The final stretch

Yesterday I went to my last European church, the Alexander Nevski Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria. It's big. It's a church. There are candles and murals and big domes overhead that let in yellow light through stained glass. There's no place to sit. I left.

Sofia is nice and all but I have reached the point of becomming a bitter, uninterested, uncaring, impatient tourist and have found myself on a larger number of park benches reading trashy novels than in lines to pay admission fees to cultural and historical monuments.

I should note, though, that I was completly fasinated by the Archeological museum in Varna on the Black Sea Coast. The museum houses the gold and finding from the Thracian tombs which dates to the 4th Milennium BC and is the oldest collection of gold artificats in the world. This makes Egypt look new and they really are fantastic.

But that is the end of my tourist wanderings. Today I'm flying back to Slovakia. Tuesday I head back to the states. In 30 days I'll find myself in the rainforest of Honduras. Not bad. I think I'm the only one at this hostel who seems happy about leaving. The people here look at me with sad eyes saying, oh, your vacation is over today and I just smile and say, no, it's just starting.