Wednesday night

Another 3 hours on a jet and finally I am here in Sofia. There was no film on this flight so I did a few crosswords etc from the paper had a bit of a nap and read from my Kindle.

When my bag finally arrived and I'd cleared customs I saw someone holdinh a Mensa sign and met up with Silvia from the UK. We had swapped emails but this was the first time we'd seen each other, so although we were on the same plane we did not know it. They had a car waiting which took us to the hotel. My room is fine although it has 2 large single beds rather than I queen or whatever. I unpacked then jumped in the shower. That was good after 27 1/2 hours of flying plus 3 or 4 more travelling to and from airports.

When I went downstairs I met a lot of the others here for the meeting. After a drink, a group of us walked to a nearby shopping centre. It was easy getting there but quite a climb back up the hill to the hotel.

I met more people as the day progressed and about 16 of us went to a local style restaurant for dinner. Very meat oriented and a group of us shared a platter for 4 but couldn't finish it. There was also a group of musicians who played something that the Croatians at our table were quite familiar with and they sang along. Apparently their language is very similar to Bulgarian. It was quite cheap, less than $20 including a Jamesons and coke. Here a standard shot of spirits is 50ml compared with 30 at home so Drinks are much stronger that you expect. I have taken to ordering twice as much mixer.

They use the Cyrillic alphabet here so signs are a bit hard to read although many of the letters look the same as our but have different sounds.There is also the occasional mixing in of English words.