Advantages: Not too busy, good value for money, green Disadvantages: Not many "attractions", not much for children
capital city, Sofia has the usual wide range of eateries covering all price brackets and styles of food. Bulgarian food is very good and quite varied so visitors should aim to go native at least once. My recommendation is "Tsentrale" - a traditional style "inn" serving hearty local dishes; the service is good, the prices reasonable and in summer you can dine outisde in the pleasant beer garden. A rather different but very Bulgarian experience is to eat at the Happy Bar and Grill - a Bulgarian chain which offers an enormous menu of grills, salads, vegetarian dishes and desserts. They have menus in English and fantastic colour photographs of the dishes. There are several Chinese restaurants, two sushi restaurants and there are pizza and pasta places everywhere.
Dedicated bars are less easy to find and there are more of the "cafe-bar" variety ...
Advantages: Great large town, that's compact and safe to explore Disadvantages: Probably only enough for a weekend; the Cyrillic language
For the first time theediscerning is hereby dabbling in foreign climes - no, not a first trip abroad, but a debut excursion into the esteemed realm of Ciao travel writers. That's what these competition thingies are for, of course.
To start with, a smallish city both tucked away in the middle of Eastern Europe's old Soviet / Warsaw Pact areas, yet far enough away from us in the UK to have some of the mystery and oddity the near east brings - Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria.
You will increasingly see this as a location for a long weekend holiday, for it is yet another fine eastern European city falling under the tourism industry's eye. With Bulgaria possibly entering the Eurozone in 2007, the urge is to go before it all gets changed.
The history of the country is far too complex to summarise here, but just one corner of Sofia ...
theediscerning 27.08.2005
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Sofia (Bulgaria)
Advantages: fast, and funny. Disadvantages: a wee bit dated
An ancient evil, once defeated, has come back to try and destroy the world again. It was prophecised that this evil would be defeated by an unknown quantity, called the fifth element, that would unite the four natural elements to create the divine light.
A race of aliens, called the mondoshawan, entrusted the knowledge of the fifth element to a human. The evil that had been defeated would come back in 5000 years, and the human race should be prepared. The knowledge was to be passed down through the generations, until it would be needed again.
As predicted, the evil arrived. The human race started by attacking it, but the attacks seemed only to make the evil stronger. It grew in size, and ferocity. But they are found by the current holder of 'the knowledge', who tells them that the mondoshawan were coming to use the fifth element to ...
