We drove out of Plovdiv on our way to a Bulgarian folk music festival call Kopreevcheetsa.
We had booked rooms at a monastery which was supposedly 7km outside of town on a "manageable" road. Manageable is really a relative term, relative to your vehicle and relative to your perseverance.
The sturdy Opel (a German car which might be my next pick if I can find one in the states) bounced along at 20km an hour for quite a while. I watched the landscape shift from fields of sunflowers to mountains and back to fields again as we dipped into the valley. I vaguely wondered if our 3 cylinder car would make it back out of the valley but kept my thoughts to myself.
The road was lined with fruit trees, mainly plum and cherries mixed in among the blackberry bushes. As soon as we arrived, we dropped our bags and went to pick as much fruit as we could eat along the road. We picked our way to a cafe which looked out of place tucked, as it was, into the side of a mountain. A dog barked at us as we approached but it was really more of a formality as he was too lazy to come out of his dog house.
We drank beer and ate fried potatoes with cheese and I watched VH1 classics on the tv in the corner. How strange to be surrounded by the beauty of the mountain and still be absorbed by Queen and Macy Gray videos.
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The music festival itself was an amazing production with three separate stages and over 15,000 people in attendance. Located in the mountains above the town of Kopreevcheetsa, it felt like crashing a party for wood nymphs.
Though the music was exclusively Bulgarian folk, people came from all over the world to listen to groups of old men and women, dressed in the customary garb of colorful wool pants, skirts and blouses, sing and dance on the stages.
Off the stage festival attendees linked pinkies with strangers to create a long chain of dancers. Bulgarian folk dancing involves a lot of hopping and skipping in time with your neighbors and often back tracking a few steps before springing forward again. There is a leader at the front of the line, but as the line grows you sometimes end up far behind the leader or else across from her and are unable to follow her feet any more and must trust that your neighbors have got the right beat. It's like a very complicated game of telephone with your feet.
I've had to rush this post a bit as I have no been in Armenia for five days and am quite far behind on my entries so I apologize for leaving out several details and descriptions...
We had booked rooms at a monastery which was supposedly 7km outside of town on a "manageable" road. Manageable is really a relative term, relative to your vehicle and relative to your perseverance.
The sturdy Opel (a German car which might be my next pick if I can find one in the states) bounced along at 20km an hour for quite a while. I watched the landscape shift from fields of sunflowers to mountains and back to fields again as we dipped into the valley. I vaguely wondered if our 3 cylinder car would make it back out of the valley but kept my thoughts to myself.
The road was lined with fruit trees, mainly plum and cherries mixed in among the blackberry bushes. As soon as we arrived, we dropped our bags and went to pick as much fruit as we could eat along the road. We picked our way to a cafe which looked out of place tucked, as it was, into the side of a mountain. A dog barked at us as we approached but it was really more of a formality as he was too lazy to come out of his dog house.
We drank beer and ate fried potatoes with cheese and I watched VH1 classics on the tv in the corner. How strange to be surrounded by the beauty of the mountain and still be absorbed by Queen and Macy Gray videos.
*********************************************************************************
The music festival itself was an amazing production with three separate stages and over 15,000 people in attendance. Located in the mountains above the town of Kopreevcheetsa, it felt like crashing a party for wood nymphs.
Though the music was exclusively Bulgarian folk, people came from all over the world to listen to groups of old men and women, dressed in the customary garb of colorful wool pants, skirts and blouses, sing and dance on the stages.
Off the stage festival attendees linked pinkies with strangers to create a long chain of dancers. Bulgarian folk dancing involves a lot of hopping and skipping in time with your neighbors and often back tracking a few steps before springing forward again. There is a leader at the front of the line, but as the line grows you sometimes end up far behind the leader or else across from her and are unable to follow her feet any more and must trust that your neighbors have got the right beat. It's like a very complicated game of telephone with your feet.
I've had to rush this post a bit as I have no been in Armenia for five days and am quite far behind on my entries so I apologize for leaving out several details and descriptions...
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