Epic Holiday, Pitstop 1, NY

Us being us, we thought moving countries twice in 6 months wasn't challenging enough, so we decided to throw in a holiday in the mix. Of course, this couldn't be a run of the mill holiday... where was the fun in that? we decided what was needed was a holiday of epic proportions where we travel out of a suitcase for more than a month and crisscross about 6 timezones. Yup. That's just how we roll. Well, that and the fact that Child 1 had worked his butt off for the grammar school exams and both of the kids were superstars in handling the move.
Right, so the iten. was as follows: London - NY- Aukland- Queenstown- Auckland- Sydney - Cairns- Sydney- Auckland- LA- Vegas- San Francisco- London. And it pushed the Baa-Lamb's itinerary- making skills to the limit. And boy, did he deliver!
So, moving on, our Epic Holiday (as I'm going to refer to it henceforth. Get used to it. It's never going to happen again for me, so I need to squeeze out the last drop of glory from its epic-ness) took off with our flight to New York.

Flags everywhere. Anywhere you could think of.
Also, those signs take a little getting used to. 

Our first contact with a new Continent, and we could immediately feel the difference. (or maybe, that was just us, a tad over excited). For all that people said about its frantic pace, New Yorkers, seemed to us a rather friendly bunch. From the kind lady who went out of her way (about half a kilometer the other way) just to lead us to the right station platform to the ticket collector who let the bossy baby play with her bunch of tickets, to even the staff at our hotel (who insisted on called her princess, which pleased her no end), on the whole, a completely delightful set of people.

Never losing their sense of fun - even stuck in a traffic jam

Given that we had just a couple of days in the Big Apple (which, by the way, is far too little), we decided to do the most sensible thing and do a hop-on-hop-off. The day was fortunately cold but clear. this afforded us some wonderful views as we decided to walk across Bryant Park and the Brooklyn Bridge.

catching sight of a rare patch of blue between the highrises. 

Did I mention the scale here? This HUGE edifice is just the Post office. Half of it, to be precise.

Walking across the bridge was definitely one of my favourite parts of the trip.

Yes, locks. This isn't Paris, you know. 

The Family. Reluctantly posing for the nth picture

The view from the bridge

In the afternoon, we decided to skip the queues that were snaking around to get to the Statue of Liberty and and Elllis Island. We took the Staten Island ferry, its free, has no queues and provides a fairly decent view of Lady liberty. Yes, we did miss the up-close-and personal 'Darshan' of the original iron lady, but this trip offers up a fabulous view of the Manhattan skyline.

The famed NY skyline. I think it looks better from the sea than from up the top of any of the skyscrapers

And this is the closest we came to the lady. 

Here's a close-up view. From one of the souvenir shops. 

We also though of doing the Top-of-the-rock towards sunset. A though that was apparently shared by the whole tourist population of New York. This meant that the earliest we could get in was at 8pm.
If you ever decide to do the NY trip, people, book your times for the Top-of-the-rock early and then come back for it, after doing the rest of the NY tour. Manhattan is pretty walk-able, even on a cold and windy day (as long s it doesn't rain).
The views from the Top of the Rock at night time is pretty amazing. We climbed up all the 3 floors (yes, there are 3 floors to climb), especially the the topmost floor, which has no glass barriers and offers up a fantastic 360 degree view of the city.

The bottom of the Top. 

Art Deco Glory

Another fabulous, all-lit-up view? Times Square. Despite our jet-lagged selves, we had a pretty fabulous first day.

Times Square

...complete with a wedding. 

Pretty unmistakable, even in  the day. 

Day 2, however was a completely different story. Freezing rain and cold winds made fore pretty miserable sight seeing weather so we tried to spend most of it indoors. We braved the World Trade Centre views, but personally, I still preferred the TOTR.

Grey rainclouds and it turned into the city of gloom.

Being a bit of an FLW fangirl, I wanted to catch the Gugenheim. Little did I know that its shut on Thursdays. And guess what day of the week it was! yup.Thankless Thursday. Oh well, an excuse to visit the Big Apple again, then. That and Central Park. The park - what little we saw of it was the favourite part of the day for the kids and definitely worth spending an entire day at, time and weather permitting. I did love some of the odd and quirky buildings that NY threw up, all of them not quite following the template, but making the cityscape fascinating.

The Flatiron.

An interesting oriel. Also, the flag. Like I said. Everywhere.

To fellow architects: 10 points if you tell me what this reminds you of.

Those Gargoyles. 

This church. 

This...Cannonball?

This, I LOVE!

Is this what the mean by camouflage?

When I look at Mumbai, I'm frequently struck by how different and individualistic our building are, but the major difference I see is the absolute lack in the civic planning that I notice in Mumbai. That and the blatant rule-flouting that is considered par for the course.

A city for all creatures, big and small

Yup. That's exactly how we looked at the sights. 

Hello there, spongebob...Or as my friend just pointed out - is that Homer?

Kitsch central!

I agree. Cool.

Just in case you have a few million lying around.

And that brought our brief flying visit to NY to an end. We needed to catch a pretty long flight to Auckland the following day.The kids were already asking me 'are we there yet?' Lord give me strenght.

Easter weekend in Bulgaria

Romania follows the orthodox Christian Calendar, which means that Easter his year was combined with the May Day bank holiday making it one BIG holiday weekend. This, we though was the perfect opportunity to visit neighbouring Bulgaria , which thus far, has been suffering from neglect on our parts when it comes to visits.
This time we'd decided to combine two historical (cue groans from both children) towns- Veliko Turnovo and Plovdiv.  Bulgaria is a lovely country with over 1/3 of the land still having green cover  If you look past the the communist remnants of rusty pipes and multi-hued matchbox residences in Ruse (the border town on the other side of Georghiu), you come across a vast countyside with hardly a human or house in sight.

The Tsaravets fortress

Veliko Turnovo, apart from the interesting bit like forts and churches also seems to have quite and active graffiti community, which seems to add to the character of the town.

See that tiled house in the top right corner? Keep that in mind. We'll come back to it later.

I don't know if this is a conscious effort by the Local Council or just a general rebellion after years of conforming to regulation, but I like it. 

We could see that Bulgarians shared the orthodox Easter with the Romanians and signs that the city was celebrating were everywhere. 

From shop windows to giant egg baskets.

Child 1 and Child 2, and their reactions to my clicking.

Dinner was at the city centre at a lovely restaurant named Ego. Well, technically, Veliko Turnovo has no town centre, but, close enough, geographically. Ego, interestingly has great taste in piped music (Tina Turner) and oven baked pizzas that are made right in front of you, 

The Portion sizes are pretty huge and they have a fairly decent vegetarian selection. Also, if you happen to go in, try and get a table at the far end, which boasts of an impressive panorama. 

That's not the view. That's just the restaurant interiors. :)

The castle and fort lit up at night looked beautiful, although we miss the light and sound show (it doesn't run every night, and when we asked around, the locals seemed pretty sketchy on the schedule)

The town is all either uphill or downhill. They simply didn't seem to do flats back when it was built. Our hotel was more uphill than downhill (or felt like it). 

Our hotel had an interesting choice of wine bottles. 

The next morning we set out to find our walking tour. Our guide was a lovely lady who gave us a quick rundown on the history of Bulgaria before we set off. There were descriptions of the city, and there were workmen working on authentic pewters (the baa-lamb was heard audibly snorting at the suggestion that we should own one of those)

Veliko Turnovo seems to have embraced the creations of a self-taught Bulgarian architect during the renaissance - Kolyu Ficheto. His structures were visible everywhere, and although I didn't find them particularly impressive - one of them being that tiled building on the top right of the graffiti steps picture, his story seems to be and interesting one. Particularly that of the 'Monkey house' as that slated edifice is called (local lore has it that the merchant who built it named it for his wife).

and here's the 'figure' that gave it its particular name

I leave it upto you to decided what exactly that figure looks like. Ficheto has several other structures to his name, but to me the most impressive was a church he's built that was designed to be earthquake resistant. And when an earthquake did hit the city in 1913, his is the one church that did survive! 

We also loved the 'skywalk' that was designed by students of architecture visiting the town in 2014.

The skywalk opened up to a fantastic view of the square in a neighbouring hill. That's the aristocrats hill and is currently closed to the public. (It was due to be opened in 2016, but the locals peg it at a more realistic 2018)

We  were headed to Plovdiv after lunch and it was only on our way back that we were able to visit the Tsravets fortress and the church at the very top. But for the sake of continuity, I'm going to mention it now, rather than later. 

The fortress was burned down by the marauding Ottomans in the 14th Century and the church was rebuilt in 1981. And since it was built in the communist era, it sin't exactly... the usual church. 

From the Altar to the murals to the windows, it is interesting the say the least. And quite unlike any church I've been to. 

The altar

Carvings on the dorrs

Personally, I really thought it was beautiful. It may not inspire feeling of peace or spirituality, but the murals depict this history of Bulgaria and are definitely eye-catching. 

The kids loved the restored Baldwin's tower and gleefully reenacted beheadings, complete with rubber axe, fake blood and soldiers' helmets. Also, it provided a lovely view of the city and the Yantra river. 

...and so we move on to the lovely city of Plovdiv. 

We arrived into Plovdiv in the afternoon. You see, our hotel was in a part of the city called 'Old Plovdiv' with entries not really sign posted or easy to find. After a bit of asking around (by us)  and mad gesticulating(by the locals), we did finally find our Hostel - the 'Guest House at Old Plovdiv' 

it was nothing like and hostel we've been to - starting with the personalised 'Welcome' boards. 

Yup. That's us. 

And the lovely, refreshing 'welcome drink' in the back garden as our concierge explained the sights and sounds of Plovdiv(the kids LOVED that. Okay, we might have loved it a tad bit too). Not to mention our room which was one of the prettiest I've ever seen. 

Sure, it's a bit unconventional not to have toilets and bathrooms in our rooms, but considering we were going to be out looking at Plovdiv for most of the day, I think we could work with that. Besides, our fellow guests were all really such a nice and friendly bunch. Despite the kids making general pets of themselves. 

We set out to walk the longest pedestrian street in Europe. It's a lovely street with signs of Easter here as well. 

Giant eggs

Roman theatre

Something else that's common with Romania - strings of Martisor

We passed through the Roman stadium that was still being excavated. Its interesting how they discovered it in the 60s when the Army corps decided to dig up the existing street to expand a stadium. The idea of preserving the old and the new in layers is brilliant and adds to the wonderful character of the city.

Dinner was a relaxed al fresco affair under a tree along the pedestrian pathway.  The streets were quite lively until pretty late into the night and we may have even witnessed a street party (We didn't go close enough to investigate the validity of our suspicions)

Day 2, after breakfast at the hostel - the Dining room shared an exterior wall with the remains of the Roman fortress. I was thrilled to bits at the setting, although the kids didn't see why I was mooning over a couple of giant boulders. 

Our guide for the day was a cheerful lady who was happy to help us explore Plovdiv despite it being Easter Sunday - pretty much the biggest religious festival for the Bulgarians.(Yup. Easter trumps Christmas here.) One of our first stops was at the top of one of the original seven hills that surrounded Plovdiv - there are only four in existence now. Pretty special views, and sunsets are rumoured to be particularly special. 

The Ethnographic Museum: Interesting if you're a history buff. or if you'd like a brief history of Bulgaria. 

This house originally belonged to one of the richest merchants in the city. 

and a whole host of interesting places.

These murals were spotted even in Veliko Tarnovo. Don't know quite what to make of them

One of Pickwick's favourites was the statue of Milo - an old town legend who was simply known for the Plovdivian attitute of 'Ay-lac' (spelling it as I heard it pronounced. Don't quite know the correct spelling in Cyrillic. Legend says that if you whisper in his ear, your wishes come true. And if you rub his knee, you'd find your true love.I cannot verify either claim, but Milo's knees were polished clean.

I loved the Bohemian part of town which had its own love story and the most interesting Graffiti.

But graffiti away from the Kapana was pretty interesting too. (you can probably tell by this point that I do love street art)

We ended up for lunch near the only mosque to exist in the city since the Ottomans. Bulgaria in general and Plovdiv in particular seem to have an abundance of Roses. The heady scent is quite something else. We learnt from our guide that Roses and rose products are Bulgaria's largest exports. 

I did get in a couple of sketches while the baa-lamb took the 'Aylac' life a bit too literally. It's not much, but it was a start.

The adjacent house...

...and the one opposite

The evening was spent less on sightseeing and more on enjoying the people of the city. There's something to be said about a a life where there's enough time to stop and smell the roses and greet neighbours and strangers alike with a cheery wave.  There's definitely something to be said about a town that creates statues of townsfolk not for deeds of greatness, but for way of life they represent. Or for being a person who questioned authority with humour. I leave you with a clipping of the townsfolk celebrating - one of my favourite memories from the trip.