Sofia to Athens

Sofia to Athens
Thursday, August 20, 2009
1:25 AM

The train to Sofia was really comfortable but it ended up being the most stereotypically eastern European of the bunch. In the morning when we arrived everyone was in an uproar as they had all been robbed. In every compartment in the train, aside from mine, cell phones and cameras had been stolen. The English kid in my compartment figured that the thieves didn’t want to deal with an American. I figured the thieves were gypsies and I look like a gypsy any way so they didn't rob their own kind.

I ended up walking around Sofia with the kid from my compartment as he had a guidebook and there were no tourist maps to be found at the train station. It ended up that it was a pretty damn big day for him as he was to receive the results of his standardized test scores. In England, schools give conditional acceptance offers that depend on second semester of senior year scores. In Stephen's case he was admitted to the London School of Economics (one of the finer institutions in the world) but to ensure he kept his spot he needed to get a score of three A's.

Although he said the tests had been watered down quite a bit and three A's wasn't tough to come by, the fact that you could be rescinded admission less than a month before you started school would have stressed me out. He was waiting on a call from his parents but ended up checking online when we got to a hostel and seeing that he had done well and was in, which was cause for a few hoots and hollars. Speaking of the hostel, it was the best I've seen and had it not been completely booked I would have spent a night there.

Instead we ended up walking around town and he caught an early train out to another Bulgarian city. I stuck around a bit more and waited on the night train to Athens. Sofia itself seemed to be a pretty small city but it was very charming. All the main streets were tree lined with cafes and a solid vibe. Being hungry I jumped off the main streets and stumbled into a hole in the wall that was full of Bulgarians. I ordered some sort of meat patty thing with a cabbage salad that was delicious. After that I sat at a café for a bit and downloading a season of HBO Entourage while I sipped and people watched. The first leg of the Athens train was dead which was a pleasant surprise.

I spent a big chunk of the ride bullshitting with a girl who was a triple citizen of Mexico, Portugal, and the US who was a Stanford Cardinal and noticed my assortment of UCLA paraphernalia. I'm proud but it is admittedly ridiculous as I wear UCLA shorts most of the time, had a UCLA binder out, and have a UCLA sticker on my laptop. The second leg of the trip to Athens was absurd and the train was almost as crowded as the festival train to Budapest. We ended up staying in the eating car for almost the whole ride which was full of smokers so it was kinda rough. In one of the most entertaining scenes yet almost 10 guys were taken through the train handcuffed to each other by Greek police officers, we got into the city safely.