One of our greatest adventures happened this morning\u00a0by accident.\u00a0 We walked out to the Monastery parking lot to find out when the bus to Rila village was and after much watch-pointing,\u00a0bus-mimicking, no-nodding, and yes-shaking we gathered that we had just missed the bus and that the next one wasn’t for 7 hours.\u00a0 Looking dismayed, a nice Greek couple offered to take us aboard their car if we didn’t mind sitting with their dog.\u00a0 The dog was cute enough so we grabbed our stuff and hitched the ride.\u00a0 We drove Euro-speed down the mountain to Rila where our Macedonian speaking chauffeurs asked two local women\u00a0for the bus to Blagoevgrad.\u00a0 One pointed one way and the other pointed in the opposite direction.\u00a0 After some more words exchanged and some giggle on both side, they agreed that it was behind us.\u00a0 We turned around and they dropped us off just up\u00a0a hill\u00a0from where we thought the bus station was.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As we were pulling our bags out of their car a bus lumbered up the hill and Steve and I both craned to see the sign on its front.\u00a0 This is not an easy task you see: we have to decode the Cyrillic.\u00a0\u00a0We managed to get b…l…\u00a0 and figured this was our bus and started running down the road after it.\u00a0 The bus stopped, we climbed aboard, and sat down.\u00a0 Looking out the window I saw the nice Greek\u00a0man\u00a0who had just dropped us off\u00a0shaking\u00a0his head and smiling–“those crazy Americans”.\u00a0 45 minutes later, we pulled into Blagoevgrad, got a taxi to the recommended hotel, and found ourselves in an upscale room with a hot shower, throne toilet, and a bed with springs and a board!\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of our greatest adventures happened this morning\u00a0by accident.\u00a0 We walked out to the Monastery parking lot to find out when the bus to Rila village was and after much watch-pointing,\u00a0bus-mimicking, no-nodding, and yes-shaking we gathered that we had just missed the bus and that the next one wasn’t for 7 hours.\u00a0 Looking dismayed, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/thrace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}