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Background: Spring break is a week in late March or early April when all universities in the US give off. This is the time when all underage American college students flock to Mexico, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica or Puerto Rico and (completely legally) pass into drunken oblivion for the duration of the vacation. The most visited attractions during the break include booze cruises, bar hopping tours, and beach raves. The large majority of students come back from Spring Break with face piercings, shaved eyebrows, tattoos, or STDs. The most frequent ways of describing the Spring Break experience are “whatever happens in (insert location), stays in (insert location)” and “shit went down”.
I thought for me, a calmer trip to a relaxing tropical US destination was in order this year, so I decided to visit my good friend in Miami, FL (read about our trip to Disney World). As it turns out, Miami was very well prepared for the Spring Break invasion.
During the day, we were sunbathing in South Beach literally under the surveillance of a squad of policemen. They were walking up to every single beach towel or lounge chair and looking around for open containers, illegal substances, or suspicious behavior. It was hilarious that they were all dressed up in uniforms and equipped with truncheons and handguns under the scorching sun while the vacationers were chilling or fooling around in the sand. I’m not sure if I felt secure or amused by the police’s presence.
Miami police scrutinizes spring-breakers on the beach
Busted with an open container!
Cool Nike-s, officer!
Now I feel safe at the beach!
I also noticed that open containers are forbidden outdoors in South Beach. However, smoking is allowed in clubs and bars. In the same time, it is illegal to sunbathe topless on the public beach in Miami, so people have to go to special adult pools to enjoy that privilege.
The beach in Miami is also very wide and without any buildings on it. Ocean Drive and the beach bars are very far from the shoreline, and so are hotels. In contrast, the Bulgarian shore at our top resorts Sunny Beach and Golden Sands is scattered with beach bars that blast techno day and night or lounges with white cushions where you can grab a mojito or a bowl of watermelon and listen to some chill out music. As cool and fun as our beaches are, our bars and hotels unfortunately eat up a lot of the beach, and thus force many people to look for alternative, uninhabited beaches. Fortunately, in Bulgaria you can always drink alcohol and go topless at the beach (and not only there)!
A wide white beache in Miami
The beach in Lozenetz, Bulgaria is occupied by hotels, beach bars and lounge chairs
At night, Miami seems even more like a CSI episode. The police had cut off one lane of a street and were making every single car go through a DUI check (driving under the influence is a very, very major offence in the States). The officers were pulling over certain cars and going through them with a detection dog! As my friend, a University of Miami law student said, such random search operations are completely anti-constitutional, and the criterion for pulling a car over is that the driver looks Latino or black! But then again, I guess in Miami it feels like Spring Break all year long, so maybe all this police presence is justified!
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Nesebar is as overcrowded with tourists as Sunny Beach, but at least the beautiful ancient architecture of the city makes it feel quaint and charming. Since the Antiquity, this port town has been ruled by the Thracians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, and the Bulgarians, and there is plenty of ruins and old buildings that remind tourists of Nesebar’s long history. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t go there on the best beach day.
On the way back to Sofia, we stopped at Burgas, Bulgaria’s biggest port city, to see the Festival of Sand Sculptures. Every July, artists from various countries (I spotted names from Australia Portugal, Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia, and Bulgaria) take part in the annual festival in the Sea Garden in Burgas. The sand sculptures are built with 3300 tons of special river sand mixed with C200 glue, so that they can hold strong at least until the end of September.
This year, the theme was Cinema. Indeed, the sand sculptures can take you on a journey through the greatest Hollywood movies with their incredible scale and detail – the fine lines on Professor Dumbledore’s face from Harry Potter, the elvish writing from Lord of the Rings, the beads in Jack Sparrow’s hair from Pirates of the Caribbean, the sleeping girl by King Kong’s side. Which sculpture is your favorite?
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11 August 2011 – Armin Van Buuren, DJ Number One in the World, played at Cacao Beach in Sunny Beach until 7am on the next morning!
The show was the finale grande of Solar Summer Fest 2011- an annual festival organized by Yalta Club – voted #19 in DJ Magazine Top 100 Clubs, and sponsored by Tuborg.
The concert was absolutely mind-blowing! There is something incredibly inspirational about dancing on the beach all night long under the refreshing summer rain together with thousands of young people!
As the night was progressing, Oriana and I kept moving closer and closer to the stage until we spent the last hour or two on the frontline! When the sun rose, Armin came down from the main stage and reached out to his fans! He touched both mine and Oriana’s hand and signed his name on every hat and flag that his fans threw towards him. Finally, he took a big Bulgarian flag and wrapped it around himself to show how much he loves the Bulgarian audience – and thus completely and utterly won each one of us forever!
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Sunny Beach is exactly what this video makes you think – crazy, young, party destination! People call Sunny Beach the Ibiza of the Balkans or the Eastern European Cancun – so probably not the place to go with your grandparents.
By day – long beaches with fine golden sand and plenty of water sports opportunities!
By night – Wild nightlife in flashy restaurants, bars, and clubs! Virtually no legal drinking age – as long as you are tall enough to reach the bar.
In reality, Bulgarians tend to avoid this resort because it is very expensive, overbuilt with hotels, and overcrowded with foreigners and especially foreign high-school and college students from Western Europe who, in return, come here for cheap alcohol tourism.
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