I play too many video games. Everyone needs a vice, right? But I notice it creeping in sometimes. The first time I saw a big cathedral, all I could think of was going Assassin’s Creed all up on it. This also applies to Roman/Greek ruins, tile roofs, basically anything built before the 17th century. And it makes the fenced-in, tourist filled reality of many of these places seem a bit flat. But what brought this to mind today was a long walk in a valley behind a monastery out in the Rhodope foothills south of the city. The only thing that could have made it more gamelike would have been some sort of horrible monsters. This leaf-covered path led backa valley, which was wonderfully tranquil. It changed to snow-covered quickly enough, but it was well  packed, and I continued on past a frozen stream, a beautiful clearing, and an old, walled shrine with an absolutely massive tree in the tiny courtyard. The sky was perfect blue, and though the valley was almost dead calm, the clouds were cruising past above the crags of the small mountains (the sky does this in games because time is passing much faster than real life. No one wants to wait 12 actual hours for the rare Albino Night Rabbit or what have you to come out). Eventually I came to an ancient rock stairway, zig-zagging up a small cliff, topped by a chapel and a half-ruined outbuilding. If I had more time, I could have continued down the path, and found, in no particular order, two peaks, a series of fishing ponds, another chapel, some sort of rest-hut, and, I kid you not, a cave, which, on the map, had the wonderful shaded-in inverted ‘U’ symbol. Oh, and prior to the chapel was a mysterious, very moneyed looking house in the middle of the trees, surrounded by a huge blue fence but otherwise totally isolated. Honestly, throw in a desperate peasant and some goblins… anyway, the valley was beautiful, not stunning, but just tranquil and lovely. Already walking here has captivated me. Besides the natural beauty, you get the ancient structures (I have no idea why anyone would build a chapel on that scrap of cliff, but there was no one to ask), and perhaps more uniquely, weird relics of the Soviet era. I don’t want to pin every abandoned structure on the commies, but I passed an inexplicable seeming compound, four or five abandoned buildings surrounding a large cleared field. I can’t think of what it might have been, and even if there’d been a sign I couldn’t read it. The short version is that there’s all kinds of neat stuff just laying around, built up over many years. It’s as true in some random valley as in Plovdiv, where you literally can’t dig a hole without hitting some 2000 year old acropolis. They’ve got several big excavation pits that are just sitting there, full of beautifully carved columns and stones, but the museums are full, so you can just wander about and climb on them. It’s just great.