Friday, September 25, 2009

Sofia, Bulgaria

Where the Hell Are We Again?

Mohawks and Cloud Bread

I’m still a little fuzzy on why, but after nearly two weeks I can say that I have a better idea of where we are. Sofia is the capital city of Bulgaria, a Balkan nation of Eastern Europe. It borders Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Romania, as well as the Black Sea to the East. (I had to cheat a bit and refer to the maps of Bulgaria that Cy and Bella drew this week in homeschool.)

The population of the entire country is less than that of London (around seven million), so it’s a manageable size. We have rented a three-bedroom apartment near the center and have walked the whole of the city (a few times over) during our afternoon outings. We’re enjoying Sofia, but I’m also noticing that cities across the world are starting to look much the same. The language changes, and maybe even the alphabet, but the fancy shops are selling the same things, people are still running to work, the corners still reek of sewage, old men are still playing chess in the squares, and you can still find a pizza on just about every corner. Maybe it’s that we’re far enough into this crazy adventure that we’re getting too numb to feel culture shock any more. Or maybe it is that we’ve been in Europe for five months now, and I expected Bulgaria to be more exotic than it is. But I prefer to think it has more to do with city syndrome since we haven’t seen the countryside for two months now, and that we just need a good dose of rural life. Tomorrow we will get just that, as we hop a train for a four-hour ride north through the Balkan Mountain Range to the university town of Veliko Tarnovo, which we have chosen to be our home base for the remainder of the two months we have here in Bulgaria.

While in the city, Cruz and I have continued our tradition of working / playing each morning from a city park. Though we’ve had to alter our expectations a bit regarding what exactly defines a park. Unlike Lisbon and London, both of which boast cheery play areas full of imagination-tingling shapes, colors and structures, Sofia’s parks are generally no-nonsense grids of iron bars and cement blocks efficiently erected during the days of Communism, the colorful paint having worn off decades ago with no funds left for maintenance. We generally settle for working from a street café with a strip of dirt large enough for digging.

Cruz is still attempting to use the Portuguese that he had finally mastered for playground negotiations back in Lisbon. Posso brincar com isto? (Can I play with that?) The rest of us have switched over to learning the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used in the Bulgarian language and is similar to the Russian alphabet. We haven’t found a language teacher yet, but all of the Bulgarian podcasts that Jason downloaded have been helping us to get by. We can now at least say please and thank you and fumble through the pronunciation of key words. Like Тoалетни. (“Toilet-nee!”)

The population of Bulgaria is much less diverse than that of Portugal where we spent the past few montsh, and that has taken some getting used to. Where as in Lisbon, immigrants stream in from Portuguese colonies painting the streets a mélange of colors, Bulgaria’s history has kept it relatively isolated for the past millennium or so. Early on the Greeks and the Romans had their heyday here, along with the Bulgars, from whom the country gets its name, and then the Byzantines. But perhaps the most formative part of the country’s history was the five-hundred-year period, beginning in the 1300s, under the harsh feudal rule of the Ottoman Turks from Constantinople. (Istanbul was Constantinople. Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople…) After five centuries of misery, the Bulgarians finally kicked the Turks out in the 1800s, with the help of a few hundred thousand Russian soldiers. Bulgaria has since been Russia’s faithful sidekick (and Turkey’s most impotent enemy).

Bulgaria had a Communist Revolution similar to Russia shortly after WWII, and the people endured four more harsh decades under the Communist regime, which helped to improve Bulgaria’s economy but did little for personal freedom. There are reminders everywhere of the Communist era, which ended in the 1980s, and has been followed by two decades of economic decline. Strolling along park paths, you pass under once-glorious rows of soviet statues—long-since pummeled—the stumps of which are now being re-sculpted by street artists or serving as skateboarding ramps for youngsters in mohawks. (Punk, by the way, is not dead!) One chap I was chatting with recently suggested that younger Bulgarians are beginning to look back wistfully on the efficiency of the Communist era, when everyone at least had a job and a place to live, but that the older generation who lived through the reality of it would never hope to go back. There is optimism, though, that things are starting to turn around. Bulgaria is the most recent country to join the European Union, and is its poorest member. The economy is not yet strong enough to adopt the Euro, so they use the traditional leva, which is helping our dollars stretch a bit farther.

As a result of their spicy history, Bulgarians make some darn good food, which is influenced heavily by their Greek and Turkish neighbors. Jason bought a Bulgarian cookbook right off the bat and has been stewing up yummy feasts each night in the little kitchen of our apartment.  Fall is in full-swing here, as is harvest season, so meals always start with hearty salads with heaps of fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, dill, mint, yogurt, Kalamata olives, feta cheese (which is called serene in Bulgaria) and, Bella’s favorite—the white, fluffy bread with nary a whole grain in sight that we affectionately refer to as cloud bread. And there are plenty of grilled spiced meats, kebabche, and hot peppers of every shape and color for the next course. Then, of course, your choice of Turkish delight or Greek Baklava for dessert.

This week, Jason and I actually celebrated the 18^th anniversary of our very first kiss, which we proclaimed to be Kissing Day much to the dismay of Bella and Cyrus. Cruz, on the other hand, really got into it—the little Don Juan that he is. Given the fact that I was 18 years old when we met, I guess this means that we’ve now been together for as many years as we lived without each other. As far as I can tell, that’s hella romantic. Either that or it just means we’re getting old.

On October 1^st we will be celebrating another momentous occasion. That day will mark our ONE YEAR anniversary of being on this silly field trip. We intend to celebrate with gusto!