Architecture nerd alert

Which means, if you don't care about buildings and stuff, you can skip reading this post. ;)

Matt was teasing me a bit ago, saying, "I've married my Dad!" Who else would go to Europe and take a photo of the toilet? Well, I guess there could be far worse fates than being compared to my father-in-law!!

But, really, this photo is less about the toilet, and more about the toilet clearances. (And the tile.) Did you know that in the U.S. we're required to have 15" from any wall to the center line of a toilet? Well, this tiny little space in the hotel we're staying in here in B's town is only 5" wider than the distance from my elbow to the tip of my finger (which is a measurement I should know, but I don't.) There's not a lot of space there! But it works!

And the tile, too. I get the feeling driving around that Bulgarians really enjoy their tile. There are numerous roadside vendors with large displays of tile right in Sofia, and it's used in a variety of places. The little bathroom here has six different types of tile on the walls, and then a seventh on the floor! But it's all used in very decorative ways.

The little alcove that the toilet's in has this interesting inter-meshing of light and dark tile on the end wall. The darker tile on the right continues onto the side wall of the shower, while the lighter tile on the left changes to a slightly darker light shade on the wall that the sink/vanity is on.

Here at the mirror above the sink you can see that lighter tile on the right, followed by a border tile that's even prettier in real life because there are a variety of textures in it, and then the very dark tiles, with two wood-grain striped tiles one above the other that you can just see at the top of this photo. You can also see me and Gloria, and Matt out in the room proper.;)

This hotel that we're currently staying in is a newer building, covered with bright blue corrugated sheet metal. Our translator laughed when she pulled up to it. "It looks like a barn!" In a country where most of the construction is concrete or tile with stucco, a corrugated metal building does look more agricultural than it would to our American eye!

The hotel that we stayed at in T's city was really quite marvelous. It was not the same high rise in the center of town that we stayed at when we were here three years ago visiting Krassimir for the first time. This one is a tiny little thing a little way out (but still walkable) and located on what I can't tell if it's a real street or just an alleyway.

From the front it doesn't look like much, though there are a few hints at its unusual interior.

This shows how its sandwiched between two houses. Both of these houses have amazing gardens, and, like many of the houses that we saw, have trellises covered in grapevines that at this time of year are covered with many large clusters of beautiful grapes. This particular house also has a big enough yard for a few small fruit trees in the front.

The hotel is called the "Gallery Hotel" and is, indeed, decorated as an art gallery, with every wall of every room - hallways - sleeping rooms - lined with different paintings and sculpture. The reception lobby for the hotel is not, as you might expect, in the glass room fronting the street, but rather up the limestone steps on the left side of the building.

You can't quite tell in the photos, but the whole building is painted a pale lavender!

What was particularly striking to me, though, were the paintings on the windows in the lobby, not only on the main level, but on every level up on the central stair.

Standing on the first landing, looking down into the lobby. You can see the large windows in the lobby painted up with an image of a woman in an exuberantly flowing gown, and also the first level landing above with the smaller window there leading out to a roof deck.

Here I'm standing up one more half-landing, looking down at the window with the roof deck (the smaller pane on the right opens for you to climb out - there's a little table and chair out there), and up to the level that our room was on. I love how the glass railing reflects the colors of the painted windows.

And here is the window on our level.

Again, these are not true stained glass - just something drawn onto the interior surface of the glass, but the scale and translucence, and the color and texture is really wonderful. Sometime the tint is even, in some of the places it's swirled, and sometimes actually has ridges and lines in it.

On our last morning, when I was taking these photos, I went up one more half-flight of stairs to make sure I didn't miss any of the windows, and was surprised to see that our floor was actually the highest floor with rooms on it! This flight up stairs goes up only to this last landing, which has access to another roof deck, but nothing more than that.

This photo of Matt and Gloria up on the uppermost floor illustrates something else that's not exactly code-compliant with the way we're used to things. As Matt walked up the stairs to look out, bonk! he hit his head on the ceiling, it slopes up slightly as the stairs go up, but doesn't go up as fast as the stairs do, so the ceiling eventually topped out at under 6 feet!! He had to duck to look out, and it would have been even worse trying to get out onto the deck, as you notice the threshold for the door is about a foot off the ground! It seems funny to us to go to the expense of a stair and all that for something you can't really use much, but at the same time, it really adds to the sense of spaciousness and lightness of the whole stair area.

And, as I mentioned, it wasn't just the windows that made this place an art gallery. The walls were lined with paintings and drawings, all nicely framed. Here is a sampling of my favorites.

This is a stylized version of dancers in traditional Bulgarian dress.

This landscape to me captures the same quality as the hotel as a whole - big, bold blocks of color, and (though harder to see in this photo), elements of tiny, precisely detailed patterns.

Breakfast was served at this hotel, not like a restaurant or a buffet, but we told them each night what time we wanted to eat, and in the morning we would go down to this room (here's a sample of the murals on the wall) and the lady working in the kitchen would bring out a pre-made (but freshly made) plate of whatever they were serving that morning.