Around Sofia with Bill, part 2
For Bill’s second night in Sofia we started by heading over to Julia’s for dinner. As usual, she fed us well. Paris and his girlfriend joined us as well, but Joel was still out of commission with his illness.
Bill, Julia and I walked around looking for someplace that didn’t require a cover and would let us in with the dinner leftovers Julia insisted we take. We eventually ended up at Flannigan’s where I had my first Guinness in 5 months. The price was a whopping 8 leva (as opposed to 2 leva for any other decent import), but I justified it by making it part of my holiday treat. In reality 8 leva is less than $6 so, really, I’d pay the same price in the US.
Bill and I split from Julia and ran into the British girls from the night before in the street. We first tried one bar, Blaze, but it was too crowded and eventually ended up at a bar that I believe used to be called Poison, but I don’t know the current name. Anyway, we basically just hung out and talked to them for a couple hours about all kinds of random stuff. We probably broke off from them around 3am and headed home.
The 3rd night started at Babbles, a loungy/house music bar. Babbles was pretty dead so we left and tried Blaze, the bar that was too crowded the night before. As an aside, of personal name for Blaze is, “The Smoke and Mirrors Bar.” We call it this because everyone there smokes like a fiend (no different I suppose than the rest of the country) and the bar is full of mirror – hence, “Smoke and Mirrors.” I think Paris was the first to coin the name. Anyway, the bar wasn’t so crowded this night and it didn’t take Bill long to enter himself into conversation will a table full of women (and one guy). It turns out all the girls were school friends from the same neighborhood in Sofia, but now all lived elsewhere (except I think for one). One was going to school in Holland and was there with her Dutch boyfriend. One was working at an embassy in France and another was going to school in France. We talked to them for quite a while until a drunk guy sitting next to us (wearing enormous and ridiculous looking glasses) started getting drunk and slightly belligerent. At this point we decided to call it a night.
The last night was Bill’s last night in Sofia. We had to leave to catch his flight at 5am, so we just decided to stay out all night (not a big stretch considering we hadn’t gone to bed before 3am all week anyway). We started at the Hash House Harrier gathering. Over the summer we had a lot of fun at Cabaret for their “Oriental Night” and I wanted to take Bill to check it out. At the Hash we met up with Niltay, one of our Turkish friends who was with us during our Cabaret visits several times over the summer. She and a couple others joined us after the Hash at Cabaret. The music was the same, but most of the “usual” crowd had moved on to some other bar so there weren’t many people there. Despite there not being any prime targets for Bill to hit on, I still had a good time. After Cabaret we went to a club called Double Vision. There weren’t many people there either, but there was at least some nice 18 year olds Bill could talk to. We closed down Double Vision, which was about 4am and we headed home to get Bill ready to head home.
We made it to the airport with plenty of time, but as soon as we go there Bill realized he forgot his computer, so I had to pay for a taxi back to the apartment, pick up his computer, pay for a taxi back to the airport to deliver his computer. Luckily, I made it on time. I was slightly nervous about Bill getting through customs because technically I am supposed to register all visitors with the police. This, however, would have required dealing with the police station – something I was loathe to do after my 5 trips there over the summer to get my ID card. As it turns out, no one hassled him and he made it out ok. I promptly went back to bed and slept most of the day.
