My First Escape from Bulgarland

It began with a 13-hour journey on what can only be called "The Chalga/Gangster Rap/Techno Bus from Hell."

The tour bus picked up we Straldja folk from outside of the school at 5:45 a.m. We immediately headed over to Nova Zagora to pick up the other group on our tour...A group that became the bane of our existance.

These kids were crazy. They, too, we seniors, but the hoarde of teachers with them seemed to have no control. As soon as they boarded at 6:45 a.m., all hell broke loose. They had brought several CDs of "music." I use quote marks because teenagers in Bulgaria (I'd say 99% of them) listen to 5 rap songs, souless techno and chalga. They had also come armed with whistles (a common feature in discotechs) and I'm pretty sure some of them were drunk. The driver, who had the professionalism of a 17-year-old hooligan, proceeded to play their CDs as loud as the little bus speakers could take, and then some.

The kids from Nova Zagora were up dancing, shaking their hips, hanging out of the skylight, blowing the whistles, and counting to twelve (other Bulgarian PCVs will understand the annoyance of this...) I could handle this, maybe, for an hour. But this was for 13. And I'm not joking.

We had one hour-long stop at the border and then a few other 10-minute breaks. But except for those, this was the state of affairs on our bus for the long tredge around the northern Greek coast of the Agean Sea.

Apart from the throbbing in my head, there was some beautiful coastline. The craggy, forested mountains dipped into the sea. The rain clouds we were running away from gathered in foggy clusters around little bays and ebbs in the landscape. When we escaped the clouds and found the sun, the water turned a crystal blue that sort of melted into the sky at the horizon. It was exactly how I pictured Greece in my dreams (and I am told the islands are even better.) When we finally arrived, it was late evening.

Our hotel was in a beach town called Paralia, in the northern part of the penninsula. No one lives there -- it is strictly hotels and tourist beachiness. All of the buildings were cotton candy pink and yellow and blue...When I caught a glimpse of the pink water at sunset, I realized why the buildings were painted so. The Greeks paint their buildings to match the sea, which matches the sky, and it all swirls together until you feel as though you've fallen into a big heap of cotton candy.

The first night I spent in a fruitless search for money...The town's only ATM was out of order, and by the time I got to the exchange place it was closed. I decided to call it an early day at 10:30 p.m. and went to bed. The next day the Nova Zagora hoodlums hit the beach and our more mature students decided to take a bus trip to Meotora.

I had been told it was a bunch of monasteries on some rocks, but that did not prepare me... Deep in Thessaly, there exist these huge stone columns on which monks have built a complex of monestaries (check out THAT sentence! word.) The buildings themselves, made of stone, seem to just grow out of the tops of these cliffs. (Well, they aren't cliffs. They are like cliffs without an actual mountain. Just columns of stone.) They look like a natural part of the landscape, along with the trees and stone and sun and sky.

We wandered around two of the monasteries, taking literally bazillions of pictures, and wearing monastery-supplied skirts so as not to scandalize the resident monks. The rose gardens were some of the best I've ever seen, and the weather was perfect -- hot, sunny, clear.

In the late afternoon we headed back to our town to relax on the beach for a few hours. Once the sun went down, we wandered the streets of Paralia shopping and eating and "loving the vibe." (See, the Greeks go home and rest from 1 to 5 p.m., and all stores close. Therefore, they are open from, say, 5 to 11 p.m. It's kinda cool.)

The next day we got up early to board the bus...again. We spent several hours in Thessaloniki, one of the oldest and most important cities in the world. I liked the town, pretty much a ritzy and clean Plovdiv on the sea. We didn't get much time for it, however, seeing as we had to get back to Bulgaria.

I suppose we left the city at 3 p.m. We made a few stops, were subjected to a concert by the Nova Zagora hoodlums on the bus microphone followed by several hours of techno party, and baked in the late afternoon Greek sun until we made it to the border at 11 p.m.

It took us an hour to clear Greek customs. Then it took us another hour to clear Bulgarian customs. My "leaving Greece" stamp is for May 28, and my "Entering Bulgaria" stamp is for May 29.

By that time of night, the kids were more or less asleep and the techno stopped. At 3 a.m. we rolled into Nova Zagora again, and I disembarked with the tour guide and the tour guide from another bus (they are tourism students in Sofia). The three of us waited at a gas station on the highway for a bus they said would go through at 4:30 a.m. to Sofia. We got some beeps and propositions while standing on the highway, but I never felt unsafe.

We flagged the bus down (literally) as it drove through and took seats on the top deck. I dozed for about and hour, and four hours later we made it to the central bus station in Sofia. The father of one of the tourguides offered me a ride to the OTHER bus station, where I caught bus number 3 to Dupnitsa. There I caught bus number 4 to Bobov Dol, where I finally could lay my hat.

I stayed there for three days as a resource volunteer for the new trainees. Andy, my trainingmate who calls Bobov Dol home, and I played 1950s couple for my visit, and I got to see his school. It felt good to impart wisdom in newbies...And it's ALWAYS nice to speak English. Yeah, I've lost steam. I'm distracted. Bye.