Hello Everyone,

It feels like forever since we last wrote because we have been to so many places in the last week. We are in Serbia at the moment but I will lump that together with Montenegro (if it works for the EU and Eurovision ...why not) in a few days time. So for now I will concentrate on Bulgaria where we spent the first week of our time in Eastern Europe.

It took us 20 hours to get there from Cappadocia on an overnight bus to Istanbul then a day bus over the border to Plovdiv. Plovdiv is the second biggest city and has a pretty little old town as well as high street that would rival any in Britain for shops. We spent most of our two days here getting lost, actually that has been a pretty common occurence this week, because all the road signs are written in Cyrillic (the alphabet used in Russia but invented in Bulgaria). This also causes problems with menus but so far we have managed to avoid ordering sheeps brain! Luckily the place is pleasant enough that wandering round for hours looking for an ampitheatre is fun in itself.

From there we headed to Veliko Tarnova which is pretty little University town perched on a gorge. We are travelling around Europe by rail which so far has proved a good way of getting to meet people. On the way to Veliko we shared the carriage with a local lady called Rosa on her way home from the market with a sheeps head and a bunch of garlic which stunk the place out. We had to politely refuse the offer to eat it with her. From there we headed to the capital Sofia which was a nice city with a lot of churches (we know we saw all of them...or at least it felt like it).

From Bulgaria we took an overnight train to Belgrade and shared the carriage with another character whose English stretched to 'dog', 'home', 'man', 'woman' and 'fish' which was always followed with the universal action for fish. He did however manage to read a good paragraph of Gareth's War and Peace and give us a full update on Euro 2008.

We have been pleasantly surprised by Bulgaria it is a beautiful country with wonderfully friendly people and is incredibly cheap (Who wouldn't be tempted with a house for 5000 pounds in Veliko). Anyway I am going to leave it there as it has took me about two hours to write amidst watching our landlady's card tricks and I have lost my train of thought several times. We are heading to Montenegro tomorrow so we will update you from there.

All the best

Laura and Gareth