Day 128 - Downtown Sofia and Rotary Oktoberfest

Wednesday, November 7th, 2018.

Today we decided to walk in downtown, review what we saw on the tour and go inside the churches, mosque, and synagogue.

The outside of our apartment, it doesn't look very nice but it is probably better this way, we don't look like rich tourists!


St. George church, built in the 4th century and still standing. We visited the interior with 3 layers of frescoes, pretty amazing.

No pictures allowed

Me being lazy so I don't have to look it up later on Wikipedia!


Really cool that you can cross the street and see the outside and the Roman ruins and free of charge!

From here we could see three Communist buildings upstairs 

Roman ruins that you can see, touch, and climb!

Inscriptions

Original Roman road found when they were excavating for the metro





The mosque behind
Interior of the mosque
The ceiling


My boys are obsessed with booping every single nose they find on this trip!



The market, oh yeah!

The synagogue. Bulgaria did not deport Bulgarian Jews during the Second World War II [they did deport 16,000 Greek, Macedonian and Serbian Jews who were part of the Bulgarian empire and who all died]. They kept giving different excuses to Hitler for the delays. They saved about 50,000 Jews after the entire population of Sofia demonstrated against deportation.
Synagogue interior




The "store"

Beautiful floor of the synagogue




People come with their shopping carts and empty bottles to fill with warm mineral spring water!


We stopped at Cush Bar for a thick hot chocolate. The place was decorated with lots of cinema posters because it is also a cinematheque playing movies upstairs, even in English!
Don Quixote with Adam Driver and Jonathan Price. Isn't Cyrillic fun?






After our hot drink, we walked home to drop the kids and Gregory and I went to a German bar to celebrate Oktoberfest with a local Rotary club. We had a great time chatting with people from different parts of the world who live in Sofia.


Banner exchange with Rotary club president, who's actually German

Gregory trying to finish his liter of beer!




Dinner was pork steak with mashed potatoes




The Rotary president is German, Gregory dressed as an American and the girl is wearing a traditional Bulgarian outfit.


After dinner, we stayed and chatted with very interesting people like Linda who was born Korean but is Swiss and lives in Bulgaria!











Comments

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