Summertime break at the Black Sea

School has been out for the past two weeks and I’ve been very, very busy! The weekend after the summer break started I took a bus to Bourgas, on the Black Sea coast, with a friend and her daughter. We stayed in a small town called Pomorie and had a wonderful, relaxing few days there. Because the towns along the coast are so well-connected with public transport, we were also able to visit the UNESCO World Heritage town of Nessebar and the tourist-ridden resort at Sunny Beach (Slunchen Bryag in Bulgarian). The old town of Nessebar is full of historical sites, beautiful beaches and many more tourist-oriented restaurants and shops than I’ve seen in most of the country. The resort towns are full of foreigners this time of year- I met a couple from Israel in line at an ATM, and was frequently assumed to be a Russian tourist, something I found puzzling. Sunny Beach was a little too much to handle for us. It was really overcrowded, not very clean and it felt like it could have been any beach anywhere in the world because of how mass-oriented the place was. If you’re into enormous hotel complexes, overpriced beach bars and sharing close quarters with your fellow sunbathers, then Sunny Beach is where it’s at. I preferred the smaller towns like Pomorie where you could at least feel a little isolated from other people. 

I hate to report that the food on the coast was overwhelmingly disappointing. Seafood restaurants served shrimp and calamari that were either undercooked or very strangely prepared. We did have some nice fried fish and mussels on the last day, so that redeemed most of the rest. One thing that didn’t disappoint was the drinking selection: we drank beer shandies on the beach, sipped local white wine and very much enjoyed the happy hour cocktails at a bar close to our hotel. 

I had originally planned to spend two nights in Pomorie but quickly decided to bump my flight back a few days- a good thing, since it rained the first week I was in Warsaw. The trip went amazingly well- as things often do when spending time in good company. I returned to Poland (for the third time this year) with great memories, a little bit of a tan and feeling very relaxed. I then spent ten days in Warsaw and traveling around Poland with my great-aunts and second cousin before my long-awaited return back to the States.