Deej Sullivan
@deejsullivan
A big old leaf-through Larry. A grade-A bookmark monger. I'm a book guy. A real deal book guy.
The only thing to do on a day like today is drink Aperol spritz by the pint
I've been all the way across Europe in the past 6 weeks, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic and the south of France and unironically, Plymouth Hoe on a sunny day is up there with the most beautiful of all of them. Maybe the most underrated spot anywhere.
Hooded crow? I saw loads of them all across Europe but we don't often get them in the UK
Watching England's opening World Cup match in an Irish pub in Milan, where it is *still* 30 degrees at 21:30. What could possibly go wrong?
First double decker train of the trip. Definitely not in Bulgaria anymore.
Day 16: Crossing to Croatia Seven hours of (mostly) comfortable, air-conditioned travel, past Balaton Lake and through increasingly left-behind looking Hungarian border towns, over this bridge, and I'm in country number three. Croatia. Excited to see what a weekend in Zagreb has to offer.
So long to the swifts of Burgas, who have kept me company through the past few virus-ridden days. Just the small matter of a six hour train to Sofia and a flight to Budapest today...
Blagodarya i dovizhdane, Plovdiv. Next stop Burgas and the Black Sea.
Day 5: Day of Slavonic Alphabet, Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture Bulgarians are rightly fiercely proud that their nation is the birthplace of the Cyrillic alphabet (repeat after me: IT'S NOT RUSSIAN) and today marks a major national holiday to celebrate that fact.
There's a different kind of madness here to that which you find in the mountains, but it's just as intoxicating. As is the espresso and baklava.
Day 4: Madjare to Plovdiv There have been humans living in Plovdiv, they say, for 8000 years. Many have left their mark. Brutalist behemoths sit alongside ancient Roman amphitheatres, newlyweds hang out of car windows, horns blaring, as tourists scatter to avoid the sudden torrential downpours.
Moments later a woman handed me a stick of candyfloss from nowhere and we all laughed as I tried, and failed, to eat it with some degree of dignity. What a strange and delicious day.
I'm currently in a Bulgarian mountain village, witnessing storks in the wild for the first time and have spontaneously transitioned from young(ish) man to middle-aged twitcher. They're SO COOL.
He then took it upon himself to try and find me a wife at the feast by first giving me a bigger bucket, and then just straight up scanning the crowd for young women, talking to them, and coming back disappointed to report that they were already married (he's the guy who walks into shot in this vid).
As a stranger in a small village I got some slightly curious looks, until one old man found out (through my mum's translation) that I'm single, and jokingly (I think) suggested his 30 year old niece as a potential match..
The meal and the villagers are blessed by the local priest and buckets are placed in semi-circles of strictly 17 buckets per vat. The bubbling, greasy goodness is ladled out by the grandmothers and everyone argues about which bucket is slightly more full than the others before rushing home to feast.
In villages like Madjare, a hearty stew of beef and vegetables is prepared overnight in great vats at the local church (in Madjare's case the Church of St Spas) and shared among the villagers, who troop through the streets at the sound of the church bells, buckets in hand, to receive their share.
Day 2: Spasovden, or "Find the English stranger a wife" Day In the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, today is Spasovden, the day of the feast of the ascension of Jesus, which falls 40 days after Easter every year.
I'm on a foreign holiday for the first time in years, and it's a biggy. Six weeks travelling across Europe from east to west, starting in Bulgaria. What could possibly go wrong?