Bulgaria

Sorry, it has taken so long to finish these posts from the International Trip.
From Thessaloniki we went to Bulgaria, but to get there we took a 6 hour long train. The train was very cool, it was like something out of Harry Potter, with sliding compartments along a hallway and ours had 6 people in each compartment.
So we left Thessaloniki at about 6 and arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria at about midnight. We then went immediately to the hotel. (Background) Bulgaria was under the communist regime until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 so the country is still in a transitional state between communism and a new autonomous government. So, keeping that in mind we arrived at our hotel, which probably could have been gorgeous with a good decorator. The rooms though; were gray and somewhat foreboding. Our room in particular had torn wallpaper on the walls, and this carpet, which you could tell had been there for way too many years. The hotel was like a donut, and in the center was this big open space, and there were glass windows all the way up, so that was pretty cool.
Okay, so the first day in Bulgaria we went on a walking tour of the city, it was pretty cool, although I couldn't hear what the guide was saying.

Pictures from the Walking Tour of Sofia

This man was selling all of this Bulgarian themed touristy stuff. No one bought anything, but a lot of people took their picture with him

We then had a picnic in this park/square. We (as a group) had all this food laid out for ourselves, but these older people kept coming up to us and trying to take it. They thought it was a charity or a soup kitchen type thing, and we kept having to wave them away. They didn't understand English and we didn't understand Bulgarian so it was hard to get our point across. Later that evening we went to the Jewish Community Center of Sofia and had dinner with the teenagers there. The Jewish community of Bulgaria is almost entirely under the age of 30. Since the fall of the communist regime and the ability to practice Judaism again, many parents have told their kids about their identity and the kids have begun to rebuild the community. After dinner, the Bulgarian youth took us all out. I went to a Karaoke Bar which was a lot of fun.
The next day we saw met with a bunch of different people from the Jewish community, including a Sephardic woman, a Rabbi, a woman in the Jewish community whose husband was not Jewish but who was raising her son Jewish and then some more of the youth we had met last night. After that we went to see the synagogue of Sofia. It was absolutely incredible, huge and beautiful with these big domed ceilings. The synagogue had been bombed during WWII and they had just finished restoring it this past September.

Pictures of the Sofia Synagogue

After seeing this synagogue we participated along with Bulgarians our age in cleaning graffiti off the streets. More specifically we cleaned swastikas. There were a huge number of them. It surprised me, a little, to see how commonplace they were. There were some smaller ones that my group wanted to remove, but the Bulgarians we were with said "don't worry about those, there are a lot of those small ones, let's go find the bigger ones".
The next morning we packed up and left Sofia, and headed to Plovdiv, another city in Bulgaria. We saw another synagogue, but then we went to the very unique thing about this city. In Plovdiv there is a monument to the Holocaust (as is found in many European cities) but this monument was in honor of all the Jews who had survived, instead of commemorating those lives which had been lost.
Background: No Bulgarian Jews died during the holocaust. The Bulgarian Government refused to deport the Jews living within Bulgaria proper to concentration camps. Many of them were sent to forced labor camps, but returned after the war. Unfortunately, from the territories that Bulgaria controlled at the time (Macedonia, Yugoslavia) many Jews were deported and killed.

Pictures from the Plovdiv Synagogue

After the memorial we went to the community center of Plovdiv where we met with the elderly community there, almost all of whom had survived the holocaust. They spoke Hebrew and Ladino (Juedo-Spanish) and a couple of them spoke English. Those who spoke Ladino understood Spanish, so that helped in order to be able to communicate with them. At this center was one of the most incredible feelings I had felt all trip. Back in Thessaloniki we had learned a Ladino song called Adio Querida. We sang it at this community center in Plovdiv and instead of the other people just listening, they all started to sing along, and there we were, 47 teenagers and 20 or so elderly people all singing the same song. It was a shivers sent up my spine kind of feeling.
After the community center we had lunch, and then headed to the airport to come back home to Israel!