Adjustment, Plus Travel Mishaps

For the first few nights of living here in my apartment in Pazardzhik, I could only stare out over the whole town and towards the Rhodope mountains from my sixth-floor apartment and think:

“Where the hell am I?”

Admittedly, my anxiety was unnecessarily provoked even further by the state of my “new” home sweet home. At first, I was under the impression that this is simply how apartments in Bulgaria exist, but after some fresh insight from a few people visiting my apartment, a thorough cleaning was done of the place, which by some miscommunication had not happened according to schedule.

Still, I love the view from my apartment, even though partaking in this view brings into my line of sight some sets of clotheslines hanging just below the window, right over the street below. I have clotheslines inside too, but hanging shirts and the like outside is far preferable, since the breeze is unhindered, leaving the shirts less stiff from hanging in a totally static position inside. The issue–and a funny issue to have at all–is that, at first, the clotheslines outside filled me with a weird sense of dread and anxiety. It must have been some combination of the height and the thought of my shirts simply breaking loose and falling into the street, but every time I thought about hanging an article of clothing there, a wave of apprehension overtook me; I had never really hung clothes to dry at all, let alone outside, so I had no idea what the standard operating procedure was. Eventually, I made the leap and set out a single unimportant undershirt, which might as well have been the Soviet flag raised over the Reichstag in terms of my feeling of success, secured by a total of four clothespins. I do still own that undershirt, and I have been hanging more and more shirts out there since. Jeans, even!

Another compact victory was the purchasing of a watch. For whatever reason, last week, before school officially started, I was feeling particularly down and unmotivated. Yet, I knew that I had to have some method of timekeeping for classes; a watch seemed like a good solution, but so many doubts ran through my mind. How much would a watch even cost here? Would I be able to communicate enough in Bulgarian with a shop owner to pick one out? All of this was occurring while just sitting on a bench overlooking one of Pazardzhik’s many town squares. Eventually, I realized I could sit there all day just thinking about it, but eventually I did need a watch. So, I got up, strolled around, found a store, and purchased a fairly cheap watch. I even managed to understand that the watch came with a guarantee for a year or two. For awhile, I wore that watch like a war medal.

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Not all of my adventures have been resounding victories, however. This past Tuesday, the 22nd, was Bulgaria’s official independence day. Generally, days between holidays and weekends are given off from work also, and I do not teach on Fridays, so I had a five-day weekend, Friday through Tuesday. Feeling incredibly homesick and dying to see some familiar American faces, I decided to spend it with other Fulbrighters while seeing some more of Bulgaria. I ended up connecting with other ETAs in the cities of Ruse and Silistra; some even suggested staying for a night in Bucharest, Romania, which I agreed to.

The problem is, Ruse, and Silistra especially, are both on the opposite side of the country from Pazardzhik (have a look at my map on the “About Post-Communist Colby page to see places I’ve travelled to). It is no small journey to get so far Northeast. My best bet was to take a train to the capital, Sofia, and then from there get a bus to Ruse at about 10:30am, putting me in Ruse just after lunch. Perfect, or so I thought.

I woke up at 4:30AM in Pazardzhik to get ready and catch a cab to the train station; construction was being done on the train tracks, so there was to be a bus leaving from the station at 6AM to drive us a few villages over where a train would be waiting for us. So, I arrive at the station at 5:30, manage to buy the ticket, and communicate that I am indeed aware of the bus transfer situation. Strolling outside into the chilly morning air, I begin to wait. And wait. And wait. 6:15 rolls around. Other passengers to-be are looking antsy. Normally I try not to draw attention to myself by speaking, because I then immediately reveal myself as a foreigner, but I figured I should at least find out who is going in the same direction as me. “Are we travelling to Sofia?” I ask to some older ladies. “Yes, to Sofia,” they say, eyeing me up and down a bit. I hear some chatter about about the town where the train is waiting. Meanwhile, I am only in a t-shirt–my sweatshirt was still wet from the previous night’s washing–so I stood there rubbing my exposed arms a bit. One of the ladies looks at me and says, “You don’t have a coat?” It takes me a few seconds to process the word for “coat.” “Yes, but in the apartment,” I say. “Ah, in your apartment,” she says, smiling a bit.

Eventually at around 7am, with the dawn finally starting to break, a bus meanders its way out of a side road near the station. The lady says to me, “It’s here. This one.” “This one?” I say, pointing to it. “Yes, this one.” The bus pulls up. By this point at the station, a herd of people had gathered for some bus or another and mobbed the door the bus. A short lady with a rather angry, irritated demeanor stepped down from the bus yelling Bulgarianisms incoherent to me. I looked at the bus and realized that there were already a ton of people on it, thinking, “There must be some sort of mistake!” People were handing the angry lady tickets, but for no reason obvious to me at the time, many passengers were bluntly refused entry onto the bus. Yet, the older lady I had spoken with at the station handed a ticket and hopped on. I pushed through the crowd a bit and stuck out my ticket towards the angry lady. She looked down at it, checked it off, and motioned me on. Thankfully I had boarded when I had, because this bus was getting full quickly. The angry lady then re-boards, shouting very loudly in Bulgarian down the rows of seats. People are shifting around, some are moaning, some are getting off the bus, and I have zero clue what is going on. I see people on the bus whom I overheard purchase tickets to Sofia, however, so I just hide in the corner of my seat and pray to various deities that everything will be okay.

I nervously eyed Google Maps throughout the whole bus ride to verify that we were indeed headed in the direction of the promised town, Belovo, where a train was awaiting us… if there was even still a train, since we were well over an hour late. We stopped in a town halfway to Belovo; the lady who had initially assisted me got off, but most others stayed on. I was tempted to follow her, but thankfully I remained true to my herd instinct, continuing to find refuge in the corner between my seat and the bus wall, and the bus set off again. Eventually, we reach something resembling a train station, and Google tells me that I am indeed in Belovo. Yet another older lady, who happened to be sitting next to me and somehow deduced that I was a foreigner, I suppose, turns to me and says, “We’re here.” I thank her, hurriedly grab my stuff, and powerwalk through the herd to find two trains opposite each other on the platform. I pick the one with open doors, get into a second class car, and find some people already waiting. I pick an older couple towards the back and ask if we’re going to Sofia. They affirm: “Da.”

A few minutes later, the train begins to roll out. I look down at my phone. The time, as I recall, is at least 8am. I was supposed to be nearing Sofia’s city limits by now. Still, since I had already completed a leg of the train journey by bus, in theory the train ride should be shorter, and I should make my early bus from Sofia to Ruse.

Well, that never happened. The train ride still took a full 2+ hours, despite having completed 26km of the journey already. My bus was to leave at 10:30 am. Again, I nervously eyed Google Maps tracking how much distance I had left until we got to Sofia’s main train station, which, conveniently, is next to the bus station. The time ticked away with each tiny stop we had to make at various dilapidated neighborhood train stations in the Sofia area. The train pulled into the station around 10:20. I figured just maybe I could make the bus.

I hurry to the bus station, only to see a bus with a prominently displayed “SOFIA > RUSE” sign already loading up its last passengers and getting ready to close its doors. This, of course, required me to go into the station, look at the schedule, find the next bus to Ruse (which thankfully was only a bit over two hours later), and communicate to the cashier that I wanted this ticket. I went to a cafe opposite the university and the Nevski cathedral for awhile, and returned to the station for the next bus without incident.

With some difficulty, a group of us figured out how to get tickets for the bus out of Ruse to Silistra the next morning.

(There is much more to this tale of travel; I might put up a part 2 in the near future!)