Here I am relaxing in our cabin on board the River Concerto. It's a nice ship, friendly crew (of course, they live and die on tips) great food.
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I don't want to say we're eating a lot on this trip, but they have named a bus after me. This says Alexiev in Bulgarian -- which uses Cyrillic letters.
These are some pictures taken in Bulgaria as we were going to this famous rock formation. Things are bad in Bulgaria, there's lots of unemployment and a lot of people actually get from one place to another with these donkey carts. You see lots of abandoned giant commie factories and a lot of vegetable gardens. There are nice houses side by side with really run down places. They really need tourism here.
The church structure is actually a monument to the victims of communism and it's right near a statue of some heroes of communism. Apparently things were bad in Bulgaria under the commies, but they're worse now, and the older people are nostalgic for communism.
This picture is at this large natural outcropping of rock in Bulgaria that we visited. It's a modest tourist attraction, but our guide says most of the tour companies haven't discovered it, so we were the only large tour group there. It was quite a hike up to the top, Zoe cleverly decided not to go. Lots of "interesting" staircases where the railings went half way up and then stopped.
Our second day in Bulgaria they took us to the town of Varna to go on a boat ride. The boats were sail boats, but there wasn't a lot of wind, so they motored out and back and raised the sails so they'd look pretty. Because Grand Circle doesn't want anyone to starve, they gave us a nice lunch on the boat. It was a beautiful day, the sea was calm, the breeze was nice and we had a really good time. This is our friend Marilyn who is a real kick. 
This picture is at this large natural outcropping of rock in Bulgaria that we visited. It's a modest tourist attraction, but our guide says most of the tour companies haven't discovered it, so we were the only large tour group there. It was quite a hike up to the top, Zoe cleverly decided not to go. Lots of "interesting" staircases where the railings went half way up and then stopped.
Our second day in Bulgaria they took us to the town of Varna to go on a boat ride. The boats were sail boats, but there wasn't a lot of wind, so they motored out and back and raised the sails so they'd look pretty. Because Grand Circle doesn't want anyone to starve, they gave us a nice lunch on the boat. It was a beautiful day, the sea was calm, the breeze was nice and we had a really good time. This is our friend Marilyn who is a real kick. 
Varna is a large city which we pretty much rushed through on the bus in order to make the boat ride. The most interesting thing we passed was the gypsy section of town. It was god-awful. They had these terrible tar paper shacks on the hillside and the whole area looked like a giant garbage dump -- not just because of the awful houses, but because they dumped all their garbage down the hills between the houses. What a mess. And it's a huge area. I'm guessing we were glad to be on an air-conditioned bus, because the smell must have been awful. On the one hand these gypsies are picturesque, like the ones with the donkey cart, but they'll have their hands in your pocket the minute you turn your back. They also take their kids out of school by the 5th grade, so are largely illiterate, they have an extremely high birth rate because they marry around 14 or younger.
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