our Greece bus was named "Hays" and our old Bulgarian bus was "Cobra"). Anyway, Little Red was cute, but our luggage definitely did not fit! I don't think the tour company remembered that all sixteen of us packed for 6 weeks of travel...we have a lot of stuff! While some of us grumbled about the bus, I couldn't help but laugh at the predicament. We ended up having a two hour bus ride back to Sofia with luggage in the aisle of the bus...but we got back safely!

On the drive we saw lot of sunflower fields. They are very common here...it's one of the "farms" they have. They were beautiful fields, so I had to take some pictures from the bus window. I also learned that the farms were much better during Communism because all the farms were government-owned and so the farming tools were provided by the government. Now a days, farmers can't afford to buy new farming equipment because it's so expensive.

When we came to the Eagle Bride and the two bronze brothers sitting on the college steps of Sofia, I felt like I was home. I knew our hotel was only three blocks away and I was very excited. We stay here for about 4-5 days and then I come back to Chicago! This is definitely the beginning of the end...I'm very excited to come home and get into a routine, but traveling around these two countries has been an amazing experience. 

Well, I finally will leave you with a picture of Danitza and Petko, our Tour Guide and Bus Driver here in Bulgaria. Hope you're all doing well at home! See you soon :)