Bansko
BULGARIA
The Village
By AARON
Monday, February 19, 2018
After a pleasant bus ride from Sofia to Bansko, we were dropped off on the outskirts of town at the bus station, and thanks to the ever-increasingly helpful MapsMe app, we headed into town towards our hotel.
Along the way, the neighborhoods dotted with local residences and vacation stays sporadically started to give way to touristy restaurants, shops and touts. I mention touts, because one fine gentleman came out to offer us a menu to his restaurant, the “Dedo Pene”. Trying to keep our child-like humor at bay (“dedo pene” translates to “finger penis” in Spanish. Wait, it gets better- translated from Bulgarian into English it means “dude foam”. Ha!), we quickly walked on lest he think we were mocking his menu or place of establishment. Which, I guess in a way, we were?
After navigating a couple more streets, we arrived at our hotel, Stavia Komita, where we were greeted by Elena, the worker on site at the time, and a family of cats. While not amazingly helpful, the cats did provide days of cute photography (see: cats snuggling in a tire), as well as a lesson to many a deadbeat father out there: be a man and raise your kids- as this male cat did for his woman and kiddo. Apparently the male cat had come along when the female was in heat, but never left after she gave birth to their one, cute white kitten. Awww….
Elena recommended that we head further into the tourist gauntlet and buy our lift tickets/rentals that evening, as mornings at the office could be busy. Taking her advice, we headed up the hill through the main street, landscapes changing more and more into what could pass for a ski town anywhere in the world. Rental shops, stores selling local wares, restaurants and bars increased in frequency as we got closer to the main gondola of Bansko. We purchased our tickets ($20USD per lift ticket! Whohoo!) and ski/snowboard rentals from a shop recommended by a girl at the ticket office and then headed back to our part of town.
Not adventurous enough to dine at the Dedo Pene, we purchased some wine, cheese and snacks for a light dinner, and headed to the main restaurant area of our hotel. Walking in this area of town was like taking a step back in time. Amidst the more modern homes were sections that echoed of Bansko’s past: cobblestone roads, walls of rounded dark stone juxtaposed with white mortar, and common rooms, with coal-burning stoves that heated the house.
All the while the walls spoke of a different time, decorated with the pictures and artifacts from their relatives and ancestors before them. Stavia Komita was no different, where owners and newly engaged couple Teddy and Dinko had been running the hotel for over 3 years now, and were more than happy to answer any questions we had of old photos, swords and tapestries that hung from their walls.
Being the only two people staying at the 5 bedroom hotel, we had the common room to ourselves, so Teddy and Dinko asked if they could join us and teach us a Bulgarian drinking game. Uhh, yeah! What proceeded after was a type of “crazy 8’s” card game, cheap Bulgarian red wine and raika, which is a fruit brandy popular in the Balkans and runs around 40% ABV. So needless to say by the end of the night the game got funnier, the stories better and the raika smoother. I remember at some point Teddy recommended that we arrive at the gondola early next day because the lines are horrendous…
