Saturday was our organized trip to Nessebar, a town about an hour from Sozopol. Nessebar was Ancient Apollonia’s rival. Established about 100 years after Apollonia, it has a similar history of occupation to Sozopol. However, it is near the infamous Sunny Beach, where British and Russian travelers go for the summers, and as such is more touristy and geared to English. It has a more modern Archaeology museum than Sozopol, and that was where we went first. We got to see the Greek, Russian, Byzantium, and later church artifacts.
After the museum, we walked around the old town of Nessebar, a UNESCO World Hertiage Site. The supervisor that joined us was an early-christian specialist, and so he pointed out all the old churches and gave us early christian history from the Black Sea area.
After the tour of the city, we had lunch on the water and then had some free time to walk around the city. We got gelato and ate it on the water, visited the painted interior of the prettiest of the churches, wandered into some shops, and just wandered through the streets.
When we came back, we had some relaxation time, and then went to dinner. At dinner, we had some more traditional Bulgarian grilled meat. The restaurant also had live music and people began dancing. It was an awesome experience and we couldn’t stop talking about it for the rest of the night.
Sunday was supposed to be our free day, but the forecast didn’t look good on Friday, so we instead decided to do a day of work on Sunday to avoid the rain later in the week. We got to the site, and our task for the day was a horizontal plan and drawing. We got about halfway through before it began to rain. We had our daily tea break early, and then three of us headed back to the hotel to the second of our two drawing-pottery workshops. It was still ugly and rainy outside, so I was able to catch up on my blog posts from the last few days.
Tomorrow is going to be our free day, and I can guarantee that even though I haven’t figured out exactly what I’ll be doing yet, I will not spend the entire day inside, even if it is another rainy one.
WANDERING 