There are many reasons I love Flickr. One of the reasons it is great is that photos posted on Flickr are copyrighted, and you can also decide whether you want to allow people to be able to download your pictures or not.
For this reason, there are a lot of both professional and amateur photographers who use the site and post high quality images. Because of this, Flickr is a place that people like journalists and newspaper writers will go to search for images to illustrate articles, travel guides or websites.
In the past few years I have had 3 pictures published, and I got an email yesterday requesting my permission to publish another one. For an amateur photographer, the recognition feels great.
Here are the pictures I've had published. I don't actually think these are my best photos, but they were what these people were looking for.
This one of the Denver City and County Building was used in a travel guide:
This one of Bill Clinton Street in Prishtina, Kosovo was used in a French news article about the unveiling of a statue of Clinton in Prishtina:
This one of Nessebar, Bulgaria was also used in a travel guide:
This photo from Sirok, Hungary will be published in a German economic journal:
To add to what I wrote yesterday - I looked into it and found out that Starbucks already operates stores in Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria and according to Wikipedia they have a store in Serbia too - although I couldn't find any evidence of that on the internet.
Another thing that some people might find interesting, is that Starbucks also owns Seattle's Best Coffee company - a former competitor of theirs, which they purchased in 2003. So, if you thought that by buying Seattle's Best coffee you were fighting against the big corporate giant of Starbucks, you actually were actually doing just the opposite. Oops :)
This year marks 20 years since 1989, when many of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell. The BBC has a cool page about this, with old video footage from 1989: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7961732.stm
One of the main things we do when traveling to any other country is spend a lot of time in a grocery store, finding local specialties and things we can't buy in Hungary. In Slovakia, we always spend a long time in Tesco loading up on:
Kofola (Czech and Slovak national soda - made from some coffee byproducts - its an acquired taste!)
Slovakia brand chips (ironically made in Czech Rep.).
By this point, we know what things we can buy in certain countries, which we can't get elsewhere - sometimes American products and sometimes specific national products:
Slovakia = Dr. Pepper
Bulgaria = Doritos chips (they have different flavors than in the States) and Digestive cookies (Rosemary's favorite)
Romania = Skittles (I went to the border once when I lived in Debrecen just to buy some)
On our trip to Bulgaria, we flew into Burgas, on the southern Black Sea coast, stayed at the beach for a few days, and then rented a car and drove up through Varna to Veliko Tarnovo, the medieval capital of the Bulgarian Kingdom - a very cool place with lots of history, a big castle, and a bunch of monasteries nearby. We spent a few days in Veliko Tarnovo, before heading back to Bugas to fly back to Hungary. On our way back we took a different route, going over the Balkan mountains which run through the center of Bulgaria. I have to say that the roads in Bulgaria were much better than I had expected. A few weeks before we went, I was in Romania, and was on some of the worst roads in my life. Bulgaria's roads were light-years ahead of even the "good roads" in Romania. Nevertheless, the road trip took a lot longer than we were expecting - almost 2 hrs longer each way. But the thing that kept us going was that there were plenty of interesting things to see along the way. Here are some highlights:
Nathaniel did a great job in the car!
He slept most of the way, and the rest of the time he kept himself busy with some light reading.
Bulgaria uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which means that most signs were in only Cyrillic
Even the McDonald's sign!
This can obviously cause some confusion, especially for Japanese tour groups:
We saw lots of interesting stuff along the way, including beautiful old stone bridges
We saw this Trabant, which had a Texas Tech sticker on it, which goes to prove that the Trabant is not only the car of the common worker, but of the Texas Tech University grad too!
Nessebar police drive the same car that we do - Peugeot 306 Break!
Quite frankly, I'm not surprised, as this is the greatest car ever made (sarcasm). I like to tell people that in the word Peugeot, the letter P stands for power, the letter S stands for speed, and the letter R stands for reliability...if you get what I'm saying.
Speaking of police, along the main roads there were these cardboard cutouts of police cars - obviously to make people slow down. They worked actually, except usually you could tell the difference, because the cardboard ones were covered in graffiti.
But my absolute favorite thing on the road in Bulgaria were these signs everywhere, saying "You are now entering the danger zone!"
Wait...so, in other words, they are telling people that they are on "the highway to the danger zone?" Its almost as if I've heard that somewhere before...
We went to Bulgaria earlier this month to celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary, Nathaniel's first birthday, and just to take it easy after a summer full of conferences, camps, and other activities. I've been wanting to go to Bulgaria for quite some time now. I even wrote a blog about it way back in 2006. We had a really great time, and we'd recommend it to anyone who is considering traveling there. The beaches were nice and the accommodations were affordable. We'll probably go back someday.
Here are some of our impressions of Bulgaria:
Its really hot.
Hungary is hot too, but in a different way. The part of BG we were in, near the Black Sea, has a Mediterranean climate, and its very hot and very dry. On one hot day I asked a shop owner if the weather was normal, or especially hot - he said that they have blazing hot weather from June to September. But, I have to say, that everywhere we went in Bulgaria there was air-conditioning. Even in small little shops and restaurants. That was nice, because we needed it!
It reminded us a lot of Mexico.
And I mean that in a good way. We like Mexico; we went on our honeymoon in Veracruz, Mexico. There were many things in Bulgaria that reminded us of Mexico, from the dry climate to the sandy beaches and warm sea, from the attitudes of the taxi drivers to the food. There were even a lot of Mexican restaurants in Nessebar. There was one next to our hotel, even with a guy in a sombrero trying to talk people into coming inside. We were thinking pretty seriously about it, until the guy told us that they only serve pizza and spaghetti! But there were other restaurants there that served real Mexican food.
Great food.
We really enjoyed the food in Bulgaria. Rosemary ate a lot of shopska salad, I ate a lot of grilled meat. I especially ate a lot of kavarma - a stew kind of thing with tons of spices. I like spicy food, and Bulgarian food made me sweat - which in my book is a good thing. They also, like Hungary, are a wine-growing nation, and they had grape vines everywhere. Living in Eger, we don't drink wine very often, but we have gotten to know a bit about wine, and what constitutes good wine - and I was really impressed with Bulgarian red wine, especially one called Thracian Gold.
They shake their heads for yes, and nod for no. That's super confusing.
At least once a day we got confused by this. Like in a restaurant - you ask for bread and the waitress just shakes her head and walks away. You think for a second, "Man, that waitress is rude!", and by that time she puts the bread on the table. Or at one point I ended up in this small village, almost out of gas, and with no cash - and I was asking if there was a gas station, an ATM, and if I could pay with a card at the gas station. The girl just kept nodding and shaking her head, and I was just terribly confused for a few minutes until I got it straight!
These are just a few general impressions. I'll write a bit more later. If you'd like to see our pictures from BG, then click here.
Last Monday, September 1, was Nathaniel's first birthday! One year ago we first saw Nate-dogg's little face and held him in our hands for the first time. His name means "Gift of God," and thats truly what he is! Over the last year we've been blessed to watch this little gift grow from a tiny baby into a little boy, who is now trying to walk and talk and do other big boy stuff. We celebrated Nate's first birthday in Slanchev Bryag (Sunny Beach), Bulgaria. We had a lot of "firsts" last week in Bulgaria - Nate's first birthday, his first piece of cake, his first time at the beach, and his first time swimming in the sea. Indecently, it wasn't Nate's first time abroad or even on an airplane. He's already been to the USA, Germany, Slovakia - and now Bulgaria. He's already traveled more than most people I know! He had a great time at the beach, digging in the sand, and got super excited by the waves, when we took him in the water. Here are some pictures of Nate's first birthday:
