Bulgaria Blog - part 1
Greetings from Bulgaria - where I am enjoying the sun and U20's FIBA EuroBasket Division B games!!
Past six days have been hectic and I probably could have written a Blog entry about each individual day, but as so often is the case - when you have stuff to write about, you are too busy to write it. So here goes a long entry about TRAVEL, BASKETBALL and PHOTOGRAPHY.
Flight to Sofia (via Munich) was yet another one to add to my European flights of the summer, with the exception of some huge thunder clouds over Austria when we took off from Munich - it was one of the bumpiest flights I've taken in a long time. This meant that I arrived shattered to Sofia, but the hair-raising Taxi ride at 120km/hour through the streets of Sofia woke me up nicely at 11pm. First night at a Hotel, due to the late arrival..
Following morning checked-in to my apartment in the business district - on a 12 day stay it is nice to have your own kitchen so you can eat when and what you like (or that was the plan!). Straight on to the Arena and first day of work - 14 hours of basketball, nice! Work-wise the days have been long due to me working for couple of clients here - so there is always a training session to attend, game to do, pictures or video to edit.
Weather in Sofia has made working even harder, the apartment is about 15 minute walk from both of the Arenas but walking in the 40 degree (celsius) heat does take it out on you, maybe it is good for me to get some exercise as well :-) To be honest, in this sort of weather one would rather just join the people by the public outdoor swimming pool next to one of the venues - maybe on Friday if no-one wants me to work.
Photography-wise the two venues are like 'Night and Day', literally. The newer Armeec Arena is great during the early games of the day, dropping the ISO to 1200 with decent shutter speeds, some of the cleanest basketball pictures I've taken in a while. Where as the Universida Zala is ... well, it is an old Eastern European venue, brown wooden walls and lights from the 70's - ISO cranked up to 4000 and still struggling for shutter speed. Unfortunately all the teams I am covering made it to the top half of the draw, and you guessed it - are playing ALL their remaining games at the Universida Zala, which not only is dark, but does not have air-con either! When it is 42 degrees outside, it sometimes gets warmer indoors at the venue.. and I can actually feel my camera heating up when shooting couple of games in a row, so I've started to cool the cameras down in between games between cold drinks bottles (it works surprisingly well!).
How much have been doing sightseeing in Sofia? Zero, zilch, nada... all I have managed has been to have couple of walks in the nice wooded park close-by, which seems a popular hang-out for local people as well. But - as one needs to keep reminding oneself sometimes, these trips are WORK and not holiday, and even on some longer travels the sights that one gets to see aren't that much apart from the venues.
One thing that amuses me here is the fact that naturally there is no English writing anywhere and with the Soviet style letters - things are tough to understand. Especially when going to to do grocery shopping - you can stare a package as long as you want, but you still won't guess what it contains, unless there is a picture on the cover. So far I am struggling to find cream for cooking - so if anyone knows the Bulgarian word for cream.. please reply to me!! Also - I made the mistake of buying an 'economy' size package of sausages on the first shopping - and let's just say I've had sausages in many different ways in the last three or four days, luckily today I have chicken on the menu.. or at least I think it is chicken ???
Apart from all this, I have managed to finish the Jo Nesbo book Snow Leopard, watch the 'Mongol' in Bulgarian on TV, taste few varieties of local energy drinks (the UpSurd is nice!), eaten snacks from local take-aways where pizza costs about £0.70, kebab platter £0.65...
One more week to go here - covering games for few different clients, before heading home and jumping straight to the Olympic duties over there! I will promise to be more active with the Blog during the next week.. maybe get some thoughts from some of the traveling GB/Finnish fans as well.
Hopefully you all are enjoying the summer weather where-ever you are - unless you of course happen to one of those 'lucky' ones who are living on the Islands of Rain - in which case you might not be enjoying the weather that much, unless it has changed dramatically since last week??
The pictures on this Blog entry just show that is not easy being a ref sometimes you get hit right in your face, other times you want to cover your face in front of the coach because of a call you or someone else made - and then the last image shows Devon Van Oostrum flying out of the court - but getting the ball back to the court.. whether it went to one of his team mates.. I can't remember ;-)