Bansko has been a wonderful place to spend the month. Not particularly productive, as far as writing blog entries goes, but still tons of fun. It is the exact opposite of Santorini, where Santorini was winding down for the season, Bansko is very much coming to life. In Santorini, every day brought new closures and a few less people, but in Bansko every day that we have been here we have seen another store or restaurant open, another sidewalks reparations finished, a few more tourists. I guess that is the difference between a beach town and a ski town at the end of fall. Unfortunately, what we have not seen much of is snow. We did wake up on Thanksgiving morning with a slight dusting- a Thanksgiving miracle!- but it was mostly gone by the end of the day. Hopefully, it stuck a little bit more in the mountains. Bansko is an interesting mix of chic ski town, full of trendy restaurants, après ski nightlife and clubs, and shops carrying the latest in fashion and ski gear, but it also has an older, more traditional feel, the architecture of the old town is charming and quaint, there is a fruit and vegetable market open on the weekends where very few of the merchants speak any english. It sits at the foot of the ski area, the gondola comes all the way down and dumps you in the middle of the trendy, touristy area of the town.
The place we are staying in is a ski condo a few minutes walk from the gondola. It is about 10 minutes to some of the first restaurants in town, probably 15 minutes to the grocery store and about 30 minutes walk to the fruit & veggie market. The walk to town is all downhill, and the walk back is all uphill. Walking into town is a pretty chilly walk, so we bundle up. Walking back is all uphill so we get extremely warm with our excessive bundling. Staying the right temperature has proven to be quite the challenge here! We are staying in a studio apartment that has a full-ish kitchen (no microwave, which wasn’t an issue until we needed to heat up Thanksgiving leftovers!) a shower that only leaks a little bit, and most of the time it has hot water. We arrived a little after midnight on October 28th and we were told that the next day we would not have hot water as they were replacing the boiler that day. But, not to worry they would happily arrange for us to visit a condo in one of the nearby buildings to shower in the morning. “Ok, no problem” we said. We were so tired, all we wanted to do was go to bed and we figured we would worry about it in the morning. However, upon arrival in our room, we found that we had no water at all. Nothing. Slightly frustrated, we went to bed. We awoke the next morning, gathered our bathroom belongings and went downstairs o the lobby so they could take us to shower in another building. Instead of the man who had greeted us the night before, we found a women whose english was not as good. Apparently, he had not mentioned anything about us going elsewhere to shower because she just kept nodding her head (remember, this is Bulgaria, where a nod means “no” and a shake means “yes”- something that has caused numerous problems, because it is just so ingrained in my head that a shake is no!!). She told us to wait, the water would be fixed in an hour. So, we waited. The man from the night before showed up about an hour later (the water, however, had not been fixed as promised!) and he took us to another building so we could shower. We showered and had some coffee before heading back to our condo to dump our stuff and wander into the town. We spent most of the day wandering around the town- we had no water at home, so we figured it would be better to be out and about. We arrived back to our condo and we were told that the water would be on later that night (it wasn’t). The next morning we wandered back downstairs and discovered that the WC on the lobby level worked- so we used that brush our teeth, to fill our pots and pans to cook. We were told that the water wasn’t in our room because the water temperature had not reached a certain point yet, once it hit that temperature it would be up in our room, we were assured it would only be about 2 hours. So, once again, we wandered off into town to see what we could see there. We returned that night and discovered that we still had no water. It was getting quite ridiculous. Finally, the next morning we got up- no water- and wandered downstairs to brush our teeth and use the water there. Thats when someone finally realized we had a serious problem. I think that when we complained that we had no water they took it to mean no hot water and didn’t realize that we had no water whatsoever. Someone followed us up to our room, saw that we had no water and went down to turn the main water switch to our room on. Fortunately, that was the biggest problem we had. The building is actually quite nice- there is a cafe, breakfast room with a cute fireplace, hot tub and pool (all closed for repairs before the season gets going, unfortunately), a gym and a game room with pool and foosball. We have spent many of our nights here playing foosball!
The ski area is scheduled to open on Dec. 15th, and it has been a flurry of activity all over town as businesses prepare to get inundated with tourists. The slopes are not open yet, in fact, there is barely any snow on them at all, an unfortunate situation that we have made the best of by hiking up the slopes. Hiking up a slope takes a lot more time and energy than it does to ski down! We have passed herds (gaggles?) of sheep walking up and down the mountain. We have hiked it several times, hiking up, up, up until we finally found snow, built a snowman, threw some snow balls and then wandered back down the mountain- singing Christmas carols loudly because it occurred to us that there could be bears. And it has been fairly warm here, we didn’t know if they would be hibernating or not (do all bears do that? I feel like that is something that I should know, but I don’t). It is quite a beautiful hike, right along a river and the forest is so dense. And the trees are so green and alive- no pine beetles here!!
The other highlight of our stay here in Bansko was the Bansko International Film Festival. Promising to be 100% extreme, we thought it was in our best interest to go as we often think of ourselves as extreme, also entrance was free (which is pretty extreme). We looked up the schedule online (we actually walked into the building where the films were being shown but they didn’t have any information in English and told us to go look it up online, so we went home and looked it up) and decided to go see All.I.Can, a Canadian film supposedly about environmental conservation, but with lots of epic shots of skiing. It was showing at 1:30. We left our apartment and wandered down to the film festival, at 12:45, giving ourselves plenty of time to get there, find the room it was showing in and get our seats. We get there and ask someone where our film was showing. She tells us to go upstairs and turn left. This turns out to be only part of the story. Going up the stairs dumps us in a large room, we can turn left, but just barely. There is a wall to the left of us. Straight ahead of us is a theater room. If we turn right we can walk out a set of doors. Once out the doors there are two options, a theater down the hall and to the left, or a theater on the right. We decide that she probably meant the theater out the doors and down the hall on the left. We head down there, and look in the theater room. Whoops! It was totally full and a movie was in full swing. It was 1:22, so we figured that we were probably in the wrong room. We went back down to the information desk to clarify where we were supposed to be. Turns out, that was the correct room. She did say they were probably running a little behind- she told us that it would start a little late, probably about 2-3 minutes. Nope, it was 36 minutes after our movie was supposed to start that the other movie finally let out. We were a little worried- was she sure this was the right theater?? Eventually, we got to watch the movie. It was awesome! The environmental message was hazy at best, and didn’t seem to really quite get off the ground, it actually seemed like it was a bit of an afterthought, the main thought being “let’s make a skiing video!” The scenery and the skiing shots were absolutely incredible and breathtaking- the video showed a group of skiers as they traveled all over the world, from the Canadian Rockies, to Alaska, to Chile, to Morocco, to Greenland. It was absolutely stunning and featured tons of epic skiing footage, which was what we were hoping for!! We left feeling very hoity-toity after attending our first International Film Festival, but a little sad that the slopes were not open yet- a good shredding movie makes you just want to get out there and shred too.
Funny story- as we were walking through the streets yesterday we saw advertisements for Black Friday sales…. Our tv gets 2 english channels, both of the British channels and they were advertising for Black Friday sales as well.
Thanksgiving here was good- we roasted a chicken, baked some squash, made stuffing and scalloped potatoes. No cranberry sauce though 🙁 We enjoyed ourselves, but definitely missed our families. The holidays make me homesick, I missed skiing with my family, and it was tough to see everyone together (whether in pictures or on skype), knowing we couldn’t be there. We hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday- we are so thankful to have such wonderful, loving, supportive families! We love you all!!
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