Sofia for Digital Nomads
You know who the worst people in the world are?
Optimists. And Nazis, but mostly optimists. Their entire lives are spent disappointed that things don't live up to their expectations. Unyielding pessimism is the only way to ensure that life is an endless stream of pleasant surprises.
Optimists are always running around trying to kill our good vibes.
I was unacharacteristically optimistic about coming to Sofia. My whole process for deciding where I go is, out of the places I can afford, I look at a map and go to the ones I have the best feeling about, and I just had a good feeling about Bulgaria. I think because in other regions of the world, the "sick child" of that region has always been a place I've loved.
In South America, Bolivia is the poorest, least developed country, looked down upon by its neighbours, but I absolutely loved it. Spent three months there before going to Argentina, and Argentina can fuck off. In south-east Asia it's Laos. It's landlocked, it's poor, it has Thailand to the south and China to the north. I loved it there too. And based on the reactions from when I told people I was going, I saw Bulgaria as the sick child of the EU, and in my human desire to cheer for the underdog, I optimisically arrived in Sofia expecting to love it, which is never a good thing.
It was late afternoon when my bus pulled-into the bus station. I caught the Metro to my Airbnb without talking to anyone and did a self check-in, quickly put my bags down and went out and to get food. After my meal I went to a phone shop to buy a SIM card. This was at an A1 store, one of Bulgaria's three mobile networks, right in the middle of the touristy city centre, so presumably visited by many a tourist wanting to get connected as soon as they arrive in the city.
The night before I'd been online and read that a SIM with A1 would cost me 15 lev. When I told the girl I wanted to buy a SIM, she quoted me 21 lev, which was more than I was expecting, but I'd been sat on a bus all day, I couldn't be arsed to question it. I paid her 21 lev and she gave me a SIM and a little stand for my phone, which I assumed they were giving away as a freebie.
It was only back at my room that I inspected the receipt to see that the SIM had cost 15 lev. The phone stand, which hadn't been mentioned at all, was charged separately for 6 lev more. After the girl that'd served me in the restaurant, quite literally the second person I interacted with in Bulgaria scammed me out of an insignificant sum of money, but scammed me all the same. This instantly moved me from a place of optimism, to a place of apprehension about whether I could trust people here. As much as I tried to rid it from my mind, I'm not sure Sofia ever recovered to match my expectations prior to arrival.
If you've ever worked in customer service, you'll know that 99% of people are lovely, but it just takes one to ruin your day. My feeling about Sofia is that 99% of people are lovely and friendly and honest, but there's 1% that just aren't. For me at least, being on the receiving end any amount of animosity, however small, sticks with me. On another day I came out of my room and there was a guy out there in a hi-viz jacket who immediately asked me something in Bulgarian. When I asked (in English) if he spoke English, he just looked at me angrily and started muttering under his breath as he walked away. Or there was this guy I encountered in the park, clearly drunk or on something who stumbled out of a bush without looking, right into my path. When he did notice me, he quickly changed course and went around me, but to demostrate his displeasure, loudly spat on the ground behind me.
Minor confrontations like this, they happen. They're a part of life. I just feel like they happen more in Sofia than in other places in the world. The people in Sofia who're fed-up with life do little to hide their displeasure. There's no attempt to build a cheerful facade.
Don't take that to mean I didn't enjoy Sofia. There are a lot of good things in this city. It's an absolutely gorgeous place architecturally; walking around the old town is a joy in itself, and I found everything to be really, really convenient. I was never more than a short walk from where I wanted to go, whether it be a bar, a vegan restaurant, a gym, a supermaket or a park, to the point that I actually found myself wishing things were a bit more spread-out so I'd have more time outside. And for how fed-up a minority of people here seem with life, they were never threatening. This city feels incredibly safe.
Unfortunately though, negative experiences weigh heavier on the mind than positive ones, and in a regrettable fog of optimism, I ended up leaving Sofia a little disappointed.
Sofia is a city surrounded by mountains which create a beautiful backdrop. This pigeon statue is in South Park.
Where I stayed
Luxury Apart Sofia Center
| Room | £1,180.97 GBP |
| 45% monthly price discount | £-531.52 GBP |
| Service fee | £82.76 GBP |
| Total |
£732.21 GBP
(£26.15 GBP per night)
|
Evolution: "I've spent 3.5 billion years perfecting a biological rhythm where people rise and sleep with daylight."
Humans: "Lol."
This apartment is on the ground floor. I typically avoid ground floor rooms for security reasons, but there are decorative bars here sufficient to mitigate any risk of someone climbing through the windows, and the door looks like it could guard Fort Knox. From a security perspective, this room is as safe as anywhere I've stayed. From a privacy perspective it's less so.
On the plus side the room is on the rear side of the building, so you don't have to worry about people peering in as they wander down the street. On the negative side, it's next to a restaurant and all the staff take their smoke breaks out the back, and should you leave the curtains open, they can look at you lying in bed.
Human beings have created some dumb inventions before, but perhaps the dumbest of them is black-out curtains: Disrupting your circadian rhythm since World War II. Save for some largely transparent drapes, this room only has black-out curtains. And as someone who likes to get as much daylight as possible, my time here was a constant battle between closing the curtains enough to have privacy, but not closing them so much that I didn't get enough daylight.
Save for the crippling loneliness, despondency and endless longing for it to all be over, the great thing about being alone is that you get to have an entire bed to yourself. I don't have a side of the bed, I always just sleep in the middle. So when I stay somewhere with an alleged double-bed, but it's actually two single mattresses, then God can go fuck himself. I don't know who thinks that's a good idea. Why would you want to sleep in the same bed as someone but be forced to be on different sides of it? If that's what you want then just sleep in different beds. Or different rooms. Or just get a divorce and get it over with.
The room is a studio, which had I paid more attention when booking I would have realised. Studios are only really bad things when you're with someone else and you have nowhere to get away from them. Again touting the benefits of soul-crushing desolation, when you're in a studio by yourself, it can be better than having a one-bedroom because you get the same amount of space without all the walls getting in the way.
That's not really the case here, it's actually quite small, but in other places.
There's just room to comfortably do yoga, which is all the space I really need. Any more is being greedy, and this room has this empty space despite also having a dining table with two chairs, an armchair, a desk with an office chair, and a double bed that some nobhead put two mattresses on.
The kitchen area is a bit lacking. It has an induction hob that you can unplug and put in a drawer when you're not using it. I used to think they were a poor alternative to having a permanent cooker, but having used them in multiple Airbnbs now, I actually think they're an improvement. You can take them out whenever you want to cook, but the rest of the time you put them away and have more surface space.
It also has a microwave-grill, which I'd never heard of until I stayed here. It's a microwave and a grill. Together. A microwave-grill. No, I don't know who came up with that either. Probably the same guy who invented blackout curtains. I found some minimal use for it by getting some baguettes from the nearby Lidl and toasting them, but it definitely wasn't adequate replacement for an oven.
The first thing I look for when choosing an Airbnb, and the reason that I never pay much attention to the details of the room, is the location. I want the room to be in a good location, which for me means it has four things nearby: Somewhere to run, a gym, vegan food and a supermarket. For as much as it could be anywhere in Sofia, this room is in a perfect location.
My favourite vegan restaurant here, Edgy Veggy, is a 150 metre walk. My gym when I was here, Silver Gym, is a 250m walk. Lidl is a 550m walk, with additional supermarkets not much further. And while you can comfortably go running from right out the front door, the north-west corner of the National Palace of Culture Park is only a 350m walk.
The gym was so close that I'd walk there in my workout clothes, go straight from the gym to Edgy Veggy, which conveniently sells protein shakes to have with your lunch, and be back at my room within an hour. The location was amazing, and made-up for the frustrations of the room, however slight they were.
I bet you've never stayed in a studio with a chandelier before.
Where to get vegan food in Sofia
Unlike in Bucharest, where I'd been prior, mainstream supermarkets in Sofia don't cater well to vegans. There are no vegan sections, you just have to wander around and pick-out the odd vegan item they happen to have.
For specialised vegan products, like vegan cheese, there are little health food shops dotted all over Sofia. The closest for me was Zelen Bio Store, but there are many others.
From a self-catering perspective I found myself limited to meals like hummus pasta and sandwiches, which meant I relied a lot on vegan restaurants. Sofia doesn't have a huge selection of vegan restaurants, but the ones it does have I found to be really good. These are my favourites.
Edgy Veggy
When I choose an Airbnb, I always get a place with a nearby vegan restaurant, and Edgy Veggy was one of the key reasons I ended up staying where I did. If it wasn't very good it would have been a great disappointment, but luckily I loved it.
It's a fully vegan restaurant, and sells a mix of junk foods like burgers and burritos, with healthier options like avocado toast and salads. I didn't eat anything here that I didn't think was really high quality, and being so close to both my gym and my room, I would often come here after a workout for lunch. They also sell protein shakes.
While the food was always top-notich, the service can suffer occasionally. It's supposed to open at 10am everyday, but one day I came at 10:40am only to be told that they would open "maybe at 11:30." Other days I came earlier and they were open, so it's a bit of pot-luck. As is coming here at busy times because, despite being quite a big premesis, they don't have much seating, and if you can't get one of the tables, the bars around the outside aren't so comfortable.
It's essentially a fast food restaurant, so on most days you'll have your food within 5-10 minutes of ordering, but this too was unreliable. One day I waited 27 minutes for a burrito, which was a little frustrating as I'd only come in for a quick lunch.
The positives definitely outweigh the negatives and the food is always good, but beware that the service isn't always on point.
The grillzilla burger was the first meal I ate in Sofia and is an absolutely beautiful nightmare. It'll cost you 16 lev.
Neéko Vegan Junk Food
Neéko was still fairly new when I visited Sofia, and is another fully-vegan restaurant. As you can probably guess from the name, it's not a place to come for a healthy feed, even though they do offer salads. It's more a place I found myself coming on a hangover, and it definitely helped.
While the burgers on the menu all seem a little overpriced, if you're willing to downgrade to one of the sandwiches with fries, you can get a good-sized meal for less than 14 lev, which is pretty good value.
It's not a popular place yet. I hope that changes in the long-term, but for now it doesn't suffer the same service issues of Edgy Veggy, because you'll almost always find that you're the only customer.
Neéko serve a mix of burgers, sandwiches and salads. This is 'The cold Italian' sandwich and costs just 9.49 lev. With French fries costing 3.89 lev, you can have both for just 13.38 lev and it's a decent-sized meal.
Bolero Fitburger
Bolero markets itself as having healthy burgers. It's called 'Fitburger', their slogan is 'You do the gym, we do the food', and on the walls are pictures of people exercising. I couldn't tell you why the burgers here are any healthier than in Neéko, and Neéko markets itself as junk food. They looked and tasted just as unhealthy here, but hey! If they say their burgers are healthy, then I'm willing to believe they're healthy.
Bolero isn't a vegan or even a vegetarian restaurant, 50% of the menu is meat, but they have a separate vegan/vegetarian menu, on which there are seven vegan burgers.
One thing I didn't quite understand is that the burgers and the sides are priced separately. Each time I came here I ordered a burger and a side, yet I was only ever charged for the burger. On my first visit I pointed this out to them but they told me it was right. I'm not sure if this is a promotion or whether a side is always free with your burger, but it makes it incredible value when you consider that the cheapest vegan burger, the tofu burger, is only 11.90 lev. It's worth visiting anyway, but if they keep up with that pricing, definitely add it to your list.
50% of Bolero's menu is vegan/vegetarian, including seven vegan-friendly burgers. This is the 'Bolero vegan chicken burger' made with a carrot orange bun for 14.90 lev. On the menu the sides are priced separately, but on each time I ate here I bought a burger with a side, and on each occasion the side was included with the burger for free, so there was no charge for the fries.
Where to run in Sofia
In my month in Bucharest prior to coming here, I got back into interval running. That's short bursts of high-speed running, rather than long, slow runs as people typically do. My hope before coming to Sofia was that I would continue doing at least some interval running, but what that requires is a flat, even, unimpeded surface, preferably in a loop.
Looking at a map you'll see that Sofia has several parks. Nearest to my room was the National Palace of Culture Park. I wasn't expecting much from this, but a little further on is South Park. Carry on going, and you get to another park, also called South Park. You'd think they could have come up with another name.
To differentiate between them I'm going to refer to them as north South Park and south South Park.
My expectation was that north South Park would be a good place to do faster runs. The reason that it's not, isn't that it's not big enough or flat enough. It's that all the paths just go straight across the park, so you can't actually do any loops without diverting over stretches of grass that are pretty uneven under-foot. I tried to do a fast run here when I first arrived, and I just couldn't do it. And yes I am blaming the directions of the paths and the unevenness of the grass for why I got such a shit time. It was nothing to do with my lack of fitness or willpower.
From that I concluded that Sofia is better for longer, slower runs, for which it is really good. The pavements and roads are quiet enough that you can comfortably run down the street, but with a bit of planning you can do some decent-lengthed runs mostly through parks.
I started by combining National Palace of Culture Park with north South Park and south South Park, but later graduated onto including Borisova Gradina Park, which turned it into a 12km loop where almost all of Borisova Gradina Park, and the south half of south South Park are some pretty isolated trails. It was really enjoyable, with the only downside being that they're so winding that keeping your bearings is near impossible. I often found myself stopping to check the map on my watch, only to see I was going in the opposite direction to what I thought.
On my last run in Sofia, I was going down one of these isolated, winding trails only to come across an old man lying on the path. I stopped, and on the assumption he didn't speak English put my thumb up and asked him "ok?"
"Help," was his response in a very timid voice. He didn't seem to know any other words, but when he started trying to stand up, I pulled him off the ground and had to hold him steady for about twenty seconds, lest he go back down again. He was carrying a crutch and had a bandage around one leg, which made me wonder if going on walks down isolated, uneven trails was the best thing for him. He could have been there for hours already, and had I not come along, might have been for many more.
His dog didn't give a fuck either. He was just chilling on the ground. Forget Lassie, that dog wasn't going to do shit.
If you are intent on doing faster runs, on the right if you enter south South Park from the north, is a place called Great Round Meadow. It's not that great, but it's flat, the path is fairly wide, and it's more or less round so you can use it for sprints just as long as you're willing to push the occasional pensioner out the way. That was the only place I came across suitable for faster running.
My first run in Sofia was an attempted 'fast' run in north South Park. I tried to find a decent loop but they haven't designed this park to be running-friendly as the paths all just go across the park. Even 50% of that little loop in the middle is running across uneven grass.
Being sociable in Sofia
There's really not that much going on from a perspective of events designed for meeting new people in Sofia. The only group running regular events on Meetup is the Sofia International Friends and Language exchange group. I attended three of their events, and they were quite curious affairs. The "organiser" didn't show up to any of them, and according to the people I met, doesn't ever show up to any of them, yet he continually updates the number of guests he's bringing to each event on the app, which inflates the number of attendees to make it look really popular.
My assumption is he has some association to McCarthys Irish Pub, the bar that these events are held in, and does this to get more people to attend, but I never found anyone to corroborate my story.
With that consideration, despite these Meetups boasting upwards of 25 attendees, the reality was it would range from four to ten, but they were still fun. I say that from the perspective of someone who's quite happy to sit in a bar alone, so take it with a pinch of salt, but the lesser attended events can be more fun because you get to know a small number of people well instead of meeting thirty people and not remembering a single name.
These were the only organised events I attended in Sofia, but I encountered one more when in a bar, a dozen or more miserable looking people not talking to each other wandered in. I chatted to who turned-out to be the organiser, and these people had all just met each other and came into this bar on the first stop of their Sofia Pub Crawl which, as I found out, is a pub crawl that runs every Friday and Saturday and you can attend for 25 lev.
My assumption is that once they got comfortable with each other and the alcohol had flowed a bit, then they probably loosened-up and had some fun. They'd signed-up for a pub crawl after all. That's another option, but in truth I didn't find much more here.
If you're a very socially-needy person then Sofia might not be for you.