The result of sloth, but a good story nonetheless

This entry is just cut and pasted from the mass email I wrote about the weekend. I am too lazy to rewrite something here. Have fun.

On March 3 the Bulgarians celebrated their independence from the Ottoman Empire and we had the day off. To celebrate I agreed to meet my friend Sarah on her night train from Varna to Plovdiv (she lives in the middle-of-nowehere northeastern Bulgaria and always has harrowing journeys when she wants to go somewhere.) The train from Varna on the coast to Plovdiv stops in Straldja at 2 a.m., so I made my way through town at 1:30 to get on it. I managed to find her, and we spent the three-and-a-half-hour train ride chatting and looking at the stars.

It was still very dark when we reached the city. It was creepy actually...Plovdiv is usually very bustling and sunny and happy. But in the wee hours of dawn it is absoluetly silent and dead. We hiked up the hill in Old Town to watch the sun rise over the Rhodope Mountains and eat our sandwiches we had packed. It was one of the clearest days I have ever seen from that spot above the ancient Roman ampitheater...Every crest of every mountain in sight was clear and defined. We enjoyed our breakfast and view until a storm started to blow in and it got cold. We headed back into town, found a bakery that was open and ate cake. Once we had exhausted ourselves there, we went to our favorite duner stand (a Middle Eastern wrap sandwich with chicken and french fries brought to this country by the Turks) and kept warm for quite a while. (One of the great things about Bulgaria is that the purchase of 2 duners at the cost of 80 cents buys you a table for as long as you want it.) By the time we were done the rest of the world had woken up and we played.

Since it was the Bulgarian national holiday we bought two little flags and ran around the city taking photos of ourselves in front of old communist monuments and statues. It was insanely windy but the said storm never arrived and the sun was bright. FInally at 1 p.m. we decided it was time to catch a train to Devin, a town about an hour-and-a-half south of Plovdiv in the Rhodopes. We happened to meet two other volunteers going to our party, Kellen (the volunteer on the coast near me) and Matt (from Long Island). Our host, Rachel, met us in Devin and we ate. Once the rest of the friends arrived (Gokhan, Scott and Scott's girlfriend Dobromira who all live in the eastern Rhodopes) we bought some food and caught a bus to Rachel's secondary site of Beden...She has a house there because she teaches three times a week and can't commute. It is a typical Bulgarian mountain village...Very very beautiful.

We played Risk all night and half of us slept at her house...The other half (including myself) stayed in a villa recently refinished by the mayor's brother. It was small but very very nice...new. (Though we aren't sure who else he is expecting to stay there...)

The next day we met the others at the house and worked on breakfast. They had run the space heater during the night which blew her fuses so we decided to make pancakes on the wood stove she uses for heat. But first we had to hunt down someone in the town who owns a cow and barter for milk (we agreed to do some woman's son's English homework in exchange. You see, smallllll town.) They turned out great, especially once we put on some maple syrup that Rachel's mom had sent her.

Once that was done we hired some neighbor with a minibus to drive us to Trigrad Gorge, a spot just north of the Greek border where there is a cave called Devil's Throat. This cave is said to be the spot where Orpheus came in search of the door to Hades to retrieve his girlfriend...When she was lost he spent the rest of his life wandering in the forests surrounding the cave.

The area was beautiful...One of the top 5 places I have ever seen in termsof raw natural beauty. The cliffs are massive, covered in pines and snow, and the water that formed the cave and gorge is clear mineral water drunk throughout Bulgaria. The cave itself was dark and dank and huge and it lead one to see why the ancient inhabitants of Greece and the Rhodopes thought this place was a gateway to Hades.

Once we had exhausted our views we had the driver drop us off in Devin for dinner and then went back to Beden for more Risk. (My group, the B-17s, are known throughout Bulgaria as being the "mellow" "geeky group.")

The next day was just as beautiful weather-wise as Friday and Saturday. We hired the same driver and went to another mountain town named Shiroka Luka. Shiroka Luka is actually a preserved village in which any new constuction has to follow the old traditional building codes...It's beautiful. They were having their annual Kukeri festival (where the men dress up in scary costumes and dance around to ward off evil spirits for the coming year.) I had seen kukeri in Razlog over new years, but every region has different kinds. These guys had the goat-skin outfits with huge scary masks and tall hats with bright colors and mirrors on them. The only kukeri constants I am seeing are the goat-hair and bells...Lots of bells. As always it was fascinating, and I can not accurately describe it.

Around 3 p.m. Sarah and I decided it was time to make our way back home. We had to get to Smolyan, a city near Shiroka Luka, and make our way to Plovdiv from there, finally catching the 10:55 p.m. train east. No one in town seemed to know when there would be a train, and there were no taxi drivers to be found. Finally, as we were walking out of town, we ran down a filled bus and convinced the driver to take us on. The going was slow because there was still lots of snow on the road and it had been all but dessimated by the weather. Eventually we made it and caught a bus to Plovdiv. It made several stops in the mountains and took a long time, but the scenery was just breathtaking. The Rhodopes are very rugged but in a very ancient-looking way...lots of pine, lots of rocky cliffs. Several other volunteers who had been in the area for the weekend got on the bus, which is always amusing.

We made it to Plovdiv at 7 p.m. and ate dinner, took a nighttime walk and ate some ice cream before going back to the train station for our night train. The people who ended up in our compartment with us had actually been on our Friday train but were too shy to speak to us in English then. (Yeah, Bulgaria is a small country where you run into people all the time...)

We made it to Straldja at 3 a.m. and Sarah decided to stay with me for a night and finish her trip the next day. I had to teach at 8 the next day, so that was not fun. But my tiredness was worth the fun I had over the weekend.

Today it snowed, so I suppose the nice spring weather has abandoned us again. It'll be back though.