Happy December, everyone! I’m experiencing college classes in the twelfth month for the first time in my undergraduate career (thank you, quarter system), and it is…so strange. I will never take my seven-week winter break for granted ever again! Because I’m still in class for another week, though, I’ve been able to travel outside of Athens a bit more without feeling stressed about finals just yet. Last weekend, my travels took me to two vastly different cities: Sofia, Bulgaria, and Vienna, Austria. While I had a great time in Vienna, I am eager to tell you all about Sofia, a city I had never felt the need to visit before this semester but can’t wait to return to very soon. 🇧🇬⭐️

For anyone who hasn’t visited Bulgaria before, and I imagine that there are many people, I would highly recommend it. Sofia is the largest city in the country, with about 1 million people living there, but it felt incredibly homey and welcoming when we arrived. Other than the fact that not a single restaurant was open past 9 pm on Wednesday night, the city was busy enough to feel alive but not too busy to feel unsafe. As a group of four young women with no knowledge of the language walking around, there were no points in which we felt uneasy about exploring. While this should be a given no matter what, it’s always nice to experience.

My favorite part of visiting Sofia was going on the Balkan Bites Food Tour. I found this free tour on Instagram a few days before we left Athens and decided to reserve four spots so we could get a taste of Bulgarian cuisine. The tour was about two hours long, and everything we got to try was totally free to us. We tried ayran (a salty yogurt drink), Bulgarian wine, lutenitsa (vegetable spread), pastries, and more. Our tour guide, a Bulgarian native, explained the history, cultural context, and ingredients of the food we were eating as well as sharing anecdotes of his life in Bulgaria. As someone who had VERY little knowledge of the country before visiting, this perspective was helpful, fun, and much more interesting than a typical walking tour.

We did take some of the travel recommendations off TikTok and visited The Red Flat while visiting the city. The Red Flat is an “interactive museum and time machine” that walks its visitors back into an authentic apartment from 1980s Communist Bulgaria while offering an audio tour of what day-to-day life would’ve been like at the time. Everything in the apartment, down to the wallpaper and canned food, was authentic. It was such a cool experience to learn about life while Bulgaria was under Soviet rule.

Another essential Sofia experience I would recommend would be the Elephant Bookstore. This vintage bookshop was the perfect place to find fun gifts, second-hand novels, and books authored by Bulgarian authors. I was especially stoked about this as last year’s (2023) International Booker Prize was won for the first time ever by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, so I was able to get an autographed copy of the novel at the bookstore!! I plan on using this for major clout in the book community, along with the fact that I am so excited to read the novel.

I am so lucky to have spent the holiday weekend traveling with the friends I have made here & getting to explore new cities. As much as I loved the Christmas markets and business of Vienna, Sofia had a certain small-town charm that I won’t soon forget. The longer I am here, the more I find myself creating space for countries with difficult histories and bright futures. Bulgaria is absolutely one of those places, and I can’t wait to go back. ♥️