Just uploaded another album to my Picasa with pictures of my stay in Sofia, Bulgaria this week. Click on a pic below to go check out the album!
Or click here to see all of my albums, including older albums of Sofia, Istanbul, Brussels, Holland, Macedonia, and Bulgaria.
I’m off to see my girlfriend in Bulgaria. Which means I’ll be writing a bit about Bulgaria over the next week. If you want to know what it’s like there, just head over to my Picasa albums and have a look at the lower half of the page.
Speaking of Picasaweb… I took some pictures yesterday of a more or less typical day of me in Istanbul. Go check them out now.
Also some great news… I got a freelance writing opportunity passed down from the international office from my university. Turkish Daily News, a Turkish newspaper in English, sent them a message that they’re looking for international students because they could offer an interesting perspective on Istanbul. This is very exciting and I hope to get a nice chance to show my take on Istanbul on a bigger scale, as well as increase my journalistic experiences after having worked with the Bulgarian National Radio before.
My life’s developing at lightspeed! I can feel the rush! (and the stress, but enough about that already!)
I’ll write soon, from Bulgaria!
Edit – Oh, and I’ve been included in a blog carnival called Carnival of Cities, covering many interesting posts about many interesting cities around the world. Go check it out! And Foxnomad was so kind as to make a summary of it and include my post 🙂
My first batch of Istanbul pictures is now online. Go check it out at Picasa.
A few years ago I was walking through my hometown Utrecht in The Netherlands quite bored, but I had to kill some time. For some reason while I was walking I looked up and suddenly found myself marvelling at a beauty I had never noticed before. I believe a lot of things in our surrounding go completely unnoticed, because we don’t look up much. That’s why I’d like to encourage you all to LOOK UP MORE!
Every Monday I will post a photo or two of shots I took while looking up. This is the first installment with some shots from Istanbul, Turkey.
The last one is a shot by my girlfriend Tsvety (visit her DeviantArt page) and was taken in Ephesus, Anatolia, Turkey. It contains the Library of Celsus, completed in 135 AD.
If you would like to participate, just post a pic every monday taken from an upward angle and post your link below! For this week don’t worry if your post is a day late. Just post your link and visit the others.
I took this shot during the Global Day of Action for Tibet on the Dam square in Amsterdam. Besides this being one of the few pictures that corresponded with the theme, I also feel quite strong about the Tibetan issue. If you haven’t already, check out the BBC documentary “Undercover in Tibet” (for free via the link).
To see the whole album of pictures I took during the Global Day of Action, click here.
If you have a wrinkled picture of your own to share and you’re a PhotoHunter, be sure to leave your name and a direct link to the post below! All PhotoHunt posts get Stumbled!
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I took this picture during my trip to Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. I was having dinner on a terrace and this stray dog kept begging people for food, shoving its head through the fence and putting it on people’s tables. First time I really saw a stray dog like that, but during my five month stay in Bulgaria I saw many. It was also featured as photo of the day on the website of Radio Bulgaria (the international service of the Bulgarian National Radio).
To see the whole album of the pictures I took in Veliko Turnovo, click here.
Got a story to share about stray dogs? Your experiences in Bulgaria or Eastern Europe?
If you have a colourful picture of your own to share and you’re a PhotoHunter, be sure to leave your name and link below! All PhotoHunt posts get Stumbled!
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Last Thursday we decided to go to a park near Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, called “Apenheul“. Literally, this means “Monkeyhill”, but I like to refer to it as Monkeyland. Before I continue and tell you about the monkeys, I’d like to direct your attention to the pictures above.
Yes, it is what it looks like. I ate grasshoppers. Since they were fried they mostly tasted like… fried stuff, but I have to say it wasn’t bad. For €4.- we got a portion of about 6 grasshoppers so I suppose they’re supposed to be eaten as a delicacy. I expected a lot more and when I saw the plate with just 6 grasshoppers I felt disappointed and relieved at the same time, as you can imagine.
Time for some monkeys now. I went to the park with Tsvety, my girlfriend, and Petar, a Bulgarian student and friend of mine who lives here in The Netherlands.
One of the first types of monkeys we came across is this beauty at the left. The monkeys in this park are not in cages, but instead have their own areas or, if they’re dangerous (like gorillas), their own island. So most of the monkeys you see can be just a meter away from you (3 feet), or less!
On the Monkeyland map they write down the feeding times, which is a particularly special time to go and have a look. You’re not allowed to touch or play with the monkeys, because they want them to be as ‘wild’ as possible instead of them being used to human contact. Yet the most fascinating time to see them is when they’re in contact with people.
This doesn’t go for all the monkeys though. They have a group of bonobo apes, which are, I believe, the lifeform that’s closest to human beings and watching them is just fascinating. They are so man-like in their behaviour and movements. It’s almost like it’s people dressed up as apes.
I think we as human beings are very arrogant to think we are much more than these apes. Go to this park and have a look at the human behaviour in there. We act like animals, pushing each other to be able to see more, cutting in line at the food places, mimicking our fellow Earthlings. 😀
I’d like to leave you with some more ‘family pictures’. Enjoy!
And finally our decapitated delicassy 😉
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As I arrived in Sofia by bus from Macedonia around 8 in the morning, I was seriously considering skipping Sofia and just heading into the first bus to the Black Sea coast. I had told my girlfriend I’d be back in Sofia though and when I realized I’m too sweet to be a total dick, I let the idea of going straight to the coast go. I checked into the Art Hostel in Sofia and met up with Tsvety, my girlfriend, later that day. I think I must have told her about 20 times that she should come to the coast to me and she told me she’d have to see how her parents felt about it an equal amount of times. After all, she’d be coming with me to Holland for one month in just one and a half week time.
The next day I got the news… Yes, we were going to the coast together. That evening we met up at the central bus station in Sofia to take a bus to… Sozopol.
We did some basic planning and online orientation to see what hotels would be good there. Tsvety printed a map and marked the hotels on it. This was only to be used in worst case scenario, because generally Bulgarian old men and women offer quarters (kvartiri) to travellers for really good prices. As soon as we arrived 3 or 4 elderly Bulgarians gathered around my girlfriend and I and started promoting their place and telling each other to shut up. This was all happening in Bulgarian and since I had just fallen asleep at the end of the busride, after 4 or 5 hours of restlessness, I was in a very confused mindstate. One of them won, apparently, and I followed my girlfriend and him up a hill. He presented our room which was very clean and we crashed and slept ’til noon(ish).
The next day we went to the beach at the new part of town, since that was closest to our place. Sozopol is split into two parts, the old and the new. The best about the old part is all the old buildings (plus the only place with WiFi I could find was there (the bar’s called Lipstick)), the best about the new part is the strip with bars and restaurants along the beach.
We spent the first day exploring the new part of town and looking for wireless internet in the new and old part, since I had a conference website to do some work for. It took hours (literally) to find a place with wireless internet and once there I got to work. Tsvety walked around a while and took some more pictures. After that we went back to the hotel to change clothes and head out to the beach. Finally! However I’m more of an eater than a beach person, so we soon repositioned our asses from beach to restaurant.
The next day I got back to work at the bar. At the end of the day we walked around past Sozopol’s port and had dinner at a sea food restaurant. For the first time since becoming a vegetarian last November, I ate an animal. Mussels, to be exact. Only a few, since Bulgarian mussels don’t come close to Dutch/Belgian ones 😉 Never decided to completely stop eating fish though, it just turned out that way. That night Tsvety got rather sick from the chicken she ate (or maybe the mussels) and we spent the night at home.
See the whole album on Picasa…
We stayed one more day in Sozopol and then we took the bus north to Nesebar, for some more Black Sea coast time! More about this soon.
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That evening Mite and I decided to get our hair cut. For him it was his beardhair, for me it was the other headhair. In total, we got our whole heads cut. We walked a bit out of the town and into the hills. There were still a bunch of houses, but they got more and more sparse. We walked up a hill and up to the shabbiest barber shop I’ve ever seen. The guy did a decent job, although my hair wasn’t really shorter afterwards, only crooked, but it was for free since he was a friend of the family (not mine; Mite’s).
Being so happy with our new cuts, we decided that night was party time! Or maybe it was pre-decided. It doesn’t matter for the story, so I’ll keep it to myself, possibly carrying it to my grave. We got the whole group together and went to a few loud bars with FashionTV on their big screen televisions that were hanging from the ceiling. No difference between Macedonia and Bulgaria there. We ended up in some club and had a lot of smiles on our faces and alcohol in our blood. Excellent. The next day we did the same. See the pictures.
The next day we took all the children out to play in the park. It was really good and actually made me think twice about what I’m pursuing in my life. Activities like this make me feel really centred, calm and happy on a deeper level than the superficial level of every day happiness. For now I’ll just postpone this thinking about what I want to do with my life until a later point in time, probably mid-life crisis. Without further ado; the pictures! (As always, click to enlarge)
Click here for entire photo album…
The next day we chilled out and in the evening got together for one more drink since I’d be leaving. To those that were present: thanks for coming out to say bye! To those that were still up when I got into the taxi: thanks for staying up so late! Speaking about the taxi… I still had to go past a cash machine before I got into my bus back to Sofia (at 3am). We stopped at one machine, I tried… No luck. Other cash machine… same story. I started to get worried. We tried another, but nope. With the fourth one we finally had success. We headed to the busstation where we discovered the driver had no change. I went in quickly to buy a ticket, so I would have change to pay the driver. I tried to buy the ticket, but the guy kept repeating “600 denari, 600 denari”. I had given him one thousand and was wondering what the problem was… 600 more? Oh no… I’d have to go back into the city and get more money… I’d probably miss the bus. Then he put 400 on the counter and started writing my ticket. These people love to fuss about not paying in the exact amount. No more worries, paid the taxi, got in the bus, didn’t sleep in the bus… Ended up being awake for about 40 hours by the time I took my one hour nap. Back at the Art Hostel in Sofia. Back where I began.
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That evening we celebrated a birthday at a bar in town. Isabelle turned 20 and as Leni and her boyfriend Vlado joined us, they surprised her (and us) with cake and chocolate. We had a drink, chilled out and called it a night at an unridiculous hour for a change.
The next day I could sleep in a little, because Mite and Isabelle had some stuff to do at the NGO’s centre. At around 12 I was picked up by Mite and we were going to have some coffee before our afternoon activity. This afternoon activity was something I’d been waiting for since the moment I decided to go to Bulgaria last year, so naturally I was very excited. In the afternoon, we’d be heading over to the Roma neighbourhood to visit the host family of one of the American girls, Alex. In this neighbourhood however, you are never left alone (that’s a positive thing), so I knew I’d see a lot of stuff I normally wouldn’t, or never have… and that there would probably be some great photo opportunities too. 😉
Mite and I headed outside and saw a guy sitting behind a car. It was the crazy man we’d seen the day before as we were sitting outside a bar. The guy seemed to be completely in his own world, or even dimension, and today was no different. Mite asked for my camera and he managed to inspire me quite a bit. He knows no shyness and that’s the reason why he gets great shots. Definitely a motivation to get out of my own comfort zone. The crazy guy hardly noticed the camera and I wonder whether he had any idea of what a camera is and what was going on around him.
Later that afternoon we visited the Roma neighbourhood. It was quite the experience. I’ve often heard Bulgarians complain about the Roma, saying they’re dirty and their neighbourhoods are like landfills and though they might be right, I wonder if they cannot see the beauty that’s right there. A speck of mud on a flower does not destroy the flower’s beauty, the obsessive and judgemental mind does.
I’ll try to explain what’s not captured in the pictures, but then I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Entering the neighbourhood, as a group that clearly was not from around there, we drew quite the attention. Children loved the cameras and came to pose for us. We walked around and immersed ourselves in the noise and continuous chaos of the neighbourhood. It was great to have people from Alex’ host family as our guides, this made the neighbourhood and the people so much more accessible. Also, Mite and his colleague Leni have been working with some of these kids for years, so they too knew quite a few people there. It’s hard to put into words what the neighbourhood is like though, so without further ado, the pictures.
As said we visited the host of Alex who had a huge house. They lived in Germany for decades, working there to earn money and went back and built a house the size of a villa. After having some coffee, we were offered to come up to see the view from the top balcony of the house.
Following the Roma hospitality, we headed back to the city so we could all go to dinner. On our way back we visited a mosque which was still under construction. An interesting fact about the Roma people here is that a lot of them see themselves as Turkish and even speak Turkish. Some don’t even speak Macedonian. A fair share of them is also Islamic (evidently). Turkey won’t recognize their claims for Turkish nationality however.
As the sun went down and the evening stole the day’s presence, more new experiences awaited me.
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