St. George's Day Parade

Today is St. George's Day - the last of the official holidays, which combined into a lo-o-o-ong weekend this year. In Bulgaria St. George is the patron saint of the army and the day is celebrated as the Day of bravery and of the Bulgarian Army, noted with a military parade.

The celebrations started with flowers and wreaths to the Monument of the Unknown Soldier:

Military choppers and elite troops. Trying hard to take pictures over the crowd, a difficult task, given my height :)))

The guards before the Presidency:

and behind the scenes:)

Ask a stranger to take your picture. Me-Made-May - wearing my cotton cardigan Christina, design by Kim Hargreaves:

And now, exclusive for the readers of this blog, live from the place of action - the President of the Republic of Bulgaria. Your humble correspondent was able to shake hands and take up-close pictures of the President, who was generously congratulating the crowd and photographing with children. Ah, my own folks did regret it being too lazy and sleepy this morning to come with me to the parade!!!

And just for good measure - the Alexander Nevski Cathedral

and the Parliament:

St. George's Day

St. George's Day is a big holiday in Bulgaria. So, my daughter made us a traditional
St. George's Day bread, the recipe of which she dug out from the Internet :)


Today we made a little outing near Sofia - the Pancharevo lake,
which is also a rowing base for training rowers.


We examined an old frigate and then hired a boat.
The children tried their hands at the oars too :)






Then we continued along the road in search of the old Medieval fortress Urvich.
It was the last of the Bulgarian fortresses to fall under the Ottoman army.
We stopped by this memorial and went down the path to the river Iskar.



The place was breathtakingly beautiful. (Can you see the duck floating along the river? :) However the path took us to the river and obviously continued across, but there was only a sort of a ford, no bridge. Still, it was shallow, so we crossed.




Only to find some 100 m further that we were actually on a peninsular, formed by the river and we had to cross again. But this time it was not crossable (for us :)


Still, we enjoyed immensely our adventure amidst this magnificent place.
Next time we'll find the fortress (according to Googlemap we should have continued some 100 m down the road and crossed the river by a stone bridge :)



In the evening our little cook made us a Tropical Paradise Cake: