I finally took a day to just explore Sofia, and I'm glad I did. I started off by walking across the city to the National History Museum. This was by no means the best way to go about getting there and took a few hours, but I wanted to see what was in between the different points of the city rather than just take the metro underneath everything. Most of the area between the city center and the outskirts, where the museum is, aren't very interesting. They're residential and look like they're probably an ok place to live, even if a fair amount of it is depressing commie blocks. I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry, but while we were driving to the mountains we passed through a whole region of what were probably the ugliest and most dismal looking communist-era buildings I've ever seen, and that's saying something by this point. Nothing quite that bad on my walk today though.

The museum is very nice, but again suffers from the problem that many of these museums have where they bizarrely leave of massive portions of their history. It had great rooms on Bulgarian history from the prehistoric era up through the Greco-Roman period, but then after that the info gets extremely sparse. There was a room featuring artifacts from the early Bulgarian kingdoms, but there was almost no information about anything. The great descriptions and text from the previous room were gone. In the Ottoman era they were back and there was fairly good information, but that again went away after Bulgaria gained independence. At least this didn't surprise me - the museum seemed to struggle with discussing the era of the World Wars, presumably since Bulgaria lost hugely in both of them. One of the rooms had a bunch of stuff on the Tsar at the time and they had a lot of dialogue about how great he was, but then in half the pictures they had of him he was shaking hands with Hitler. He also has one of the major subway stops named after him. I don't really understand why he's so revered, since as far as I can tell his most lasting contribution to Bulgarian history was joining the Axis and then sending tens of thousands of Jews to the Nazis, before of course losing the war and permanently damaging Bulgaria's standing in Europe yet again. Another display celebrated how massive public resistance to his complicity in the Holocaust forced him to spare a fair number of the Jews he'd planned on deporting, but it really gives the impression that he was more than happy to hand over as many as Hitler asked for. Nowhere in the exhibit is there any acknowledgement of wrongdoing on the part of Bulgarians, in stark contrast to how it was in Austria.

I decided to take the metro back to the center of town. I was shocked to find that it's actually an incredibly well done subway that's clean, fast, and extremely modern. For all the talk I heard about Bulgaria being poor, it doesn't show here. I walked around downtown for a while longer and found the Christmas market that had been put up in a nearby park. There was an "ice park", which seemed to essentially be a skating rink with additional icy paths around the area, and tons of little wooden shops selling food or crafts. Bulgarian Santa was up on stage with a ton of kids and while I have no idea what he was saying, at one point they started dancing to a weird song in English that seemed to be about lattes. I'm guessing they didn't understand. Nearby, a huge group of people were playing more of that traditional music I heard yesterday from a boom box and doing the same really boring dance moves I saw in the restaurant, also in a huge circle. They were waving around Bulgarian flags everywhere and seemed to be having a great time despite the fact that they'd been doing the exact same 2 step dance move for quite some time. I guess Bulgarians really love dancing.

As I walked back through the city, I found myself coming away with an unexpectedly positive impression of Sofia. It's got a lot of really nice architecture and feels culturally vibrant in a way I hadn't expected, on top of having a great metro and being generally a pleasant place to spend time. I headed back to the hostel to wait a few hours until my bus left, and that's where I'm currently typing this from. We'll see if I get any sleep at all - I'm doubtful, honestly.

A few minutes ago I found myself listening to a song from one of Franky's playlists that I've come to associate very strongly with late night road trips ("Dreams Tonite" by Alvvays), but specifically with my time in New Zealand. That song can still call me back to the very unique emotional state I was in for the best parts of my time abroad - an ultra-specific distillation of emotions, thoughts, events, and memories that I can only describe rather synesthetically as the "flavor" or maybe "smell" of the memories I have from that semester abroad. They color and influence all of my recollection from that time. I'm surprised to realize how different that state is from now. There was a sense of almost childlike wonder to my time in NZ that I don't think I've felt since, but I'm not entirely sure what's different. I'm absolutely fascinated by everything I see and do, and I'm having an amazing time here. In many ways the trips are comparable. But it's not the same and in a way I doubt anything I do in the future ever will be. I think the biggest factor is the lack of permanent company - of the hundreds of people that I've met on this trip, and the many of whom I've really liked, there are none that I'd have rather been with in 2020. At the same time, I wonder how much of this is purely retrospective - 4 years ago I wouldn't have been able to identify the "taste" of the memories that "Dreams Tonite" still brings me back to, and now only can because of the time that's passed since. Perhaps there's a feeling as distinct as that, associated with this trip, which I'll be deeply nostalgic for in a few years' time. Maybe it'll be called on by last week's new Kendrick Lamar album or something. At the same time, the memories of how I felt in 2020 are undeniably fading. I can describe them as acutely as ever, but actually "tasting" them is becoming harder and harder. That saddens me. I'm hoping that this blog will allow future me a window into my thought process now and perhaps afford a degree of preservation for these memories that I'm sure to cherish.

I'll finish this post with a relevant quote from one of Melrose High's greatest philosophers:

"Cars and Miles are like memories as time goes on things fade and new memories are made and new cars come along"