Travel when you live in Istanbul is fun in a blender. You can spend a few liras and whoosh yourself away to any of a handful of nearby destinations in entirely different countries, and be back in just a few days. The stakes are low, because if it's bad, hey! It was a cheap vacation. It wasn't so hard to get there. This opens your possibilities up: you're more willing to take chances on places that aren't big names. If Istanbul was merely one pleasant stop on a long trip, if you instead lived far, far away, you would instead select travel destinations based on huge-trip narratives. Or on top-10 lists. Or on the hipster/grunge/goth/prep/nerd instagrammable street cred. There would be no reason to select a modest city in a modest country in a modest corner of the world.

Like Plovdiv. Plovdiv is such a destination. You'd have no reason to plan it as part of an epic trip, or as part of a short trip. But a weekend trip! From Istanbul! It's perfect. Plovdiv might be one of my favorite weekend destinations on earth. Why it is perfect: like every other part of old timey Europe, various bundles of humans have collected the surrounding rubble and organic bitty parts to make fun houses, trees, amphitheaters, factories, tiny walls, and sandwiches. Unlike every other part of old-timey Europe, Plovdiv is the oldest old-timey Europe place in Europe. That is to say: Plovdiv has been inhabited continuously for a longer time than any other place on the continent. Its incomparably rich blend of Roman, Slavic, Turkish, and a dozen other kinds of civilizations make it the ideal place to do some cultural exploration. Plovdiv boasts a delightful Stari Grad ("old town" in Bulgarian), a great selection of yummable things to eat, and enough museums and churches to hypnotize a history aficionado for the next few centuries. Let's take a look.

GETTING THERE

Don't fly. Why would you fly? Do you hate money? Just suck it up and go to the Metro Turizm (a bus company based in Turkey) office and pay TL 120 ($33) for a round trip ticket Istanbul-Plovdiv. Do not - DO NOT - go with any of the discount knockoff bus companies in the Aksaray International Bus Station. I have made this mistake exactly once (okay, twice), and I will not do this again. People traveling to Bulgaria on the cheap bus often take suitcase upon suitcase of saleable textiles, which the Bulgarian authorities then take two leisurely hours to inspect at the border, not including an additional two hours of smoke breaks. It is very, very boring waiting for them to finish this job. Fewer quasi-legal smugglers operate on Metro Turizm, which is one reason I recommend them.

The other far, far more pressing reason is that Metro, either by company policy or Turklaw, makes scheduled stops every three or four hours so everyone can eat and excrete. In the mad rush to catch my bus, I skipped dinner, depending on the bus company to stop at an overpriced lokanta (restaurant) somewhere in Edirne. Imagine my surprise when I was starving in agony, praying for the driver to pull over at a gas station long enough for me to buy a bag of crisps. In any case - bring your neck pillows, your sleeping pills, your baggie of bus snacks and your podcasts.

STAYING IN A PLACE

Plovdiv overflows with cheap great accommodation, and all of it is on Airbnb. The hotels for the most part are drab and uninspiring, and the hostels are for the most part dirty and full of wretched backpackers. (Though, Funky Monkey hostel stands above the rest for being central, clean, and staffed by friendlies. Similarly, Hostel Old Plovdiv is in a 18th century Ottoman pleasure mansion. Hiker's Hostel, by contrast, had a strange species of spider or six-legged insect which lives in the beds, and when it bit me my knee swelled up like a balloon.) If you have collected your best buds to sprog about with and split costs, you won't pay more than about $15 dollars a night.

EATING

Bulgarian cuisine, like all regional cuisines, was invented by prominent nationalist chefs who decided they needed a national cuisine. It was perfected by the uncountable thousands of peasants who are confronted with the eke of cornmeal and squealing animals every day, and have to make the same meals palatable. You owe your enjoyment to the Bulgarian peasantry. If you're not keen on cornmeal and pork, fortunately enough Italians have descended upon Plovdiv to grace it with their national cooking, which is actually good.

If you're aiming for a meal of tankards of ale, fatty sausages, and (you guessed it) cornmeal, XIX Vek is the place to go. It's a fabulous traditional Bulgarian tavern and the locals are boisterous and kind. It's cheap, too.

If you're looking for something a little more upscale, pop on down to Hemingway for a wholly-out-of-place but still enchanting Parisian brasserie atmosphere. Try the roast duck! Get pasta with creamy parsley sauce! Or, Elea has a selection of pricey but delicious Greek food, and Afreddo has the best gelato in town. Any gelato though is the best gelato in town. Why is there no gelato in Turkey? Because we put mastic in our ice cream instead, and serve it in slices, like a vanilla meatloaf.

My favorite place I visited was a fabulous Argentinian-Bulgarian deli/grill on the Knyaz Aleksandar, the Istiklalish pedestrian avenue of the city, and I cannot for the life of me remember what the name of it was. My best googling leaves me bereft. Last time me and my friends were in Plovdiv, we spent approximately 20 euros on a lavish picnic meal for eight people, including sausages, grilled chicken, several kinds of salads, mezes, and bread. We then meandered to a grassy knoll and picnicked for several idle hours, picking our teeth after the meal in delighted satisfaction.

DO STUFF

The first and most obvious activity on your to-do list should be a thorough exploration of the city. Plovdiv's been built up between the ruins of Ottoman battlements and splintered Roman roads, so take a solid afternoon or two to get thoroughly lost in the Stari Grad, just above the Knyaz Aleksander. Here are a few recommendations.

First, the Odeon, a Greek amphitheater and stage where teenagers come to take selfies and flirt. It's smack-dab in the middle of the maze of scrabbled cobblestone streets which is the old town, where mansions and dappled run-down shacks share the same blocks. You can stand at the top of the stone seating, and get a vista over the whole of the city, which is why it's a good place to start your tour. The Municipality of Plovdiv also routinely employs their Odeon for music and drama events. There is sadly no way to know what's coming up in advance. If you look online, instead of a calendar of events, the tourism board of the City of Plovdiv put up a poll. (The poll is "Why Plovdiv?" and your three answers are limited to "Yes," "No but I am going to," and "No.") You can buy all sorts of local crafts and art on the streets of old town - it's also where many of the city's artists hang out.

Just down the hill from the Odeon is a coliseum underneath the street level, and you can look down upon it like coral through a glass-bottomed boat. It's way less impressive than it used to be - now it's just a glass bridge on the Knyaz Aleksandar overlooking some broken rocks - but you can creep in and get a close look at the stairs where once thousands of Romans watched gladiator stab each other.

The Dzumaya Mosque (a Bulgarified version of the Turkish word "Cuma" (Friday), to nobody's surprise) is right across the street. It was rebuilt sometime in the 1400s and features a diamond-brick tiled minaret, plus almost gothic ceiling calligraphy. Jump around the corner and check out the Cultural Center Trakart, because they've got some ancient, eye-crossing mosaics - winding blue-gray-yellow patterns of zigzags, circles, and waves. I stumbled in and followed the lines for an hour like a confused Roomba until my friends led me out by the elbow, gently concerned for my mental well-being.

Pop on over to the Ethnographic Museum, mostly just for the façade: a garish blue billowing frame with gold trim with delicate flourishes and visual repartees. When you see it and close your eyes immediately after, you'll see the complementary-colored after images, like staring at the sun for too long. You pay a pittance in admission to browse the rows and rows of historical costumes, crafts, and furniture in this neato antique Ottoman house.

Boom! You've now seen the Roman stuff, the Ottoman stuff, the Byzantine stuff, and the Greek stuff in about forty minutes. To round off the cultural tour, head on over to the St. Marina Orthodox Church and check out the lavish iconography. I love me a good spat of iconography. The only things you're missing are the communism and the dinosaurs. Go visit the statue of Alyosha Soviet Army Memorial to pay your respects, and then walk down the Knyaz Aleksander and try to find the dinosaur head poking out of the wall of a restaurant. The dinosaur-head place is also a restaurant, but as they cannot actually serve dinosaur steak, I was uninterested.

Don't get lulled into thinking rustic rocks and fancy clubhouses are the end and totality of Plovdiv's sights. The city's been inducted as the European Cultural Capitol of 2019, and while I realize that it is not yet 2019, but the city has produced a nightlife scene to earn the title well in advance. Kapana Fest is the prime example, and this is more or less the reason you should be booking your tickets to Plovdiv in advance. It'll be a two-day street festival of music, art, and screaming celebration of the artistic diversity of a modest Bulgarian town. Normally the festival is in October, but they're staging a special two-day celebration from June 2-4 this year. All of the available information about who is playing, where it is, how to get there - all of it is in Bulgarian. This is very much a local festival. My best research couldn't uncover what Kapana even means. (Just kidding - Kapana is the name of the artsy district in the city, basically in the heart of the old town.) If you book accommodation now and show up then, you'll have a decent chance of finding yourself in the middle of an artistic deluge. The other times I have visited Plovdiv, we departed the old parts of the city, charming as they might be, and found an abandoned elementary school and tested the durability of the playground equipment. For science. We also discovered a giant inexplicable net by the banks of the river Maritsa and we jumped inside. Again, to test its durability. For science. We investigated a local bazaar and made friends with the Roma people who lived in a shantytown just a ten minute walk from the old town, and went to their clothing bazaar where we could buy horrifying discount coats. My brother purchased a pink windbreaker, and I got a flowery women's jacket from the year 1782 which has since become my signature item of clothing. I paid two leva, five lira, for this privilege.

GO HOME

Yes, the time will come to go back to work eventually. It's Sunday afternoon, you'll have to bite the bullet, take the bus at 4 p.m.., and show up back in Istanbul sometime around midnight. Did you remember to bring Bulgarian souvenirs?