As the swedish summer was getting more and more depressing (rain, rain, a minor storm, some more rain, and.. perhaps some rain for a change?), me and the girlfriend bought a last-minute trip to Nessebar, Bulgaria and went there in the middle of july.

When I go for a charter trip, I expect a few things:

• Sun
• A beach
• A decent hotel
• Tasty and cheap food.
• Something to do, as I get bored at spending time at the beach after about three days.\

Especially the food is a very important factor - eating at restaurants is very expensive in Sweden, so when we go abroad, we always get very tasty food for what we think is nothing.

We choose Nessebar because it advertised itself as being a very old city (it’s on the UNESCO world heritage list), which would hopefully mean that the town was beautiful. More on this later..

So, evaluating how Nessebar fulfilled the requirement’s list:
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Sun

Oh yeah, lot’s of it. And we actually managed to get there between two very hot periods, so it was only a few degrees too hot to be perfect.

Beach

Oh yeah, and it was very good. Even I, who am not really a lie-on-the-beach-for-a-full-week person, thought it was good. Unfortunately, the rumours says that the fee you pay for renting a parasol goes straight into the wallet of the mafia. Oh well.**
**

Decent Hotel\

We were actually quite surprised by the standard of the hotel room at “Hotel Hawaii”. The bed was a bit hard, but the air condition worked as expected and the toilet looked OK.

There were some “features” as well.. among them the two elevators, which had a tendency to break down once or twice a day. We didn’t get stuck, but we heard other people talk about it. Also, one of them stopped about 20 centimeters above our floor. That’s quality..

Another interesting thing was that during one of the nights, I woke up by the sound of someone putting a key in our hotel room door. That’s not what you want to hear at 4:30 in the morning. Even worse - this person actually managed to open the door and began to enter the room! Not a pleasant surprise. When I shouted something (I’m not really sure what, but I think it was in english), the person left the room. \

My guess is that it was another guest that thought she (I think it was a she) was on her own floor, which she wasn’t. Regardless of the reason, it feels like the quality of the doorlocks might need some attention.

Tasty (No!) and cheap food

Unfortunately, we were very disappointed by the quality of the food served at the restaurants in old nessebar. All restaurants claim “WE HAVE EVERYTHING”, very loudly, and often by use of several people employed only to harass tourists trying to get them into their restaraunt. The lack of specialization means that no restaurant get really good ad doing anything, and the result is rather depressing.

Not only does every restaurant serve exactly the same menu of food that lacks good preparation - the menus are kind of hard to understand as well.

Something to do when bored at the beach

There are, if you are interested in that kind of stuff, plenty of nightclubs and karaoke bars in Nessebar. Arriving at our hotel in the evening, we had to run the last 100 meters with our ears covered, as the hotel bar always ran their karaoke machine at an incredible volume - fortunately, our hotel room had its balcony on the opposite side. But, not being the karaoke/nightclub person, I need something else to do.

We did go for a boat trip, which was nice. Had I thought of it earlier, I probably would have gone for a jeep tour into the surroundings of Nessebar, but when I tried to book it, there were no reservations left. \

Photo opportunities

I did bring my photo gear in the hope of being able to take some nice pictures. This did prove to be something of a challenge, as the hopes of Nessebar being a nice little ancient town full of photo frames proved wrong. There’s not a square meter in old nessebar that has not been converted into a restaurant, shop or something other tourist-related thing. Very boring and not charming at all.

Trying to avoid the hordes of tourists (yes, I know, I was also a tourist), I set my alarm clock at 6 in the morning and went up with the sun. This proved to be a very good idea. It was calm and almost no people in town, so now there was a chance of getting some decent photos. The beach was also rather empty, which was nice.

The photos you see on this page are all from Nessebar. See more Nessebar Photos.\

Summary

Nessebar is off the list of places to visit - it’s just too much adapted for tourists. Bulgaria might be nice, but avoid the big tourist cities on the black sea coastline.\