BasBasBas.com

Tag: travel

  • Off To 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 🙂

  • Expat Experience Blog Carnival!

    A blog carnival is like an online magazine with a collection of the best (usually recent) blog posts on a particular topic. For examples you can just Google “blog carnival” and any given keyword of what you’re interested in, such as “travel” and you’ll find quite a few of these. It’s a great way to get your blog out there and it’s also nice to discover other bloggers in your niche, and network with them. Besides that, it builds traffic and pagerank, because of linkbacks (if that’s what you’re interested in).

    I haven’t been able to find any expat blog carnivals, so I decided to set one up myself. Therefore, I’m calling for all expat bloggers to submit their materials for the first edition of the Expat Experience blog carnival!

    How to participate? Simple. Just go to the Expat Experience submission page, select one of your most fascinating, well-read, recent posts and submit it for the next issue! Piece of cake.

    When the next issue is posted, I’ll link every article back to the original blog posts (and main blog page), but I also expect people to show off their submission in the blog carnival and link back to the carnival. If you think the quality of the carnival is sub par, then don’t link it. It’s all up to you, but it would be nice to create a buzzing community. 🙂

    Want to earn 300ECs (or a 2 week 125×125 banner on my site) and public recognition in the next issue of the blog carnival? Design us a cool banner that communicates the global expat experience with a width of 475 pixels! Whoever’s design is picked gets the prize!

    So what are you waiting for! Submit your articles and leave your link below to show your participation!

    Visit Expat Experience on BlogCarnival.com.

  • Istanbul pics online!

    My first batch of Istanbul pictures is now online. Go check it out at Picasa.

  • Look Up More Monday

    Look Up More Monday Banner

    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.

  • PhotoHunt: Beautiful

    Last year when I was working at the Bulgarian National Radio, they sent me on a worktrip to a town called Troyan. This town lies in central Bulgaria and is not frequently visited by tourists. I was told by the town’s tourist board to go spread the word, I also met the mayor, that’s how few foreign guests they get ;-). Besides work, there was also some time for sightseeing and we visited the church displayed in the picture.

    In general, I find most Bulgarian churches more interesting from the outside than from the inside, although my first encounters with the Eastern Orthodox interior of churches were far from boring. Check out the full album of my pics in Troyan.

    Have you been to Eastern Orthodox churches before? How did you like it? Ever attended a service and care to share how it differs from Protestant or Catholic services? Share now and leave a comment. 🙂

    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! *

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    * No direct link or no PhotoHunt = delete.

  • Off to Istanbul!

    I’m off to Istanbul today. It’s only been 6 months since I came back to Holland from Bulgaria where I lived for half a year. Now it’s time to get myself over to Istanbul for half a year of studying abroad. Since my girlfriend’s been in Holland with me for the last weeks and she’s from Sofia, we’re both flying to Sofia, Bulgaria tonight. I’ll be staying there a night and then I’m taking a 10-12 hour busride to Istanbul. Wednesdaymorning, I should be there.

    It looks like Wednesday’s going to be a bit crazy… Out of the bus, into the taxi. Out of the taxi, into the hostel. Out of the hostel, into the classroom for some intensive Turkish language courses. FIrst things first though, I’m leaving in a few hours and still haven’t completely packed yet, plus I need to get myself a new insurance for my stay abroad (but I know which to take, it’s just a matter of signing up). So I’m going to leave you like this. EntreCard users; I’ll try to drop back to the best of my ability, but the next days might be a bit chaotic, so I can’t promise anything. Keep dropping though!

    To all the people I know in Holland; I’ve had a great time… To the people I know in Istanbul; see you soon! 🙂

    Want to stay up to date on my life in Istanbul? Subscribe by RSS or click here for email updates.

  • Homeless

    It’s my last weekend in Holland. This Monday I’m flying to Sofia, Bulgaria, from where I’ll take a bus to go to Istanbul where I will be studying for half a year. Moved out of my apartment last weekend, staying at my parents now, getting ready to stay in a hostel for a while, so I’m officially homeless again. Woohoo! Freedom! 🙂

    Figured I’d deliver an update on some things.

    My visa
    After posting the concerns I had about my visa, I decided to email a friend of mine, Ivaylo, who has a lot of experience with travelling and living abroad. His take on it was that once I get my residence permit, I’ll be a temporary citizen of Turkey, which will thus grant me entry into Turkey. So even though I have a single entry visa, once I get my residence permit I should be set.

    I’ve tried calling the Turkish consulate over the last 2 days to get a confirmation about this, but haven’t been able to get through yet. Once I’m finished with my studies I’m seriously going to consider helping out ministries of foreign affairs around the world to shape up the external communication side of their consulates and embassies, since I have very few very good experiences with consulates or embassies. The only embassies that I dealt with and I’m impressed with is the English embassy in The Netherlands and the Dutch embassy in Bulgaria, though I guess the latter doesn’t have very much to do 😉 (just joking of course).

    Monday morning I’ll get up early to call the consulate, just in case I do need to go to Rotterdam to change my visa, which I don’t expect. If I don’t get through, I could of course take care of it when I’m in Turkey.

    Language course
    I decided that I actually should take part in the language course I blogged about. After posting it here and going through the comments, I figured “why not?” So let’s just do it and see what happens. I emailed them again to double-check if they had seen the email in which I said I would not be attending and to ask whether I could still be part of the course.

    And I can. Cool.

    A place to live
    We set up a group on Facebook which has a big number of the Erasmus students who are going to be doing one or two semesters for an exchange this year. Some of them are already finding apartments and looking for people to come and live there.

    I decided to add everyone to my friends with a small note about the exchange in Istanbul and then get messaging to see if I meet like-minded people to live with, or people who are already looking for an apartment. While doing this, a Turkish girl who studied at the university I’ll be attending (Yeditepe), sent me a link to a consulting company that helps with temporary housing in Turkey. BY Consulting Company‘s site looks promising, but they don’t have anything near my university currently. Maybe if I contact them once I’m in Istanbul I can find out more.

    Turkish hospitality
    Every Turkish person I know or have spoken to through Facebook has been incredibly friendly and from a Dutch perspective are going out of their way to help me out. Offering to hook me up with people in Istanbul who can introduce me to the city, helping me out with ideas for housing, regularly checking on me; I’ve never met a more hospitable people than the Turkish and I haven’t even set foot on Turkish soil yet.

    All worries are gone. Everything will be perfectly okay and will run smoothly. The only thing I worry about now is getting my stuff washed and packing my bag with as much stuff as the airline allows (which is just 20 kilograms). Just 3 more nights in Holland!

  • PhotoHunt: Colourful

    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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  • I’ve Got My Visa!

    There we go. Last thing I definitely needed to arrange before going to Istanbul for half a year. Looks like it’s a single entry visa though, meaning I can only visit the country once during these 6 months. I wonder if that means that if I leave the country, I have to get a new one. It wouldn’t be a problem, if it wasn’t for the residence permit I’m supposed to have.

    I checked the form I handed in to the embassy (I made a copy of it) and I requested multiple entry, so I’ll call in Monday to see if I can get things fixed. After all, I’ve got a lot of people in Bulgaria that I want to visit if I’m living that close to them, I might want to visit some other of Turkey’s neighbouring countries, and maybe I’d like to go home for Christmas or any other reason, who knows.

    Feel a lot more relaxed having handled this though. Especially since I probably won’t have to go to that dreadful place called Rotterdam anymore. Unless, of course, I get a multiple entry visa. Besides all of that… I’m so ready to get out of this rainy weather and head over to Istanbul for some serious adventures 😉

    The Turkish consulate was quite the place also… It’s like you step out of Holland and into Turkey just through one door. You enter a small security booth and then walk into a room with 95% Turkish people, Turkish signs only, and a few lost Dutch faces. Thankfully most employees speak Dutch and else they speak English.

    Istanbul here I come!

    If you wish to stay up to date about my travels, you can subscribe by RSS or email.

  • Black Sea Coast: Nesebar

    As we got to Nesebar, we were a bit confused where to go. Everyone got off the bus at the beginning of the town, so we did the same, but we didn’t have a clue where the centre of the town was. Immediately an old woman comes up to offer a place to sleep and we take it.

    A few hours later we’re ready to go and explore Nesebar. As we head out, one of the first things we come across is… a horse.

    Hooray for Bulgaria. Anyway, we continued down the streets of the new town towards the old town. Once you get close to the old town, you’ll start seeing an increasing number of tourists, tourbuses coming for day trips, boats and harbours… and sea!

    Tsvety at the harbour

    To get to the old town you have to walk over this dam built in the water. I suppose Nesebar used to be an island. It has 3 millenia of history behind it, which is slightly noticeable because of old ruins, but recently tourism has been on the rise and with the growth of the beach resort Sunny Beach (Slanchev Bryag), Nesebar seems to be getting swallowed by tourists. Not really my thing, I prefer to explore a bit myself. Therefore for food and shopping, I found it better to get out of the old town and into the new town, which was slightly more Bulgarian.

    Since we were told there are no good clubs in Nesebar, we went for a night out to Sunny Beach and see what all the fuzz is about… See if it’s really a unique place in Bulgaria. And it was…

    It’s not Bulgaria. If you want to see Bulgaria, don’t go to Sunny Beach. If you’ve been to Sunny Beach, don’t tell people you’ve been to Bulgaria; you haven’t. You’ve been to Sunny Beach, which is interchangeable with any extremely touristy and club-filled town at the Spanish coast.

    Having said that, it’s an interesting place of modern architecture. Wealthy Bulgarians (some of them undoubtedly involved in the mafia) build huge palaces in honour of… err.. themselves probably. These palaces are beautiful and it’s no wonder so many tourists are willing to pay big bucks to sleep in Bulgarian mafiosi’s penis extensions.

    The clubs… they’re decent. At most. The first we went to was called Lazur… and it was like high school, but with a LOT of alcohol. Kids dancing like it’s the first time they’re in a club, etc. We left soon and found a slightly better club where a waitress tried to rip me off, so I’m not even going to mention the name of the club. Actually, I will… Don’t go to Mania.

    We got a taxi back which was 30 leva (15 euros), but because of my girlfriend, who’s Bulgarian, we only paid 15 leva (7.50 euros). Pretty expensive for a 5 minute ride, especially in Bulgaria, but oh, I forgot… Sunny Beach is NOT Bulgaria.

    At the place we were sleeping, we discovered some kittens the next day and took some shots of them. They seemed to be rather sick though, so we kept a little distance. The pictures worked out well though. Click to enlarge.

    Click here to see the whole Nesebar album…

    After Nesebar, which is definitely a place to have seen in Bulgaria, we went to Sofia, where Tsvety did her things and I did mine for a few days. Then we both got on a plane and went to Holland. Time to show Tsvety where I’m from.

    If you wish to stay up to date about my travels, you can subscribe by RSS or email.

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