Sofia

dentistry? Do you know? Oh, It's a massive number.

I mean, in Bulgaria, there were three that I was given offers from, which was Plovdiv, Varna and Sofia, which are sort of the three major cities.

And then there's going to be...

Didn't

fancy going Sofia? It's the only place I actually knew.

So if I'm completely honest with you, and I will tell you the truthful answer to this, which you'll probably giggle at, is because they said to me, you can go Sofia or you can go Varna.

And I looked at a map and I saw that Varna was next to a beach.

And I went, I'm 18 years old.

So, you know, we could have 40 junior women in an event.

And for me, especially also given the fact that the standard can be at times really low, you don't want to just be saying, "Oh, you know, they competed in Sofia, Bulgaria last week, and they got twenty-six point seven four."

[laughs]

It's just so mundane and boring.

Well, this isn't something I get to say very often, but I had a really beautiful infancy.

I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in the late '80s.

I was very close to my mother, who was a Bulgarian national, and my grandmother lived in the home with us, as is not uncommon in most of Eastern Europe, quite frankly.

Mm-hmm.

He was actually working.

First, he was in a refugee camp and worked as a taxi driver, and then he was admitted into a doctorate program.

He'd met my mother in a master's program in Sofia, and, and she was in that program and, and ended up becoming a, uh, a technician, a computer technician in, in the, in the country, in the city where we lived.

And he was in Sweden, and she had fallen in love with another man.

And I had done two movies already here.

I'm in Sofia, Bulgaria right now prepping my next film.

And I had done two movies prior, and I had the most amazing team led by my producer, Yanko Ustaf, and Stani Stanisman, my stunt coordinator, second year director, and also a producer.

And with them and this awesome team, I've been able to do big things.

And I said, hey, what if we, instead of going to the conflict you're talking about, which is super controversial, and I don't feel comfortable going down that road, why don't we just...

Bulgaria is a great double for Kyiv and for Kharkiv.

And especially Sofia, because Sofia is a city that has the old Soviet style, which is more Kharkiv, and it has a very modern kind of European glass towers, newer side, which would be a better match for Kyiv, the capital.

And I said, you know what? Let's film it here and use this situation.

Just after I turned 21, my roommates and I took a 48-hour train ride from Budapest, Hungary to Istanbul, Turkey.

Somewhere along the way, we ran out of drinking water and had to fill our water bottles at a public fountain in Sofia, Bulgaria during a brief train stop.

This was 1990, and Bulgaria had just emerged from behind the Iron Curtain.

The three of us were all affected with acute dysentery during our travels through Turkey, and my own bowels continued to be dysfunctional for almost a decade, whereupon I went to Asia, and you know that story.

Bound on one side by the Danube River, that's up in the north, and the Black Sea on the east, Bulgaria's location is at the intersection of civilizations through history, and that gives it a vibrant cultural heritage.

And while the modern capital city of Sofia is certainly worth a visit, if you have time for just one city in Bulgaria, I'd say it's gotta be Plovdiv, P-L-O-V-D-I-V. Plovdiv, it's Bulgaria's charming second city, and it claims to be one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.

It's a fascinating place to explore, and it's just flat-out easy to enjoy.

To take us on a tour, I'm joined by a Bulgarian tour guide who I've known for many years, a good friend of mine in Bulgaria, helps me whenever I'm on a mission in Bulgaria, Stefan Bozojev.

Hey, um, tell us where is Plovdiv, and how big is it, and just introduce us to the city.

Well, when you look at the map of Bulgaria, Plovdiv is in the very middle of the country.

It's just a little bit more than an hour drive from the capital to the east from our capital, from Sofia.

It's our second-largest city with a population around 360,000 people.

I won't touch any buttons.

But look at, you see as people are coming in, Sofia, Bulgaria, Toronto.

[laughs]

Our enemies in Canada, with whom we are at war.