Just read through the Travel section, and see that some members have recently been to both places, so I'm wondering which would you choose for a 4-day weekend (namely NEXT weekend!!)?

Things to consider:
- the drive - Sofia: plains and mountains / Bucharest: Bulgarian coastline
- border crossing locations: very busy and long delays at border for Sofia vs coastline border crossing just mins?
- distance from Istanbul - how many hours to either city?
- monasteries vs. castles?
- the expense? the same in both cities?
- safety? I'll be going alone in my own car.
- the food? something different from Turkish for a nice change
- the language - Cyrillic alphabet vs. Romanian (something close to French?)

Any information would be very helpful - thanks!

Romanian more closer to italian then anything else but still, bucharest is a rat infested shithole. Dont know about Sofia apart from you might run into some Bulgarians there, but why not go to Salonika instead?

Where's Salonika? I'm now thinking of skipping Bucharest, and heading straight to Brachov and Bran and doing some hiking...

Assumng starry is talking about Thessalonika, Greece which was the European city of culture 2000? It also has some very nice theatres! hence I was stuck there for a little while.

I was wondering if he was trying to be all cool by shortening a city's name! Hey, your ankle up to some Ultimate today?

Yeah, the swellling seems to have gone down so we'll put it to the test!

(Starman cool, used in the same sentence, isn't there a law against that?)