Welp, yay!

Returned the keys to the rental agency without even having to sign anything, and took the bus to Sofia.  While we were waiting after boarding, a woman across the aisle said, “I see you read English.  You like ice cream?  I bought ice cream a few minutes ago, it was so good.  Yes?”  Then she darted off the bus and returned with two delicious packaged ice cream cones, one for herself.  “No problem, no problem, I do it to see your smile.”  Man, some people are nice to foreigners.  Some are not, but some definitely are.  

Ps, I am getting so good at public transportation.  

Forests, low rolling hills and flat yellow-brown valleys all the way west to Sofia, but just to the south were blue mountains, which looked so nice against the occasional bright sunflower field in the foreground.  Oh by the way, people in this area use sunflower oil instead of corn oil.  Checked into the Hostel Mostel, and immediately went to the archaeology museum, which has artifacts from the Paleolithic, Neolithic, Copper Age, right up to religious works from the 1700s.  They also have big chunks of ancient carved marble just plonked down in the grass outside the entrance to the museum, like there’s just so much Roman relics that those chunks are expendable.

Seem to have accidentally been starving myself what with the traveling during lunch and dinner time, but I had some delicious potato-cheese-egg-butter-dill thing cooked in a clay pot.  Then free spaghetti and beer at the hostel.  Heh, AND, as I was sitting by myself, just…sitting by myself, 22 guys (seriously- all from the same engineering class, and no women were in the class) from Switzerland swarm the table in recently graduated glee.  And I end up talking to one of them, actually from Lichtenstein (never met anyone from Lichtenstein, there’s only 35,000 people in the country anyway) for a loooong time about the differences between Europe and the US, basically.  I don’t know, it was like a 8.5 hour long education on European languages, dialects, and cultures, with me trying to explain that the US is varied as well.  Though obviously not to the same degree.  We followed the mass of engineers to a couple of crazy ritzy empty horrible clubs in Studenstki Grad, where we stared at the white leather couches and overall shiny expensive snobbiness.  Our taxi driver didn't speak English or German, none of us speaks much Bulgarian, but he and I both know Spanish, so that's how we got to where we were going.  It was cool.  And the European cultural lesson just continued.  It was just fantastic.  I’m learning a ton.  And it’s like that gut-changing learning that is too fragile to try to describe right now lest I shape it too much, but I will let you know later.  Whether you like it or not.  Nah neh.