The vulgar Bulgar...

Note to self: Taking a night bus or train only really makes sense if you are not crossing any borders.

In the case of the the night bus from Istanbul to Plovdiv, Bulgaria we had to cross the Turkey-Bulgaria border... unfortunately this crossing took place about three hours into the bus ride (~1am) and because Turkey feels the need to do three separate passport checks before letting you leave this process took almost three hours to get through.. then there was the random thunderstorm that landed on top of us as soon as we entered Bulgaria..needless to say we did not get any sleep on the bus that night

Anyway, we arrived red-eyed and delirious at about 7am the next morning at the bus stop in Plovdiv (it really just a rusted old shed with some Cyrillic graffiti scribbled on the side). Stumbling out of the bus and into the damp dawn we struggled to sort out which way was up. Eventually we spotted a cabbie whose broken English was infinitely superior to our non-existent Bulgarian and finally managed to communicate that we were looking for a particular street in Old Town. Turns out we were only about 10 blocks from the street and the hostel we were looking for to begin with so the taxi ride was short. We did get to try out the only Bulgarian we knew however "Da, ees OK"...

After milling about out front of the hostel for about half an hour wondering if we were in the right area we finally spotted the lady from the hostel coming up the road..or rather she spotted us...I think our ridiculously large rucksacks gave us away.. We checked in and on our way up to the room to nap we hear that Scorpions song, "Wind of Change", playing on the TV downstairs.. it was somewhat surreal and ironic since that song was written back in 1990 to celebrate the collapse of Soviet hegemony and the re-opening of eastern Europe (places like Bulgaria for instance) to the rest of the world...and here we were..anyway.

Plovdiv was ok..it had a really great Roman amphitheater ruin that was better preserved than anything we had seen to date; and the old town with it cobbled streets and restoration era mansions was cozy. Still we only stayed one day before moving on to Veliko Turnovo near the Romanian border... and this is where out next adventure began.

Getting around Bulgaria was particularly confusing. First of all the alphabet is Cyrillic (e.g. like Russian).. which, forgive my ethnocentrism here, looks like a two year old's first attempt at typing. Trying to find your way to the local автостанция to buy two tickets for a ride to Велико Търново is just confusing.. To complicate matters, the standard yes/no head signals are backwards in Bulgaria..they nod their heads for 'no' and shake them 'yes'. So even after I manage to sort out the above nonsense and get our bus tickets to VT, when I asked the driver of the bus that I thought was ours I get a head shake 'no'..or rather a 'yes'..but then confusion sets in..did he shake his head 'no' and mean 'yes' because he's Bulgarian? or did he know that I wasn't Bulgarian and shake his head 'no' in my language..the only option left was to reconfirm with a "Da?"..which would most would cause them to look at you with the same disdain that one looks at a child with on their twentieth round of "I know you are but what am I?"

Even the simple things like trying to nod 'yes' to the waitress gesturing about whether or not I want milk in my coffee ends up backwards. Over time we tried to adjust and remember the backwardness of it all but 34 years of ingrained social-linguistic training is hard to subvert..mostly our attempts found us making big wobbly circles with our heads..like a life sized bobble head doll..which for all we know means 'see you next Tuesday' in Bulgarian..

History it seems is punctuated by these funny little moments of decisiveness that over time blossom into strange cultures and customs. Take driving on the right side of the road for instance. This American tradition was born out of the teamsters wagon drivers in the late eighteenth century because of the lack of a driver seat on the wagon. The Castillian lisp is purportedly traced back to a fourteenth Spanish king who popularized the speech impediment. Where this flagrant violation of the natural order of head shaking comes from in the Bulgarian culture is any ones guess.

Anyway, we spent a couple of cools days in VT hiking around the hillside town. We met a cool Kiwi couple who was also on a their world trip honeymoon..their travelblog has some funny comments about Bulgaria that's worth reading (http://taneandlauren.blogspot.com/2007/09/good-bad-and-bulgarian.html). We also met a really awkward hotel owner who went on about people from California all being rich, about how he hates lawyers and about why the gypsies are evil.

In general Bulgarians are a funny bunch..they have really bad fashion sense (think a pink stripped jump suit with matching feather boa). The store owners don't seem particularly interested in helping customers..most of the time when you order something they give a strange shrug that is somewhere between bored and 'whatever' that seems to say "well ok..if you want that I guess I could sell it to you..(sigh)". The country is really poor I guess and so maybe I can understand their malaise..what they really need I think is the invigorating tonic of ten thousand greedy capitalists moving in revamping their cities..houses are cheap..30k euro gets you a nice two story four bed town home in the hills above VT.

anyway..after VT we took a bus north on our way to Bucharest Romania.

a puppet player playing his puppets in bulgarian street...

our street in bulgaria (eastern europe apparently hasn't discovered underground cabling yet..almost every street in everytown we've been in is littered with wires and cables hanging across the streets..)

the hill castle sound and light show as seen from our window... (this was neat to see actually as the entire hillside lit up..)