Hey guys! As I said in a previous post I was planning to go visit Dylan and his family once again. Last time I was in Shipka I made a post about it and it got pretty popular, so I hope this one is as good, if not better than the last one. Now, the story is quite long, so I'll split it in  three parts - one for each day I spent there.  Credit for most of the photos (the prettier ones, to be exact XD ) goes to Chris, who you'll meet later in this post. Part 1:  I couldn't get on the early bus from Sofia to Kazanlak, so I took a late one instead, which was pretty awful. What was worse, though, was the fact that it wasn't even a bus, but a minivan. All the seats where taken, so there was too little room for comfort. The journey went on for about four hours, so it was very exhausting. When I finally arrived in Kazanlak it was already quite dark (about 9:00pm). Dylan was waiting for me. We took a taxi to his village, Shipka. While in the taxi, we caught up with eac...

 Yesterday (5/18/20017) I went to Samokov for karate practice. Usually this is when I visit the Iskar river, since it's right next to the building I train at. The weather was nice, so I decided it's gonna be a great time for a little herping. Sadly, I was wrong: I only saw about 4 or 5 snakes, all of which where Grass snakes, except a young female Smooth snake (Coronella austriaca). They are very rare in that section of Iskar that crosses the city, and the reason is very simple: they don't belong here.  Usually, Smooth snakes end up in Samokov when the spring snow up in the mountain melts and the river drags them down to the city. Smooth snakes are reptilophagous (I don't know if that's even a real word XD ), meaning they prefer to eat reptiles such as lizards and rarely baby snakes. The problem, though, was that the wall alongside the river gives a huge advantage to the lizards to escape a hungry Smooth snake, leading it to its eventual starvation and death, w...