Bulgaria, Part 3 (or -Megan Whines About Caves and Recounts Other More Pleasant Memories)

Every time we ate in Bulgaria I ended up being so full I felt like a pig being prepared for slaughter. The next morning in Smilyan turned out to be no different.

By the time Mariana, Kaloyan and I had woken up, Mariana’s grandmother had already made about 20 mekitsi – fried circles of dough. You put fresh jam or honey on them and eat them warm. They are so good! After about three though you start to feel a little ill, but you aren’t allowed to stop until all of them are gone.

We were off to explore some of the surrounding mountain villages, so after a quick coffee stop down the road, we piled back into the car and Kaloyan started driving towards Greece.



How awesome is that??

We stopped in Mogilitsa first, a village with a population under 500 that is the home of Agushevi konatsi, a castle-like winter estate built in 1834 for the wealthy Ottoman feudal lord Agush Aga and his family, and Bulgaria’s largest spoon. The house was cool, but personally I was more impressed by the spoon. While Mariana, Kaloyan and I walked around snapping photos, her grandmother struck up a conversation with the locals who were lounging nearby in a way that only an elderly, near-local woman could. People openly stared at me, their eyes asking the question that the language barrier prevented them from voicing – what are you doing in a small, Bulgarian mountain village?? I felt like the French man in the Roma movie “Gadje Dilo” that we had watched a few days earlier, and I quite enjoyed being the odd stranger for once.

We drove on through several more villages, searching for a restaurant where the river that flows down through the Rodophe Mountains begins.

Have you ever been in an Amber store? Every time I go into one I am impressed by how many different colors of Amber there are. The stones range from warm oranges, to clear yellows, to a rainbow of greens. Driving through the mountains felt like I had been miniaturized in a case of Amber. The trees took all the colors of fall and presented them so brilliantly that they looked as if they had been Photoshopped. The villages were spaced out and small, following the tracks of the valley between the mountains and climbing partway up the mountainsides. Older people, their faces and hands weathered with years of hard work, congregated in the village centers, seemingly content just to sit together. You could see the influence of the Ottoman Empire more in this region since it was one of the last areas of Bulgaria to be liberated. There was at least one Mosque and one church in each tiny village, and often more than one of each. The mountain villages were peaceful, quiet, beautiful and seemingly untouched by the busy, technology-driven life of the rest of Europe.





After a few villages, we reached a sign pointing to a dirt road, saying the restaurant was 500 meters or so down the path.

About five meters down and I was starting to think that ‘path’ was a rather generous word – I couldn’t have comfortably walked on this road so you can imagine how difficult it was to drive over.

Every hundred meters or so we would find a handmade sign nailed to a tree saying something encouraging like “I promise it’s not far now! Don’t turn around!”

Finally, at about the point that I was seriously beginning to worry about the car, (It was an older, small-ish car certainly not fit for the off-road driving we were doing) we saw a wooden archway with a sign saying we had finally made it.

When we walked through the wooden arc, we first spotted a wooden cabin-like structure ahead. Different swings and hammocks hung from the pine trees leading down the hill and into the rambling restaurant below. A giant, black and white, shaggy dog barked enthusiastically and pawed the air from the left where he was chained to a tree. To the right was the river, which was really more of a stream at this point, with several small bridges arching over it. Small, open shelters lined the sides, housing a mix of chairs, benches and wooden stumps around rough, wooden tables.





It was an eclectic, beautiful place. Stepping into it felt like walking into a fairy tale.

A short man with a wide grin and a sheepskin hat ran up excitedly and began to chatter about the menu with us. Just before he went to get our food, he handed us a key and told us to try it on the cottage at the end of the stream.

The cottage was set up in the traditional, old Bulgarian style, with red, green and white Bulgarian national dresses hung on the walls and jars of homemade jam and honey stacked along the edges of the room.

We sat down back outside in one of the shelters as the man was coming back with our food. He brought us homemade berry juice that was rich with sugar, yogurt with homemade jam and crepes with five different types of jam on them. It might not sound like an overwhelming amount of food, but never underestimate the power of jam. There were giant spoonfuls of jam in the yogurt, five heaping spoons on the crepe and the juice was basically pureed jam with water and extra sugar added. My stomach was threatening mutiny if I ate any more about halfway though. I managed to eat my way through the yogurt, the juice and half of the crepe before I started to feel like my throat was closing off and had to admit defeat.



When we were able to move again we waddled back to the car (taking a break on one of the swings halfway there and another by the fluffy monster-sized dog) and started driving back toward Smilyan.

About halfway there, Mariana asked me if I wanted to stop and see her favorite cave. I said yes since a) I (used to) like caves b) it seemed like an important place to her, and mostly because c) caves are usually cold and quiet, which sounded like it would help with the about-to-vomit-jam feeling.

We pulled off and parked in front of a mountain that was so steep it was probably only a few degrees away from being a cliff and Mariana hoped out of the car and pointed straight up, saying something along the lines of “we need to hurry to make the next tour!”

Ok, you can do this, I thought. It’s not too far – she must have just been pointing a little too high. It’ll be worth it.

We started climbing and by the time we made it to the first switchback I could taste pumpkin jam at the back of my throat. Pull yourself together, I thought, don’t slow the group down! Move it!

By the third switchback I didn’t care if we never made it to the cave because I was barely keeping the jam down. I plopped down on the bench and panted for the next few minutes.

We finally found a set of stairs – hooray!

Only 12 more flights of stairs to go until we got to the cave!

Oh, so when you pointed at the sky you really did mean “we are about to scale that mountain.”

These weren’t any ordinary stairs either – they were steep, shallow and offered a pretty direct fall down the mountain if you slipped or didn’t hang on to the slim railing.

By the time I crawled to the top of the last set of stairs I was heaving like a wounded animal. When Mariana cheerfully asked me if I wanted to walk over to the railing and see the view down the mountain it was all I could do not to growl at her.

I flopped onto a bench and slowly calmed my heart rate, settled the jam back into my stomach and caught my breath. Before too long a cheerful woman came out of a hut to the side of the clearing and unlocked the metal gate blocking the entrance to the cave.

She started leading us down into the cave, past all sorts of damp cave formations and through skinny slanting areas that had me wondering how mental the first cave explorers had to be to brave these sections without a path. Then she led us down some more, and down a bit further. The whole time I was counting the steps and thinking that once we reached the bottom we were going to have to turn around and go right back up.



Suddenly, she stopped at a flat walkway, bringing me to a halt since I was right behind her, and turned around slowly. “Don’t make any sudden movements and don’t be frightened,” she said in slow, calm English.

Why, have we awoken the dragon?? I’m pretty sure the stalagmites don’t scare easily.

She very slowly pointed to one of the stalactites a foot or so from my head. My eyes followed her hand just as slowly, and I found myself staring at a black ball. A black ball? That’s a weird rock. With a wing. And another.

Have you seen Ace Ventura? Yes, well this bat might not have been white, but Shikaka can keep his cave - I was getting out of there. The path back was blocked by people so I quickly ran down the next set of stairs away from the evil, winged, fanged thing and prayed there weren’t any more below. As I didn’t come face-to-face with another, I am going to continue to tell myself that there weren’t.

I can't show you a photo of the bat because I ran away too fast, but I can show you our bat faces.



We finally reached the end of a cave where we found a very impressive set of cave formations. (I kid you not, the end was a quarter mile into the mountain, which is half the distance to the parking lot below.) There was what looked to be a waterfall made from sparkly, white stone with brown formations around it.



The tour guide pointed out the “statues” that people had found around the walls, including the Virgin Mary and an elephant’s butt.



I’ll be honest: all I saw were rocks in the way of “statues” at that point.

Other Photos

The cats in the larger cities like Blago or Sofia were more skittish and ran when you got close, but the cats in the smaller villages were really friendly! Once I pet one they started flocking to me in droves.







We attempted to read our tea leaves (or coffee dregs).



Mariana saw more than I did.



RLO

One positive thing about not celebrating Thanksgiving is that the Christmas madness can begin an entire month early! The insane lights on the city streets, the red Starbucks Christmas cups, Christmas music, Winter Wonderland carnivals – they all come early and stay for two entire months. I love it! This also means the warm-fuzzy/nostalgic/I-love-winter/cozy/it’s-almost-Christmas feeling begins earlier and gets to last a bit longer.

London-isms

Bit – part (They use similarly to how we would define it, just way more frequently. i.e. “I liked the bit where James Bond blew up the building,” or “I didn’t mind the bit with the videos in the museum, but I didn’t like the rest of the exhibition.”
Fit – hot, attractive. (i.e. “He’s really fit.”)
Happy Christmas – Merry Christmas
On offer – on sale
Washing – Also means dirty dishes
Washing-up Liquid – dishwashing liquid
Muffler – scarf
Mince – ground beef
Toastie – toasted sandwich

Bulgaria Part 2

Road Trip

“Good Lord, why are there no railings!” I asked for the eight-millionth time.

Because seriously – I was a good several hundred feet above the ground on a narrow path of white rock that had been worn smooth and slippery from hundreds of years of use and weather and I had nothing to hold on to.



“Just be careful!” Plamen said behind me.

“Yeah or die,” I muttered under my breath, clinging to a rare rock jutting out from the cliff next to me and glancing down at the ground far below to my right.

It was my fourth day in Bulgaria and Mariana, her boyfriend Kaloyan, her friend Plamen and I were driving from Sofia on the west side of Bulgaria down Smolyan in the mountains to the south. In total, the drive takes a little more than four hours.



After a fair amount of road trip games and talk about everything from Harry Potter to traditional Bulgarian food, we stopped at Asen’s fortress.


(Did I mention the funny photos we took before we stopped?)

Asen’s fortress is a medieval fortress that was built high on a rocky ridge in the 11th century and was then considerably renovated in the next two centuries. All that is left of the fortress today is a series of walls and foundations that ramble up over the top of the hill, but the Church of the Holy Mother of God which was built next to it in the 12th century is almost perfectly preserved. Looking at it now you can’t help wonder how in the world it was built.



The area was beautiful. Mountains rose behind us, the earth dropped into a steep valley before rising into more mountains in front of the church, and a deep valley sloped off to either side. On one side mist blurred layers of mountains that stretched away from the fortress, while on the other side buildings covered the valley floor like a river, flowing out past the edge of the valley and spreading on the barely visible plane beyond. Vibrant orange and yellow leaves covered the trees and carpeted the stones in areas. The rocks themselves had been worn so smooth they looked like polished marble.



It was fun exploring the ruins as well. There were no ropes or railings and few attempts seemed to have been made to preserve the crumbling foundations. I have always loved visiting ruins. It's fun to stand in the small squares that are ringed with stones and imagine the room that used to stand around the space. Who did the room belong to? How was it decorated? Where were the windows? Who looked out them at the same view I am looking at now?

Mariana, having grown up in the mountains, seemed to have all the fear of heights that a mountain goat might have, and carelessly climbed on and around the walls, ignoring the sharp drops next to her as if they didn’t exist. I however, the much more paranoid one of the two of us, liked to have my hands on something solid, and clung to the rocks like a baby that is just learning to walk.





We left before too long and continued on, but after a half hour Mariana proposed another impromptu stop. We had come to a sign for the Wonderful Bridges, rock formations that were about 30 kilometers off the main road. Without much convincing, we all agreed to go.

When we finally pulled up to the bridges we found another hill. This one was less treacherous but more tiring. By the time we walked to the top of the hill to see the first “bridge” we were all puffing like 80-year-old asthmatic smokers.

The bridges are massive, natural arches that have been worn into the face of stone cliffs by a river. They’re impressive because of their symmetry and size.



We caught our breath and made our way back down the hill. The next bridges were off to the side and down a steeper hill, and the only thing I could think as we walked down the hill was how much it would suck coming back up.

The bridges at the bottom were impressive, but after a bunch of photos we found ourselves standing at the bottom of the hill looking for the least tiring path back up. We settled on a rocky slope to the side instead of the stairs but still ended up huffing, puffing and whining our way up the last 30 feet or so.

Smolyan

We drove into Smolyan as the sun was sinking behind the mountains, casting the buildings and steep streets into a hazy gray light, and dropped Plamen off near his house before taking the car to a shop near the river at the bottom of the city so snow tires could be put on. From there we walked up about ten million billion flights of stairs to meet Mariana’s friend Nikki and his girlfriend on the pedestrian street at the top of the city.



By the time we reached them at the top of the last staircase I was convinced that there could not possibly be a single fat person in Smolyan.

As we were walking to a café at the end of the street we ran into several more couples that were friends of Mariana, and there was quite a bit of screaming and hugging and jumping about. When we got to the café we had assembled a group of six, and were quickly joined by two more.

It was a fun, relaxing hour at the café, sipping drinks and getting to know people. Nikki had a kind face and was constantly smiling. He and his girlfriend both laughed nonstop in an endearing, infectious sort of way. Svetla, the woman who lives next door to Mariana’s parents flat in Smolyan, is a sincere, quiet woman. She was more reserved than Nikki and his girlfriend but we chatted about the area and her classes at University. Her boyfriend, Peter, seemed like a peaceful person. He seemed content to listen and observe in a group, rather like I am.

The one thing I have noticed about nearly everyone that I met in Bulgaria is that they are very proud of their culture and local histories and love to share. By the time we left the café I had heard all about the local food, the lack of jobs in the area and how the multitude of winter resorts that are being built nearby are causing light pollution that interferes with the massive observatory in the city. My favorite story was about Orpheus, a Greek mythological prophet who was said to be able to charm every living thing with his music. It is said that he was born in the Rhodope Mountains where Smolyan is located.

Smilyan

Once we had climbed back down the mountain and collected the car, we drove about 15 minutes to Smilyan, the village where Mariana’s Grandmother lives. Her parents are living with her sister in Finland, so she didn’t want to stay in her empty flat.

It was a good choice, because when we stepped into the freezing night outside her grandmother’s house, we were infinitely glad for the warm stove and hot food waiting just inside.

Her grandmother had made a local dish called patatnik, which is made from potatoes and meat covered in flakey pastry. There was also soup made from a local bean that the village is famous in Bulgaria for and a coleslaw salad. It was delicious!



We went to bed full, warm and incredibly content.

Other Photos


This is the inside of the front door at Mariana and Kaloyan's apartment. Um...guys? I think you need a few more locks...


The night before we left for Smolyan we met Mariana's sister and her sister's boyfriend for dinner at a restaurant on Vitosha Mountain above Sofia. Mariana and I split a very epic waffle.


I was coaxed up onto a wall at the fortress but I don't think I let go of Plamen until I was on the ground and had my hand safely back on the wall.


This is the inside of the church at the fortress.


Surprisingly, a crepe with feta cheese, honey and jam is actually delicious.


Fluffy dog!


Wood-carrying-horse-crossing

Finally, more fun with signs!


DO NOT PLAY YOUR FLUGELHORN IN THE TUNNEL!!!

RLO

At Mizzou, as at many American universities, school shirts and sweatshirts are pretty standard campus-wear. Granted, Mizzou takes it up a notch, (if half of your wardrobe hasn’t come from the bookstore or free events and organizations, you aren’t a real student) but even students at schools with less school pride tend to sport their colors around campus.

I made the mistake of wearing my bright pink University of Westminster hoodie to class one morning here and felt like a pariah.

Seriously – the looks I got would make you think I had a scarlet “A” stitched to my front.

I paid attention after that and noticed that one of the Australian students and one other American girl insist on wearing their hoodies around nearly everyday, but I have yet to see a British student do so.

I now save my hoodie for in-my-room-comfy-wear or elsewhere-around-London-warmth.

London-isms

Rubber – eraser
Rub out – erase
Be one of the lads – Be a man/ man up
Getting too big for your boots – getting cocky/ getting a big ego
Torch – flashlight
Pissed – drunk (Which created a lot of awkward situations the first few weeks here, because whenever someone said, “I’m pissed,” I would respond with “Aw, why? What’s wrong?” They would then look confused and say, “No… I’m drunk…”)
Courgette – Zucchini
Aubergine – Eggplant
Knackered – exhausted
Banger – really old car

Bulgaria Part 1

Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria

“KGB!”

Ok, I know I take a lot of photos, but really?

I squinted and smiled at the man watching me before snapping another photo.

The man’s eyes widened and his mouth fell slack. “Cameras, phones, computer, facebook, KGB…” He mumbled as he speed-walked away from me, clearly fighting the urge to break into a run.

You might be wondering how I ended up KGB-ing my way across Bulgaria last week. It started about a week ago actually. I was skyping Mariana when I realized that my Thursday class had been canceled and she said I should come visit her. Since it was the week before her fall break, I could see her university town before road-tripping with her to her village in the mountains to the south. Five days later and I was hugging Mariana in the Sofia airport.

This is Mariana.

She and I met when she studied at Mizzou last year, and she is probably the sunniest, kindest person I know. She gets really involved in school and with her friends, but no matter how busy she gets, I can’t imagine her without a smile.

Blagoevgrad is something of a university town located south of Sofia at the foot of the mountains. Mariana’s university, the American University in Bulgaria, is near the center. What I liked about this town, and really about the rest of Bulgaria that I have seen, is that it presents such a tangle of contradictions. People want to hold on to the past and move into the future at the same time, which you can see by walking from the old style part of town (a neighborhood built in traditional, Bulgarian style about 100 years ago) to the half completed, top of the line university building and basketball stadium. The area’s history extends back to 300 BC when the Thracians settled it, and the locals are proud to share this history, yet the relics are set around outside the relatively new museum building weathering away to obscure lumps of stone. It really seems to be a country caught between the past and the future. The people are also some of the most sincere people I have ever met. They love their country, they love to share it and are genuinely excited when you learn about it and enjoy it as well.

Lectures

The first day we were in Blago, (this is how everyone there abbreviates Blagoevgrad) I went to Mariana’s Balkan Cinema Class with her. I found it especially interesting because I am currently taking European Cinema in London, so I was able to compare the film we watched with the films I have been studying. We watched Gadjo Dilo (Crazy Stranger), which is about a young Frenchman going to Romania to search for the gypsy singer that sang his father’s favorite song. He runs into a gypsy man who takes him home and he slowly becomes a part of the gypsy community.

The film was really good. Like the European films we have been studying, it was much more subtle than most Hollywood films and the plot was left somewhat open. Unlike a lot of the European films we’ve watched though, the narrative was clearer and easier to identify and follow. There was definitely a clear narrative structure to the plot, which is lacking from movies such as L’Avventura or Bicycle Thieves.

What was even cooler about her class is that her professor is from Northern England, lives in Thessoloniki, Greece, but teaches film in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, which is such an interesting combination. I love meeting people with interesting stories, and his seemed especially unique.

The professor of her creative writing class the next day was similar. He was an American who had taken off to explore Europe after college and ended up falling madly in love with a Bulgarian woman, settling down in Bulgaria and persuading the college to let him teach without a Doctorate because he is such a good writer. Writing in his class was fun as well. After free writing for about 20 minutes while he played music spanning from African chants to ACDC to Mozart, we did an exercise called The Exquisite Corpse. For this exercise, we were split into groups of four and each group was given a small notebook. One person wrote on one page for 10 seconds and then passed it to the next person. That person could only read the page before theirs and then they had to write and pass it on. The notebooks were then rotated between groups and the results were weird, slightly dark, oddly poetic and often quite funny. Overall it was a really fun class. It was even more fun because I knew I would not be graded or tested on anything in class.

The Underground

We had been invited to a show at The Underground club on the first night I were there. (The logo for the club is the Tube sign – ironic that I went all the way from London to Bulgaria to go back to the underground.) Several university bands from her university were playing and a few of her friends were in the bands.

We got there as the first band was taking the stage and a tall, skinny, blond guy was just introducing them as “the university’s most international band," in a heavy Russian accent. He was from Russia, while the other-lead-singer was from America, and the final two band members were from countries-that-I-can’t-remember-but-were-not-Bulgaria.

The band sounded good, but it was hard to get past the lead singer’s Russian accent (most of the songs they sang were English ones). Soon he had ripped his shirt off to reveal a painted tribute to Nate, the American band member, before Nate began singing a Russian song in what sounded like perfect Russian.

Side note: It seemed like more than half of the people I met in this small university town in the middle of the Balkan Peninsula had come from all corners of the earth and had found themselves settling in Bulgaria unplanned. I have a bit of a theory for this.

Earlier that day, Mariana’s Balkan Cinema Professor had said that people are now searching for something simpler, more nostalgic – the good, old life. It’s a bit of the Noble Savage Theory where primitivism and minimalism are romanticized. Bulgaria, not exactly an “it” spot, is seen as slightly backwards and rural. It seems mysterious and authentic, and people end up here searching for what used to be – a simpler, even exotic life. Maybe that’s how all of these people came to be there.

Varosha (The Old Town)

A cobblestone street lined with houses, galleries and restaurants built in the traditional Bulgarian style winds its way up the foot of the mountain across the river from the town center. An older church stands preserved beneath a resort and a clock tower to the left side of the entrance to this street. The area is quiet and peaceful. It’s easy to imagine that you are in another time.


Stray cats wander along the roof tiles at eye level, dropping over the wall if a stranger gets too close. Red orange ivy drips down doorways. Yellow leaves quietly detach from branches and drift to the grass below.

We wandered through an open doorway into a courtyard to find paintings hung all the way around the courtyard wall and on the building in front of us. Most of the building was partly obstructed by canvas or frame. It seemed similar to how Bulgaria displays its ancient artifacts outside – as if they know they have precious objects but are going to risk displaying them outside anyway because they are made more beautiful by the open air. I had never seen an outdoor gallery before and the paintings did seem more stunning in the sunlight.

There was a church further toward the new part of town built also in the traditional style. The inside of the church had the same dark, dusty feel that most Bulgarian Churches have. This didn’t make it feel any less reverent though; if anything it made the atmosphere made the church seem holier. The sunlight streaked across the room in dramatic shafts of light, illuminating random relics or paintings in a way that seemed to attribute significance to them. The paint on the walls remained only in patches, with white wall showing through as a stark contrast to the ancient saints painted around it.


From the top of the street you could see the buildings of Blagoevgrad and several clusters of houses in neighboring towns stretched out in the valley to meet mountains in the distance. A soft mist blurred the scene so it felt as if we were looking at a painting.

Food

Oh food. I love food. I am definitely a live-to-eat person, not an eat-to-live one, and Bulgaria is a great place for one to live-to-eat. Everything is freshly grown or homemade. When we got to Mariana’s flat for example, she had honey from her cousin’s bees, apples that her grandmother had grown, wine that her grandmother had made from the grapes that she had grown and cheese that her village had made. We then ate at restaurants where everything was made from scratch using only fresh ingredients and you were charged no more than 5 US dollars. Here are some of my favorite meals:

Peppers stuffed with rice and meat and drowned in yogurt sauce.

Pizza with broccoli, cauliflower and feta.

Chocolate Souffle.

I've never eaten so many apples in my life.

The most alarming thing we ate was pizza, because when we went to get pizza Mariana started squirting ketchup on hers. It got weirder still when she started squirting mayo on top of that.


What?

I tried pizza with ketchup, which wasn’t bad necessarily. The ketchup just reminded me of burgers and I ended up craving In N Out for the rest of the week.

The other thing I love about Bulgaria is that there are about 20 cafes per city where you can just order juice and coffee and sit for hours chatting and watching people walk by.

Melody

The next day, Mariana and I were walking over to Green Market (an indoor and outdoor market place) to look for some shoes when we ran into Melody, a film teacher and documentary filmmaker from America who had moved to Blago to teach at the university three months prior. We all started chatting and she decided to come with us.

She was another interesting person - she and her husband left their daughter, friends and family in the states and moved from Minnesota to Bulgaria to teach at the university. On her blog, Melody Moves to Bulgaria, she says they moved because their new motto is “Try to project years ahead and then look back and figure out what you wish you had done but never did. Then go do it.“ I hope I have enough courage to do something like that when I am older.

We had a fun time finding scarves and shoes in the market, and then Mariana helped her sort out her phone and we parted ways.

Cookies

It seems I am destined to do nothing but make chocolate chip cookies while I am abroad. I was telling Mariana about my flat (dorm) and my life in London when I mentioned baking.

“You made chocolate chip cookies? From scratch?” She asked.

“Yea, it’s really not hard at all,” I answered, wondering why the US seems to be the only country that is in on the secret that is the Tollhouse cookie recipe.

“We have to make them tonight!” She squealed.

Several hours later and we were mixing ingredients while her friend, Plamen, played with her computer on her bed.

The cookies turned out sort of funky since the store only had chunkier brown sugar and salted butter, but we had fun eating the dough and the crumbs. (We also didn’t have a non stick pan, so we had to scrape the cookies off in crumbles.) I again showed both of them the joy that is eating raw cookie dough. (I’m surprised Americans have kept that secret relatively well too.)



We then watched what I would describe as the weirdest Greek Film I’ve ever seen. I don’t even remember the name. I just remember thinking it was slow and weird, and then slowly starting to really care about the three main characters until I was tearing up when one of them died and wondering when I actually began to like the film.

Getting lost

Finally, I have realized that I am, in fact, directionally challenged. There was a brief moment in Stockholm where I thought I had been cured, but Bulgaria has reminded me that a cure does not exist.

The last morning in Blago, Mariana had a test rather early and I was going to meet her at the university after it was finished. She asked me if I was sure I could remember how to get there, and I answered that of course I could since it was only out the front door, across the street and straight.

Nope.

Lies.

I wound up ten minutes late on the wrong side of the river, staring at the university on the other side and wondering how in the world I got there. I had to walk ten minutes to the bridge downstream and then another ten minutes back up the other bank before finally getting to the university.

Other Photos



Nescafe 3 in 1 advertisements are elaborate and everywhere.

The best peach juice ever.



Mariana's balcony.

More fun with signs!


Doesn't this bench look like the super mario mushroom?

RLO

People always give British food a bad rap, and after having eaten a significant amount of it thanks mostly to my flatmates, I am here to defend it.

First, pub food – more brilliant food does not exist. Pub food was basically born when someone thought, “I’m going to combine every type of food that is warm and comforting.” Bravo pub food inventor, bravo. Sausages and mash, smothered in gravy, mince meat and vegetables covered in a layer of warm mashed potatoes and again drowned in gravy, any sort of pie with meat and vegetables and toasty crust and gravy – it doesn’t get much better than this.

Second, beans. When they say baked beans, they don’t mean baked beans like Americans would. They aren’t tangy or sweet – there’s no BBQ sauce. Their baked beans are in tomato sauce so they taste, at first, a bit plain. They grow on you though. They basically put these on everything. My favorites have been beans and cheese on chips (fries), beans on toast and beans on baked potato.

Third, Ketchup. They put ketchup on nearly everything. For example, the other day I had toast with melted cheese on it and ketchup on top of that. It was oddly delicious.

Fourth, Sausages. I don’t mean sausage in the traditional American breakfast sort of way – I mean Cumberland sausages and pork sausages and beef sausages that you fry and then eat with gravy or potatoes or put in stew. They are seriously amazing.

Finally, pies. I am including things like Pastys (particularly cheese and onion or Cornish), sausage rolls, steak and chicken bakes and all other manner of pastry-covered things. Brilliant. There’s nothing better on a cold day when you have a semi-long tube ride than grabbing a warm Cornish pasty and crunching into it as you sit down.

Londonisms

Tanoid – Overcom
Safe – cool
Kip – sleep, nap
Prit stick – glue stick
Fizzy Drink – Soda
Sod’s Law – Murphy’s Law
Lad up – Man Up
Spindly – Lanky
Corridor – Hallway
Tea Towels – Kitchen Towel
Kitchen Towel – Paper Towel
Went for a wander – Went for a walk
Me/Meself – often exchanged my/myself (i.e. “I lost me shoes,” or “This is a photo of her and meself.”)
Jacket Potato – Baked Potato
Camp – an adjective describing feminine gay style or drag. One can be camp without being gay though, which makes this a hard word to really define. It sort of means over the top.