In Sofia, city visits you

I'm back after spending a week in Sofia, Bulgaria for a lame planning conference. When I learned I was going to Bulgaria for a week, I didn't know what I was getting into. I had thought that it would be full of thick-necked guys named Boris and lots of borscht. As it turns out, Sofia is a fascinating city with lots of history and thick-necked guys named Boris.

Truth be told, there were three types of people in Sofia: Russian mafia thug-types, skinny hairy guys, and beautiful girls. The proportion of beautiful girls was actually alarming, even compared to Italy or Europe. I'm not sure the reason for this, but maybe it's because Sofia is named after the luscious St. Sofia.



Compare her to the dowdy Statue of Liberty. Snooze!



She's certainly not the gilded, bare-shouldered hottie that St. Sofia is. But I digress.

Here's a slideshow of some pictures that I took around Sofia. Nothing too nuts, just your standard vacation snapshots. I had only a half-day to really explore the city during the day, so most of these were taken on a whirlwind tour in the afternoon. Worth mentioning is the Ruined Soviet Monument. The picture is just a detail of a much larger monument that used to stand in one of the parks there. It's got a lot of classic cold-war motifs going on: the strong square-jawed worker standing tall with hammer in hand, the poor and infirm cradled in by the caring hands of the workers, you know the drill. But this huge (7-10 story) monument has since fallen into disarray since the fall of the Soviet Union. You can clearly see the exposed steel frame showing in the picture. It's as if the people were happy about the fall of their Soviet masters, but not enough to actually tear down the monument. Lazy capitalist mores creeping in already!