Day 25: Our inital plans for the first few days of August had involved us going to Sofia, then Istanbul, Athens and Thessaloniki before moving on to Macedonia on the 6th. However, these plans involved taking four night trains in a row!! At the start of the trip this prospect hadn't phased us too much; but after what happened on the night train to Warsaw neither of us particularly fancied this. When you add the fact that no night trains have showers and neither do any European railway stations, a serious re-organisation was needed. In the end we decided to take it a little easier and miss out Greece and Turkey. One of the Inter-rail zones is Italy, Slovenia, Turkey and Greece so we can always go back for a fortnight and see all these four together :oD Having spoken to fellow travellers it became clear that Sofia wasn't all that of a great place to go and that Plovdiv was a better bet. There were two trains, one at 9am and one at 3pm: our new found relaxing travelling style dictated that 3pm was definitely the way forward and after a lie-in we visited the (beautiful) cathedral and explored the local markets for more tat. We were becoming SERIOUSLY addicted to tat now and couldn't walk past a stall wthout stopping to investigate hehe. We stopped off for a beer/cocktail before cacthing the train and Ellie especially enjoyed her "grasshopper" - a creamy green concotion that with the added help of two cherry "eyes" and six straws as "legs" did look very cool :o) Simple pleasures for simple minds right? ;o) After all this leisurely slacking we managed to nearly miss the train - a normal procedure for us by now as I'm sure is obvious from our previous entries!! The journey took us two thirds of the way across Bulgaria and the scenery was truly beautiful. Farmland dominated near the track for the most of it but beyond were majestic mountains and we passed through several "lost" valleys containing all sorts of butterflies, flowers etc that unfortunately went by in a bit of a blur!!! We got in to Plovdiv an hour late and were taken to the hostel by a local cabbie. The last half of the journey was over cobbles and up narrow winding roads, not good for the taxi but promising much for the next day's exploration :o) We went out for a late drink with a few fellow (English) travellers and managed to find the rubbishest Mojito of all time - no fresh mint, no rum, no tonic: more of a Creme de Menthe and Lemonade with a bit of sugar for authenticity. Wouldn't have been a problem if we hadn't already gone on about how amazing a cocktail it was beforehand and persuaded everyone to have one - D'OH! We found out the train time to our next destination (Skopje, Macedonia) and it meant leaving at 8am, (or staying a night in the middle of nowhere) so we booked an extra night in order to actually see some of the city we had been assured was worth seeing. Despite the worrying absence of a lock on our room door we managed to get to sleep without too much hassle..... James and Ellie xxx