Monday, October 30, 2006

Another day, another country - Bulgaria

Saturday 28th October

Neseber is a small town on the Bulgarian coast - too small in fact for the ship to be able to dock at the port. So we had the challenging experience of taking the tenders to the shore.

The town reminded me of North Wales - every street corner seemed to have a redundant church. Meanwhile a walk around the place also showed that is has become something of a tourism mecca. There were as many souvenir shops as there were churches, selling everything from Nazi and Soviet military paraphenalia to post cards of the same churches to jars of rose petal jam (we bought the latter!)

After a visit to the town's museum we headed off to a Bulgarian village for lunch and more folk dancing. This ended with a couple of the dancers walking over hot coals. I've seen this done before, in Kandy in Sri Lanka.

We hot footed it back to Nesebur in the early afternoon. Our original plan had been to stay in the town for a bit but we had had all the churches and souvenir kiosks we needed in the morning. So we took the first tender back to the Discovery we could get. The ship left port at 5.30pm which made for some good sunset photos (watch out for framed editions appearing at forthcoming Lib Dem coffee mornings!)

The housekeeping crew are nearly all Philipino and they put on a show for us in the evening. Carlotta our wine waitress turned out to be a first class dancer! - pole dancing (no not that sort). I have forgotten the name for this type of dancing but it's the sort where you have to step rapidly between heavy bamboo poles which are smacked together. I have also seen this done before - in Borneo (I turned down the opportunity to take part!)

No comments: