From Istanbul to Sofia

As Thijs woke up feeling a lot better, we did regretfully had to leave Istanbul. Our plan was to drive to Sofia, a 580 km drive. We left the lovely hotel and felt sorry for the children to have found yet another box in the car. They are extremely annoyed about their lack of space in the back-seat of the car, but we try to cheer them up telling them how beautiful the Istanbul - lamp will be in our new house.

Crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria was easy. No issues, just show the right paperwork. Our license plate did raise some questions at the Bulgarian border so many questions were asked about the car: "Iran?" "Iraq." (what a strange question if your license plate is from Bahrain and the ownership certificate states that the care comes from Bahrain... Again, our little google-map print with the highlighted route (from Bahrain, through Saudi, Dubai, ferry, Iran, Turkey, etc.) proved enough to make our point that we are on 'transit' and that the car is not from Iran but we travelled through Iran.
No more questions asked, we could pass. Incredible easy compared to the ridiculous paperwork we had to endure in Iran (going in and out).

Sofia felt like Russia and Onno enjoyed looking at the buildings and architecture. It must have been once a beautfiful city, but it looked old, run down, lot''s of drunks and alcoholist on the street and the same familiar Amsterdam-Central-Station smell.
We checked into a small hotel and as we were all hungry, tried to find a place to eat.

We found such a place where they served German size beers and young girls with very short skirts serving the food.

I guess we have left the Middle East...