1. In Bulgarian, "ice cream" is *sladoled*. 2. All the beaches are municipal. If you want a sunbed, you pay. If you want to reserve it for yourself, you pay for five days. We reserved ours. Today a family from Israel settled in next to us. Loud—worse than any Italians. But that’s not the main issue. The horror is that every half hour the mother literally pours half a bottle of sunscreen over herself. She sits there covered in a white layer of goo about a centimeter thick. Well, she could just sit there and to hell with it. But she also goes into the water. She leaves a trail behind her like a ruptured oil tanker. So if you want to take a dip, you have to move about ten meters away. Otherwise you feel like a baby seal in those Greenpeace-style propaganda films about the horrors of pollution. 3. Point 2 is Bulgaria’s only serious downside. Other than that, Turkey is left nervously smoking on the sidelines. I’ll write more about that later.