Bulgaria

Tuesday July 10th

We spent the last 2 ½ days in Bulgaria. Crossing the border was interesting. Bulgaria is quite different from Romania. I was a little surprised. Romania has much more German and Hungarian influences I think. But mostly the difference I noticed was in the level of poverty. It was clear immediately how much poorer Bulgaria is and how much the effects of communism are still prevalent. I was frequently reminded of my visits to East Germany. You can still see quite a few of the old Eastern block cars for example. Even Trabants. Many of the buildings and signs, especially roadside stops or buildings in towns still have that communist style to them. The houses in the villages are old with clay tile roofs and many peasants seem to still use horses and carts. Haying is being done like my father used to do when he was a boy in East Prussia. It’s quite charming somehow.

The land seems vaster than in Romania. In Romania the villages were much closer together. The farms were in small land plot strips. Apparently that happened after communism fell and they divided the land plots in small strips so everyone would get an equal amount of the good soil. In Bulgaria they have vast, huge fields. I don’t know how they parceled out their land. The huge fields of sunflowers are beautiful. Those of us here at the back of the bus are having an ongoing discussion as to how sunflowers work. Do they really follow the sun? Because we’re observing that sometimes they seem to be facing the “wrong way”. At one point the SFs in one field were facing the opposite direction from the ones in the field on the other side of the road. It seems to remain a mystery.

The bus got lost trying to get to our first stop following a detour so we were quite a bit later getting in than expected and we had a concert that evening too. We were all a little stressed, some more than others, when we checked into the little two star hotel in Veliko Tarnovo. That was quite fun. A little like a high school trip as we visited each others rooms to compare and marvel. Most bathrooms for example, were old style where you’ve got a shower head in the middle of the itty bitty bathroom, no tub, no curtain, just a drain in the floor. Needless to say everything gets wet, including the toilet paper if you’re not careful enough.

The food here is delicious. It seems typical to eat cucumber, tomato, roasted red peppers and feta as appetizer, either as a salad or individually on a plate. Main course is usually some sort of meat, pork, chicken, some kind of beefy sausage type thing, and potatoes or fries. Yesterday we ate lunch at a lovely place at an ethnographic museum in Gabrovo complete with traditional pottery dishes and handwoven colourful tablecloths on the picnic tables in a pleasant grove. Before getting back on the bus we waded in the stream to cool off our feet. (It’s quite hot.) In the evening we went to a restaurant that served variations of the above mentioned food on large wooden platters in the centre of the table. Everyone could help themselves and there surely was enough food left over. The place had a wonderfully rustic ambiance and we were entertained by cheesy lipsyncing Bulgarian pop folk music and dance. It was quite entertaining though I didn’t have a lot of energy and I was thankful that I was not one of the group to be called upon to participate in the belly dancing in particular.