The Eastern Europe

Bulgaria is a place you can sink your teeth into. Literally.

We flew into Sofia last night and met Emilia and her mother at the airport. She brought us back to their house for a feast prepared by her father, Elgeni.

Wait, wait wait. In my haste to tell you the fabulous details of Bulgaria, I forgot one fun fact about Munich. We got stuck there for 6 hours!

Our flight leaving CDG was late because of some auxiliary power problem. We already were cutting it close with a 40 minute layover so we were pretty much expecting to miss our connection. And we did.

Lufthansa gave both of us 10 E vouchers to eat lunch for free. So after that, Ila and I settled into our naps. Jetlag sucks!

But, we both agreed that if we had to be stranded at an airport for seemingly endless amounts of time, Munchen would be our choice city. The terminal was modern and quiet! And, the chairs were stuck together to make benches without armrests, which meant we could literally lay down on them.

Both of us wanted to nap so instead of taking shifts as initially planned, we laid on our bags and made sure nothing would be taken.

I had a little more faith in humanity and so inserted my commercial regulation camoflage earplugs to block out any residual noise.

Halfway through the nap our out of the way gate/bedroom was host to a flight, but since I had the cantaloupe sized plugs in no noise was penetrating my auditory nerves.

After Ila napped for a little over 5 hours (She claims she was just resting her eyes but I distinctly heard her snore) we went to use the free Lufthansa dinner cards.

We ended up getting salads, water, toblerone and... a pretzel. How deutsch.

Our dinner company included a nice Canadian couple, their 2 year old terror Tristan and a crazy Polish/Italian man.

So we finally boarded our very small plane to Sofia. The nearly 48 hours of travel was almost over.

During the flight, my stomach was feeling ill. As I already get motion sickness, I was suffering pretty badly. The pressure in the cabin was excruciating. I thought I was going to explode just as the captain announced in broken english that we were making our final descent into Bulgaria.

So we land, take a bus to the gate, go through customs and FINALLY meet Emilia.

Sidenote: on the plane there was a boy who traveled with a horse toy. As luck would have it in our customs line there were 3 Italian men. The horse toy kept making noises and Ila translated what they were saying: I want to eat that horse.

After our drive back to Emilia's parents apartment, we were given a feast. There were amazing salads, cheeses, cucumber spread, salami and then a roast chicken. We had to drink vodka, wine or rakia (a sort of minty aperitif drink)

Emilia's father told us were were welcome in their home any time, with or without Emilia. All four seasons. Priceless.