The Internet is filled with contrived lists ranking the best-looking women and men around the world. A list of the top ten cities with the most beautiful women on Traveler's Digest, for example, places Kiev at the top of the heap, but Varna, on Bulgaria's Black Sea came in a very respectable fifth.

Gallery: Bulgaria

Trying to quantify beauty on an international, comparative basis is, in a way, ridiculous because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But just about any seasoned traveler will tell you that they've been to a place where they found the locals to be simply irresistible. I've never heard any Western women rave about Central and Eastern European men, but there is something very compelling about the women in this region. (Traveler's Digest's list of top ten cities with the hottest men completely excludes this region.)



But are Bulgarian women the best looking in Europe? I wouldn't argue with Bryson or anyone else who makes that case but the competition is awfully fierce. I've been to a handful of countries around the world, which I won't name, where I didn't find members of the sex particularly attractive, but one can make a pretty compelling case that the women of almost any country in Europe are the most beautiful. If you don't believe me, take a long walk through the streets of Belgrade, Kiev, Zagreb, Budapest, Copenhagen, Berlin, Rome or Madrid, and you'll see what I mean.

After I joined the Foreign Service and was posted to Skopje, Macedonia, for two years as a married man, I found other reasons to love Bulgaria. After Bryson visited Sofia in 1990, he wrote, "I'm certain that if I come back to Sofia in five years, it will be full of Pizza Huts and Laura Ashleys and the streets will be clogged with BMW's." His timetable may have been a bit off, but he was basically right.



Sofia is a very interesting city but living in Skopje, I was most impressed by the fact that they had Dunkin' Donuts and Subway. (Married men can still enjoy munchkins and foot-long meatball subs.) But my favorite places in Bulgaria were all outside the capital – I loved Veliko Tarnovo's gracefully crumbling architecture, Varna's tacky seaside charms, Melnik's wineries, Blagoevgrad's youthful energy, Koprivshtitsa's colorful houses and Plovdiv's sense of history.

But the place that really hooked me was Bansko, a lively little town nestled in the Pirin Mountains in the southwest of the country. Bansko now hosts a World Cup ski race and it has plenty of hotels and bars, but it's still a place where local farmers walk their cows through the streets, wedding processions take over the center on weekends and photos of the dead are plastered all over buildings.

Bansko's bars alone make the place worth a visit. They serve the excellent Pirinsko beer on draught, dirt cheap, and feature live gypsy bands almost every night of the week. But what I liked best of all about Bansko, was the way I felt each time we visited: blissfully cut off from the wider world and all of its problems.

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(Photos courtesy of Klearchos Kapoutsis on Flickr and Dave Seminara)