Day 7 - Thursday, August 28 - Nikola / Pleven, Bulgaria

 It turns out the reason why we are in Nikola and not Rusk is that the water is too low for the ship to continue further downstream and had to dock here. Fortunately it is not much further from Bucharest. I'm not sure whey the river is shallower further down - maybe it is because it become wider, eventually turning into the Danube Delta before entering the Black Sea.

There is a small ferry carrying tractor trailers across the river, 3 or 4 at a time. When we got on the bus this morning, there were dozens of trucks waiting to cross, some from as far away as Iran.

We went to Pleven instead of Rusk as that would have been 2 1/2 hours away - too much for a morning tour.

We traveled mostly through agricultural areas where they grow sunflowers (many waiting to be harvested), corn, wheat and barley. We went through many small villages with just a few houses, many of them abandoned and in poor shape. When the communists took over, the land went into farm collectives which were industrialized and not as many workers were needed so they moved to the cities. Our tour guide said you could buy a 2-story house with half an acre for $20,000. Most of the people living there were pensioners.

We saw more solar and wind farms. Why is our government trying so hard to kill it?

Pleven is a pretty city of about 100,000 people with wide avenues and large green spaces with flowers and fountains. There are also many roaming dogs which is very different from Istanbul and Bucharest. But apparently the dogs are well cared for. They are picked up, health checked, vaccinated and neutered. Then tagged before being let back on the street. They appeared well fed and mostly ambivalent to people, although when I went to use an ATM, one dog barked at me rather viciously - no idea why. Only a few cats.

After walked around the city, we had a short bus ride to the diorama celebrating the 1877 victory over the Ottomans who had occupied Pleven for 500 years. The diorama is in a huge 3-story building with the top floor having a 360 diorama of the battle that took place exactly around this hill-top location. It was pretty gruesome with thousands of troops dying on each side. Troops from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Modavia, Latvia and even Finland were fighting the Ottomans. The first two battles were a failure but the general for the third battle laid siege to the Ottoman army in Pleven and after 45 days they fled the city. It is hard to imagine such a fierce battle in the snow in December.

The display was much more interesting and impressive than we expected. It is like the diorama at Gettysburg.

The museum also had an actual Gatling gun from the battle which was too heavy to take over the Balkan mountains to fight the Ottomans the rest of the way through Bulgaria. The Gatling gun design was from a farmer who was trying to design a machine for planting cotton and when someone from the Colt Arms company saw it, realized this approach could be used for a gun! The mechanism was still working and we could see how the bullets were fired as the muzzle was rotate.

The Bulgarian language historically uses the Cyrillic alphabet which makes reading the signs tricky although some use Latin letters as well. 

Then back to the ship for lunch and to relax.

We had one of the best dinners last night with filet mignon and bacon-wrapped green beans followed by chocolate torte.

The best part of the day was hearing from ship staff who grew up during the communist time. Sonya, the program director, grew up in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. Christmas could be celebrated in Czechoslovakia but not at all in the much more repressive Bulgaria. She (everyone) was part of the youth brigade and during high school she learned to take apart and reassemble a Kalashnikov rifle. There as an exam to get into special schools which was easy to pass but many students didn't pass if they had relatives in foreign countries or who did not support the state.

The ship piano player grew up in Hungary and told about when he was 12 years old, he really wanted a white t-shirt and jeans like Americans. His grandfather was a musician and brought these back from the US after a concert trip. He was so excited and had an artist friend paint a jazz symbol on the back. His first time out he was stopped by the police and stripped of his shirt for its terrible western influence.

The ship manager told of growing up in the former Yugoslavia in the Bosnia-Herzegovina region. Yugoslavia was the least restrictive of the eastern-bloc and people cold travel more freely. But when the eastern-bloc collapsed in 1989-1990 and Yugoslavia broke up his family was caught in the war, lost everything and had to live in a basement 150 miles away for 4 years.

Sign for Pleven in Cyrillic and Latin characters 

Small part of diorama