Bulgaria's President Rosen Plevneliev has painted a rather dreamy picture of the Bulgarian infrastructure in 2020 while speaking at 7th annual "Strategic Infrastructure Bulgaria" conference in Sofia.

"Sofia can turn into the only city on the planet where people can go skiing by subway. There's no other place in Europe or the world where one can go to the ski track from the metro station," stated the President, who served as Bulgaria's Regional Development and Public Works Minister in 2009-2011, and is a former construction entrepreneur.

He further declared that the magic formula for Bulgaria's infrastructure by 2020 consists of 7 highways, 7 high-speed roads, 2 bridges, and one tunnel (apparently referring to the construction of two more Danube bridges and the Shipka Pass Tunnel).

"All political parties support the 7-7-2-1 formula. We need to move in the right direction regardless of who is in power," he told the infrastructure conference.

Plevneliev stressed that strategic infrastructure should not be taken to mean only roads and water purification facilities.

"In order for Bulgaria to make progress in the upcoming decades, 10 or 20 projects must become a priority in order to unleash its economy," he said, while also naming the development of bio- and organic agriculture, food industry, and health industry as priorities.

Plevneliev's dreamy infrastructure vision spilled over to a number of other dilapidated and long neglected transport projects in Bulgaria – such as a bright future for the Stara Zagora Airport, and turning the cities of Stara Zagora, Plovdiv, and Ruse into logistics clusters, with the Danube city of Ruse also supposedly becoming some sort of an organic agriculture hub feeding food exports to the non-functioning Ruse Airport in Shtraklevo and Port Ruse.

He even went as far as suggesting the creating of a bicycle route along the Bulgarian section of the Danube.

"The Danube River hides enormous opportunities. It is the most important artery for the development of the cities on its banks. We can also dream that the Bulgarian Black Sea coast will have a super-modern museum showing the history of all civilizations that left a mark in Bulgaria," the President declared, adding that the medieval Bulgarian capital Veliko Tarnovo could create a lift linking the Tsarevets fortress and the architectural reserve of Arbanasi.

"My vision is very clear. Sofia first needs to find a concessionaire for the Sofia Airport which can be a strategic partner. It is unacceptable to fly to Belgrade via Vienna or to Thessaloniki via Athens," Plevneliev said.

"Sofia can be the only city on the planet where 1.5 million residents and people from all over the region can go skiing by metro. After in 2014 we link the Sofia Metro with the Sofia International Airport, and then extend the ski lift at Simeonovo, for which we already have a project in the making, we will have a unique city. An hour flight from Bucarest and Istanbul to Sofia Airport, and then you go up in the Vitosha Mountain by subway," he said.

The Presidents dream-infrastructure tale continued with the situation of the vastly troubled and outdated Bulgarian State Railways BDZ.

"If BDZ is now facing a bankruptcy, we do know that in 2020 a large amount of the goods between Europe and Asia will have to go through Bulgaria and the railways will be modernized. We are convinced that Bulgarians will soon travel by rail from Sofia to Burgas in three hours in trains with air conditioning and WiFi," Plevneliev said.

But with all that said, he declared energy efficiency and e-government to be his absolute priorities.

"We are wasting five times as much energy per unit of produce. We are the most energy inefficient nation. The planet has gotten the latest efficiency technologies in the past 30 years that we spent talking about the Belene NPP project. We have missed the great change – the era of energy efficiency," he concluded.