Veliko Tarnovo

I went on a day trip to Veliko Tarnovo after only being in Bulgaria for three days. This is a municipality about 3 hours outside of Sofia. I met with the Deputy Mayor there to talk about his experience with flooding and natural disasters.
Biggest problem - funding. That sounds familiar.

Downtown Veliko Tarnovo

Yantra River 

Tsarevets - medieval fortress right near downtown

   

Much of it has been rebuilt...if you can't tell

Including the church at the top of the hill

Looking back towards the main part of town

This was the tower where the prisoners were locked up.

I thought it would have been a great view from there

Until I saw that these were the windows

Gypsy burning a tire to get the metal out.  Nice. While I admire their dedication to recycling items, burning tires can't be good for the environment... 

 Veliko Tarnovo University

The round green thing in the foreground was a speaker - occasionally they would give a little background on the fort in various languages (English included)  

It felt like my own personal photo shoot with my driver, Krassi, directing me where to stand and he would take photos. I'm not one to have my photo taken, but he was very sweet, so I let him.

This was such a beautiful fort, but definitely from another time period. This is execution rock, with the river below. I'll let you figure it out. 

Here I am with Krassi...had to get at least one with him in it too!

I was sure not to do any yoga on the walls

Sometimes I think my phone takes better pictures... 

  

The weather looked like it was taking a turn for the worse, so we called it a day and headed back to Sofia.