We went.

We saw.

We conquered.

And that was all in the first two hours we were there. The question is: What did we do the whole next day?

So, you get the idea. Zavet was, well, small. More than small. Tiny. Miniscule. Microscopic. And yet, we were there for one whole night and one whole day. Here’s how it went:

9:00pm: Arrive, drop off our bags, go to one of two restaurants in town and eat.
10:30pm: Return back to the flat. Watch a movie.
12:30am: Go to sleep. On a wood floor.
10:00am: Tour the town. This meant walking for a total of about 30 minutes down the two main roads, through mud, slush, sheep and horse poop, and who knows what else. Here are some of the sights:

zavet-church.jpg zavet-sludge.jpg

(church) (Sludgy road)

zavet-goat.jpg

(random goat out for a stroll)

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(shepherd and his flock)

12:00 noon: Shop for food for breakfast/lunch. Because it was Sunday, our shopping options were limited. LIMITED. We went to the only 3 open stores and still could not find any bread. Now, I use the word “store” loosely here. If a place only sells, say, 12 items, is it still considered a store?
1:00pm: We ate breakfast/lunch. It was actually quite a god omelet that our friend made.
1:00-4:00pm: We busied ourselves playing Scrabble and reading books. Because, well, there was nothing to do outside. Or anywhere else for that matter.
4:00pm: We packed up our things and headed to the center of town (hahahaha, center of town, hahahaha) and called for a taxi to take us to Ispery, the main town nearby where the train comes through.
5:00pm: We walked around Isperih. Surely you want some history on this place. Click here. We saw some statues of the guy who “founded” Bulgaria.


ispery-statue.jpg ispery-monument.jpg
Then we began the quest to find a place to eat. Which, of course, was almost nowhere, since it was Sunday, and apparently people don’t need to eat on Sundays.
6:00-8:00pm: We found a restaurant with no heat to eat in. They were obviously waiting for a larger party to come, but in the meantime, they let us eat there. They rolled out a heater….right past us and under the other table. The table that was not yet being used. They heated an empty table. WHILE WE FROZE RIGHT NEXT TO IT. Seriously. They did.
8:00-10:00pm: We moved to the only open café across the street, drank tea and coffee, and played yet more Scrabble. (Huge shout out to Mark’s mom who gave us the travel Scrabble game before we left. Without it, I think we actually might have died of boredom in Zavet! Oh, yeah, and I’ve beat Mark already like 5 times. He actually passed 2 TIMES hoping to find a place to use a 7-letter word he had. Clearly, his strategy did not pay off. Heh!!)
10:30pm: We caught the night train to Sofia. The night train. Another tale for another post…..

So, that was our village experience. It was pretty boring, but this is how a large segment of the Bulgarian population lives, so I really feel it was important to experience it for ourselves. They farm and live a simple existence in the villages. On holidays, they slaughter pigs and the whole neighborhood joins in. Other than that, they work on their farms or in their stores, and….I don’t know, play Scrabble with their spare time???