Classic Oriënt Express 2009: Day 11

I recently found my old travel diary again and started reading it.  Seems that I made 2 very nice trips in the past, which I think may be very interesting for my blog.  Thus I decided to copy what I wrote about these train journeys through Europe on my blog.

This is the eleventh day of my Oriënt Express Journey.

The first stop on my way back home (following the Arlberg-Oriënt-Express route) was Ruse in the north of Bulgaristan (as the Turkish call Bulgaria).  After a long trip through breathtaking mountains and valleys of the Bulgarian inland, I arrived at 14h00 at what might have been the biggest surprise of my journey: the city Ruse.  I arrived here without high expectations, but my first impressions were so positive that I already regretted only staying there for one night.

After checking in at my hotel, I started looking for some food, the last meal I had was yesterday evening.  I found a nice small restaurant, where I had a delicious Shkembe Chorba (a soup with pieces of "the stomach of the son of a cow" - veal stomach), a salad, a double big chicken skewer with chips and 2 ice teas.  The restaurant was located on Svoboda Square, the main square of Ruse.  Nearby I found a tourist information office, where I got a city map and some brochures about the city.  In return for all this information they asked me to sign the guestbook, which I promised to do the next day after my visit.  I did take a look at what other tourists wrote... and apparently I was the first one to look at the guest book this year, as no one signed it (so I wondered, was I really the first tourist this year?).

At the tourist agency they strongly advised me to visit the historical museum, where there was currently a special exposition running on the history of the local area.  For only 2 euro I got a full guided tour of the museum (probably because I was the first tourist of the year).  I learned that in this region humans hunted mammoths en that they also made and used boomerangs in the prehistoric era (they even claimed that they invented the boomerang before the Aussies did).

Next part of the museum was all about Roman times.  The Romans reigned over this area while there was a war for independence going on with the local Bulgarian tribes (then still called Thracians).  In the permanent collection there were lots of memorabilia of the Bulgarian Navy, which was founded in Ruse.  More recent in this history Belgium sold a ship to Bulgaria and so there was a document signed by the Belgian minister of Defence, André Flahaut, and his Bulgarian counterpart.

In the last part of the museum that I saw, I got to see lots of music instruments as to clarify the band between the city of Ruse and classical music.

After visiting the museum I continued on my tour of the city.  I saw the orthodox Holy Trinity-church, the beautiful operahouse, the modernist city hall, the Girdap-bank (which was the very first bank in Bulgaria), the palace of justice, the profit-yielding building (with shops, casino, library, art gallery and theatre 'for the community') and the Hristo Botev school.  I ended at the Lyuben Karavelov regional library, close to the historical museum, where my city walk started.  I finally went on to the Semisov-house and ended the day with an evening walk on the Danube bank.

Ruse is a city which surprised me in a very pleasant way, on every street corner there is a building which could be a monument and the main shopping street, Aleksandrovska Street (which is almost completely car-free), is the center of cosiness in Ruse.