I got to Plovdiv on a train from Sofia. The train ride was straightforward and I found the hostel without too many problems. Other than being rained-off one day, pretty much everything went to plan!
I left the hostel in Sofia and asked the bloke working there which direction I needed to head in, in order to get the ram to the train station. I hadn’t listened to the woman’s instructions before, and ended up wandering around Sofia for about an hour in an area that wasn’t on my map, so decided to ask before setting off. I found the tram, figured out how the ticketing system worked (there was a non-descript grey box behind the driver’s cab) and made it to the train station. I knew the train and bus sations were next to eachother and I had arrived at the bus station, but got off the tram and it wasn’t immediately obvious where the train station was. I walked down the road a bit and there was a building that looked a bit like it could be a train station, with the word ‘gare’ written on it, so I presumed that was it. Inside a ‘tourist information’ bloke followed me to the ticket office and then led me to the platform my train was leaving from, but as the station was under construction, I had presumed it was a free service, as the whole place was a building site. It wasn’t free, but I didn’t give him any money, as I had said I was fine from the beginning!
The train journey was straightforward. I got to Plovdiv and it wasn’t obvious from the train station that I had arrived there. After getting off, I noticed the word ‘Plovdiv’ in gold on the cream-coloured background of the station building and made my way to a kebap shop for a ridiculously cheap chicken kebap with chips in it.
After finding the hostel, I met Nathan and Phillipa who were Australians who had been travelling for 3 years. I wanted to go to Buzludzha, a UFO tower that had been used as the Communist Party headquartes in Bulgaria in the 1980s. Nathan also wanted to go, so we agreed to see what the weather was like the next day before hiring a car. As Nathan didn’t have his licence, I would be hiring and driving it and as it was raining the next day, I spent the morning updating the blog and the afternoon walking around Plovdiv and up Youth Hill.
The next day I went with Nathan to the car hire place. We were with two Californians from the same hostel, who took the slightly bigger manual car and we took the smaller automatic one. As I hadn’t driven on the right side of the road before, we took it easy and made it to a road-side restaurant that had its own fish-farm attached. Once we reached Buzludzha, Nathan and I spent several hours climbing around inside and made it up to the top of the tower (reportedly 16 storeys) before making it down and getting back to the hostel. As both Nathan, Phillipa and I were going to Istanbul the next day, Phillipa had bought bus tickets and we drove the hire car back to the rental shop the next morning, after which the car-hire bloke drove us to the bus station and dropped us off.
When we had got back from Buzludzha the day before, I had parked outside the hostel and I had a faint recollection about someone saying there may be parking problems outside the hostel. When I got down the next morning, there was a parking inspector standing over the car filling a form out and someone attaching a clamp to the front wheel. I tried to explain that I was moving it, but they insisted I pay the fine and they removed the wheel clamp. This was my first parking ticket ever (20 Lev)!