I crashed kinda hard in Bulgaria. I knew I was running dangerously low on energy after the intensity of Knudepunkt¹ and to my credit I booked a week in Sofia with nothing to do. And then I did nothing. Sofia’s inexpensive enough that you can get a pretty nice hotel for pretty cheap, so that’s what I reserved. That gave me six days where I woke up, went down to breakfast,² went back to my room, and watched TV or puttered around on the computer until it was time to find some dinner. So I did spend a couple hours wandering around some of the city every day. But I didn’t have the motivation to really dig in.

Part of the problem is I’ve kind of been all over the Balkans at this point, and for all the nationalism and ethnic pride in this small area there’s a lot of similarities from region to region.³ Sofia reminded me a lot of places I’ve been: maybe Sarajevo, or Belgrade, or Pristina.⁴ No doubt if I’d visited in the reverse order I’d feel the same in reverse.

I flew in on Tuesday⁵ and left on Monday. And all I really have in the way of sightseeing are a couple churches, the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (which is big and nice but very much of a tradition) and the St. Sofia Church, which is the one you really have to make time for. It’s the oldest church in the city, dating back to the fourth century. But it’s built on the site of several previous churches and temples, and even better those previous churches and temples were built in the middle of a necropolis. They’ve done a lot of excavations under the present church, and for a nominal entrance fee you can enter and walk around a city of ancient tombs, scrambling over their roofs and looking at the tiles and the frescoes. It’s quite memorable.

For the second half of my trip, I rented a car. Bulgaria’s not huge, but it is kind of divided into Sofia and everywhere else. And while you can see Sofia without a car, it’s a pain to see everywhere else without one. Plus that gave me a chance to duck across the border to North Macedonia and Serbia⁶ and see a little more of the area. I’ve said my favorite way to travel by car is to stay at places about 2-3 hours drive from each other, so of course this trip everything was about a 4-6 hours drive. It was an aggressive pace, especially alone.

I started by heading to North Macedonia. North Macedonia was one of the constituent parts of Yugoslavia, and when Yugoslavia broke apart managed to secede without bloodshed in 1991. It joined the United Nations in 1993 and applied to join the European Union in 2019. My major association with it was the dispute with Greece over its name; it was known in the UN as “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” until it finally⁷ settled the dispute and became known as “The Republic of North Macedonia.”⁸

There’s a bias, I think, where you think if you don’t know much about a place there must not be much worth knowing; if a place were interesting or important you’d surely have heard more about it. It’s obvious how ridiculous that is when you state it plainly like that, yet I still find myself succumbing to that kind of thinking. I kind of assumed North Macedonia would be a little run down, but if anything it felt bustling and prosperous. Having spent a lot of time driving around⁹ I can report the countryside is gorgeous, all forested mountains and valleys.¹⁰ It’s also fitted with very well maintained highways¹¹ with lots of rest stops and toll booths which take credit cards. It’s lovely.

On the drive back from North Macedonia I detoured into Serbia; there was a Skull Tower¹² I missed when I visited Serbia the first time which I didn’t know if I’d ever have a chance to return to see. I still find Serbia a little terrifying; I’ve still got two valid passports, and there are reports of Serbia refusing entry to people who have been to Kosovo,¹³ so I made a point of using the other one when crossing. And it was a long, annoying process waiting in line and getting stamped in and back out.¹⁴ But I did it, saw what I wanted to see, and made it back to Sofia in time for dinner.

The next day I headed to the coast. I’d never been to the Black Sea, so I thought this was a good time to fix that.¹⁵ And there’s a yearly firewalking ritual on June 3 every year out in the hinterlands of Bulgaria which I’d be visiting over. So I booked a cheap hotel which turned out to be at a resort, because of course it’s at a resort on the Black Sea,¹⁶ and drove out on Thursday.

And then, on Friday, I developed a cough.

I’ve been relatively lucky, traveling around, that I haven’t really been all that sick. I’ve caught colds before, including a rather debilitating one during And Then There Were None, but after a week the only lingering issue was that I had a hacking cough which lasted for a month-and-a-half. I’ve never been so sick I couldn’t get out of bed or manage to feed myself, even if I was miserable doing it.

It’s also never been COVID, as far as I know. I’ve tested as often as I can find testing kits whenever I’ve felt a little ill, and frequently when I haven’t but I’ve been around people who had it. And I have my doubts; I know the tests aren’t completely reliable so it’s possible I had a mild case that just didn’t get picked up. I’ve been isolating and masking whenever I’ve been sneezing or coughing, just to be careful.

But there’s always a fear that I’m going to get myself into some situation where I can’t take care of myself and there’s no one around to help me. The few times I’ve been particularly ill I’ve relied on room service, and I don’t always stay in hotels where that’s an option. Food delivery apps aren’t universal, and sometimes you can’t pay over the phone with a credit card. Sometimes I’ve been staying a 20 minute drive from the nearest grocery store. It could be bad. That sometimes worries me.

In this case I just cancelled my plans for Saturday.¹⁷ Friday I felt okay but was clearly getting worse, the following day I woke up sick and spend the whole day in bed, save for buying a packet of peanuts for lunch and a small cheese pizza for dinner.¹⁸ Sunday I was clearly on the mend, and well enough to drive the four hours back to Sofia, even if I did need to stop halfway to take a short nap.

I’m now in a fancy corporate hotel waiting to return the rental car to the airport and fly back to Vienna. I’m still recovering; my body has hit the snot overproduction phase of recovery — mercifully I’m not sneezing — and I’m addled from bad sleep over the past weekend.¹⁹ I’ll be rocking a mask and I’ll test for COVID once more before I leave the hotel, but barring any unforeseen surprises I guess I’m cleared to fly.

Next: Vienna to Bratislava
Prev: Copenhagen (CPH) to Vienna (VIE)

Footnotes

¹ I score freakishly high on just about every introversion scale I’ve ever taken. I’ve heard of people who get energy in the presence of others; I just get exhausted. I like loud, raucous dance floors the way I like scathingly hot saunas: they’re great for two or three minutes but then I need to go jump in a cold lake to recover.

² Best part of breakfast? The sour cherry juice. Yes, it’s from concentrate, but my love of cherries is deep and wide and embraces even the chemical varieties.

³ I think there’s a pretty good argument that a lot of that is just the narcissism of small differences. Most of the capitals are at most a five hour drive from each other. Bostonians will go on endlessly about how vastly different they are from New Yorkers but the only major disparities at a distance are size, commute times, pizza quality, and style of clam chowder. There. I said it.

⁴ But not Zagreb, and it took me a lot longer than it should have to realize why. Zagreb was the capital of the Habsburg-controlled Kingdom of Croatia, and the Ottomans never controlled it. Its design and architecture takes a lot of cues from Central Europe.

⁵ I realized while booking flights that I was going to need to transfer flights to get to Sofia from Copenhagen, and since that was the case I figured I could save a few bucks by booking a round-trip ticket out of Vienna and then getting a one-way ticket to Vienna instead. I spent the night in the Moxy Airport hotel at the Vienna airport.

If you’re flying a low-cost airline, like Wizz Air or Norwegian or Eurowings or shudder Ryanair, there’s no benefit to booking a roundtrip ticket over a single. Most other carriers offer discounts according to the vagaries of whatever scheduling algorithm they’re rocking, sometimes to the point of round-trip tickets costing less than one-way tickets. Vienna’s a hub city for Austrian Airlines, Austria has historic ties to the Balkans so they run a lot of flights throughout the region, and I wanted to stay in the area for the Portal larp convention anyway.

⁶ I had the foresight to pick up an International Driving Permit when I was last in New York, and thank heaven because not only did I need it to rent the car but they demanded I show it when I returned across the border from Serbia. And if you’re taking a rental car internationally outside the EU, you get to pay extra. In my case the car cost €65 for a week’s rental, the insurance to take it into North Macedonia was €90, and the insurance to take it into Serbia on top of that was €30. And all three places scrutinized the paperwork at the border.

⁷ Mostly

⁸ The whole issue reveals a lot about how contentious Balkan politics can get. The borders of ancient Macedon and its dependent territories extend north beyond the contemporary border of Greece, stretching all the way into Thrace and lands which today are part of Bulgaria and Turkey. So there’s a geographic Greek Macedonia which is populated almost entirely by people who call themselves Macedonian but aren’t ethnically Macedonian nor do they speak Macedonian.

There are a number of ethnic Macedonian outposts in Greece and a rough estimate of 15,000 people who consider themselves Macedonian rather than Greek, but Greece refuses to recognize it as a legitimate minority. Greece objected to calling the region in Yugoslavia “Macedonia” and blocked the application to the EU until they changed the name.

And just to underline how seriously both sides take this issue, partisans on both sides carried out a series of bomb and arson attacks in Melbourne after Australia recognized the “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” in early 1994.

⁹ There’s a futurist monument in the south of the country that’s only a couple hours drive from Skopje and, I mean, I had the car.

¹⁰ At one point I zipped past a rather large tortoise crossing the road in the opposite lane. If I were going any slower or there were a place to pull over I would have stopped and helped it across. I’m happy to report that there was no sign of misadventure on the drive back so it clearly made it safely.

¹¹ Paid for, in significant part, by the European Union. I didn’t know they’d sponsor projects in candidate countries, but it makes a lot of sense.

¹² It’s exactly what it sounds like, a legacy of the Ottomans.

¹³ Yes, I took the bus from Prishtina to Belgrade in 2021. I’m not going to defend the consistency or logic of the Serbian border policies.

¹⁴ Compare to North Macedonia, where there was no line whatsoever going in to the country and on the way out they just waved me through without even checking my documents.

¹⁵ I kind of thought I’d have seen it in Odesa by now, but …

¹⁶ It was 45€ per night, and sort of nice? It’s very inconsistent. There are about a half-dozen pools throughout the property and all of them are very well maintained. There are three restaurants, and the food’s nothing special. The beach has a lot of chairs and umbrellas for lounging. There’s a lot of fountains throughout the property which are turned off and filled with stagnant, brackish water; that may be because it’s still quite early in the season.

The stuff which is maintained was great. The stuff which isn’t is sub-par. I’m used to places which are consistently good or consistently crappy. This half-and-half confuses me.

¹⁷ I’m torn on it. On the one hand I was here, on the one day of the year I could see it. On the other, there’s not a lot of information about it online other than it’s held at a village of hundreds of people and attracts thousands of visitors, which sounds like a nightmare to havigate. There’s no suggestion of when to arrive or where to wait or how to stake out a spot and I’ve heard because of the crowds there’s now a ton of vendors who set up and sell crappy tchotchkes to the tourists. I’d have given it a shot if I were well, but I wasn’t going to fight it since I wasn’t.

¹⁸ Of which I ate a single slice and gave up. Being sick really screws with my appetite. What I really wanted was someone to make me tomato soup with saltine crackers and fresh orange juice mixed with Sprite.

¹⁹ Saturday night I turned in early at 9pm, and woke up feeling so much better. I had clearly turned a corner; my throat no longer hurt, I was no longer sore all over, and it felt like I had slept for ages.

I checked the clock. It was just after midnight. I had slept for three hours.