The best thing about Varna is the park by the sea, where old ladies sit knitting and selling things they've knit and cats hang around the little fried fish restaurants and turn up their noses if you try to feed them something boring like bread. The worst part, for me, is the lack of options for getting to Constanta, in Romania. It's a biggish city, and it's only three hours away. There's a direct road. But there is virtually no public-transportation way to start in Varna and arrive in Constanta early enough to catch a bus to Tulcea, two more hours north and on the Danube delta and where I was ultimately headed. I ended up finding a guy to drive me, which worked out about as well as it could have. His ringtone was Yakety Sax and he told me his conspiracy theories about 9/11 and made a little side trip to his favorite place in Bulgaria, some really dramatic/terrifying cliffs along the coast. (So, I guess the bad Varna-Constanta transportation options worked in my favor. Still, I don't understand why there aren't more buses.)
It's funny how quickly you get sort of used to a place. Not that I had Bulgaria all figured out or anything, but now in Romania I feel like even more of a disaster than I did in Bulgaria. It may have been a bunch of coincidences, but so far Romania has more of a last century/wild west feel than Bulgaria did. We passed a funeral procession going down a major-ish highway, led by a man walking and carrying a huge cross. We passed a man aiming what looked a lot like a handgun into some bushes. We passed several horse carts. The bus from Constanta to Tulcea sold 'seats' that meant sitting in the aisle, and stopped on the road for anyone who flagged it down.
Anyway, I'm only here in Romania for the weekend to ride around the Danube delta. I'll read about Romanian history and go to lots of museums and ramble on about it on some other trip.
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