Heading South for the Border

Today we felt the need to escape the gray skies of Bucharest, the communist apartment blocks, the stray dogs. We packed up the kids to head south for the border to Bulgaria for another view of gray skies, communist apartment blocks, and stray dogs. Just across the Danube River, lies a city called Ruse. The Blond City, aka Little Vienna, is important for international trade, gorgeously preserved 19th century buildings, and an archaeological reserve full of prehistoric skeletons and is home to about ten different types of bats. But it also has a Metro. 

Cruising the incredibly neglected road to border control and adding another stamp to the passports,  we rolled right into a Metro ninety minutes later for some prime time warehouse shopping. Turns out Bulgarian wine is awesome. The country used to be quite prominent in the wine business before the fall of Communism, they used to rank second in the world for wine production. With five diverse grape growing regions, they have room to cultivate a good variety of wine. I won't pretend to know anything else about it. It's good.   

And cheap, but only if purchased in country. How cheap you ask? We averaged about 5 dollars a bottle. In Romania, the same bottles would cost about fifteen.  So we started piling up bottles around Deets in the shopping cart, who helped pick out a few labels too.

Deet's highlights: watching a forklift
move pallets of beer
and eating sheep's cheese.

All that shopping made us hungry, and what better way to sate an appetite than giant flaming skewers of meat? A friend highly recommended a traditional Bulgarian restaurant in the center of town, telling us to look for the restaurant with the wooden sign. Seriously. So we were to navigate the one way streets written in the syrillic alphabet successfully and just find the "one with the wooden sign."

Meat on a stick: perfect for Dukan dieters.

Turns out, she was totally right. The wooden sign was unmistakable. The workers at the restaurant, Mehana Ciflika (written as Механа Чифлик) were able to spot tourists a mile away. They saw us creeping up the street looking for parking and directed us to a piece of open sidewalk. Here we could take our pick of virtually any body part belonging to a chicken, sheep, goat, or pig for our meal: boneless lamb heads, pork shins, sheep intestines, ect. ect. We ordered several types of skewered meat which they promptly stabbed into the ceiling and lit on fire. For more cholesterolic fun we also ate stewed meat along with sheep's cheese fries.  It was all I could to not lick the plate clean.

With full bellies, a full trunk, and only a bit of leftover Bulgarian currency, it was time to head for the border. We celebrated the end of our day by drinking a $5.50 bottle of  2010 Enira Cab from the Bessa Valley Winery, and watching Blue's Clues intermixed with Tom Train. Success!