A Scandal in Bulgaria

scan·dal 

noun: 1. an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage.

          2. Transgression or wrong doing

          3. disrepute.

After a very eventful night we wake up to find ourselves rumbling through a completely different country than we had left the day before. In Istanbul there was a lot of people (just under 14 million), when we woke up there was nothing, in Istanbul there was civilization, on the train, the toilet opened onto the tracks…everything was completely different. But for some reason it all made sense. We were in a country that until recently had been under the grip of Communism. And frankly I was wanting to see how many stereotypes I could find while on the train. 

I was sure to find many stereotypes but one thing still clung to the back of my mind, what in the world is Sofia going to look like. I felt like I was going on a blind date with someone from the moon. I didn't know what to expect other than it was going to be the most different from what I had experienced. 

We arrived at a random station in Bulgaria, I have no idea where. But we were pretty sure it wasn't Sofia. There weren't really any people there and it seemed to be a small town. We didn't think it was the capitol city of a country. We ended up sitting at this train station for about two and a half hours before we started moving again…about 30 meters before reversing. This proceeded to happen about four times before we made any progress.  Apparently we were adding more cars to the train.

While sitting at the station for what seemed like the whole day. a range of thoughts went through my head, "Are we actually in Sofia, should we get off. What if we aren't and the train leaves, no other train comes through here." As well as "No one speaks English or German so we cannot ask anyone what's going on." Fortunately we stayed on. And though our train was scheduled to be in Sofia at noon, it showed up around supper time. 

Arriving in Sofia seemed a bit Monty Pythonesque to me. I thought the soup would be made with Vodka and the drivers would be absolutely insane. I thought I would see men in uniforms marching down the streets and banners of a man in a giant mustache hanging from windows. Only the part about the drivers was actually true. While standing outside a grocery store the next day, I saw 5 almost collisions that would have been horrific, all in the span of 15 minutes. 

We wandered the city deciphering Cyrillic, which turned out to not be quite as hard as I thought, and we made it to the hostel. We had met an Australian on the train that was traveling alone so we offered to hang out. She ended up staying at the same hostel and then met some other Australians and a Canadian and hung out with them too. 

Through my trip so far I had been looking for stereotypes. I was hoping to see things like, a goat pulling a car, or a cart of bread, maybe a dead cow on the tracks, and a lot of root based foods everywhere. Let your mind wander on the stereotypes of the Eastern Block and thats what my perception of this part of the world was. I saw a nice car parked beside the tracks and thought it was a drug lords car with maybe some RPGs or a body in the trunk. I really knew nothing about this country or this region.

In Sofia, the train station wasn't really proving me wrong. Neither was just outside it. There was a bathroom that hadn't been used in forever that had trash piled almost two meters high in it. We kept walking and things kept getting nicer. The place where our hostel was, turned out to be a good spot. Then we found out what ten Euros a night will buy in a country like this. It may not be true all over, but we got a really good deal. Basically we had a quite large apartment to ourselves. To those of you who live in Europe and know what a Wohngemeinschaft or WG as most people call them, it was a nice one of those. America, its an apartment with several rooms and a common living area, kitchen and bathrooms (Yes Germany has just one word to describe that whole sentence). The 10E also got us a yummy supper and an all you can eat buffet breakfast. I was feeling good about this.

Stereotypes were sliding away by the minute. Not only was the city quite nice, but a lot more people than I thought, spoke English. I was thinking they would be pouring their waste into the gutters out of wooden buckets but instead there was free wifi in the parks. Also a fabulous trumpet street performer in said park, but I digress…I began to feel bad that I thought this way about such a beautiful place. Granted, there really was at one point a goat pulling a car full of assorted things right next to the train tracks, but it wasn't all like that. What I thought Communism would have left the country was poor, without hope, and pretty much grey and bleak. Instead what I saw was a concerted effort to change their history and their city and make a real name for themselves and their homeland. I couldn't imagine doing anything else if I were in their shoes. The people were incredibly nice and the food was not cooked in Vodka…at least not the food I had. There were several pretty churches and many things to see. Communism had left a giant gap in the classes. Not everything in Bulgaria was nice like Sofia, but I feel like in a few years…things could be different and running water could come out to the countryside too. 

At the end of the day in Sofia, I had really developed a fondness for the area. Also there were mountains. That's never a bad thing. The people were definitely not used to a whole lot of tourists, especially in February, so we got what felt like special attention. I loved my time in Bulgaria, and if I could counter my wrong doings, my transgression of ill thoughts towards this country, I would write a blog about how great my time was there.