New day, new adventure!

Adventurous day yesterday!  Our bus broke down and we had to wait three hours for a replacement which was not easy to find in this busy tourist season but our wonderful tour guide Iliana worked miracles and somehow pulled it off!  Luckily we had come to a halt outside a roadside restaurant so could while away the time drinking coffee and watching Bulgarian TV!  Anyway, we made it in time in the evening to see the concert that this wonderful amateur dance ensemble called Sider Voivoda put on for our benefit.  These men are in costumes from the Pirin region (south west Bulgaria) and my first extra shows some of the girls in costumes from the north east of Bulgaria, specifically from the town of Varna on the Black Sea coast.

We are now staying in Arbanasi, a little village near the city of Veliko Turnovo which was the Bulgarian capital from 1185 to 1393.  We visited there this morning and the old quarter of the town was very picturesque despite the pouring rain (see second extra).  The weather has been quite stormy recently but we are up in the mountains and hopefully it should improve as we wend our way south towards the Greek border in the next few days - fingers crossed!