Bulgaria was a bust

meg and lbora: blog us bitches! facebook only entertains me for so long, keep us updated and post those "pictures" or else we're gonna start thinking you guys are just hiding in reno, NV tripping off acid and making all this shit up.

This is an excerpt from an email written by Kathleen (college roomate...we miss Anza) that cracked us up. Sorry this took so long Kathleen, this blog is for you....

OK. Where did we leave off? Istanbul. We took a bus the next morning from Istanbul to Borgas, Bulgaria. In total the trip took about 7 hours, and we made sure to drink NO water whatsoever in fear that we would not stop during the entire trip for a bathroom break. But oh how wrong we were. This was a sweet bus ride. Music videos played the majority of the time (though they were all of Bulgarian pop stars who were half naked, so it was kind of awkward). A little Turkish man was our bus attendant, and he ran up and down the aisle of the bus like his life depended on it. Meg and I agreed that he was the hardest working person we had seen since arriving in Europe. He had an area set up in the back of the bus with all his "supplies" and would periodically appear with all sorts of treats with a dramatic flourish. First there was water for everyone in little plastic cups. Then he appeared with a glass bottle that was filled with hand sanitizer, which he loved to zealously dump into everyones hands. Next it was fruitcake, followed by more water, hand sanitizer, Nescafe, hand sanitizer, candy, and MORE SANITIZER. My hands have never been so clean. The bus also stopped every hour and a half or so, and Meg and I would scrounge up some change to pay for the bathroom and then check out what new snacks we could find in the mini markets. As we tend to do, we started wandering off during one stop to check out the scene until we heard some yelling from behind. Our little Turkish man was having his shoes shined, but had seen us drifting away and was bellowing at us and gesturing wildly to remain near the bus. He was definitely looking out (and it was probably a good call not to wander around some random little town in Turkey anyway). He truly won us over, however, when after some rumaging around in his area he produced a tray of little cups of ice cream. I'll miss that little man.

Finally we reached Burgas, Bulgaria (it's on the coast of the Black Sea). We wrongly assumed we would be dropped off at thecentral bus station and figure out a hotel from there, but instead we were dumped off on the side of some road, the only ones on the bus to depart. The only actual person in sight was a guy selling really old looking bananas across the street. Sweet. So we wandered around for a bit, made some inquiries about hotels to whoever spoke even the slightest bit of English, and ended up staying in what I could have sworn was an abandoned skyscrapper until we walked through the door. Think really tacky 50's decor in a concrete building. We spent a night there, and then spent two more nights in Varna, another seaside town about 2 hours north of Burgas. I'm just going to lump the towns together in my description of what we saw, as they were pretty much the same thing (although in Varna our hotel wasn't only a ghetto skyscrapper; it was a ghetto hotel/CASINO skyscrapper. Uhhhhh! We tried to go in but they wouldn't let us until they checked our passport and so we decided we were over it).

Now I hate to be judgemental, but bottom line: Bulgaria sucks. Meg and I kept looking around and just cracking up- it was like we were in Bizarro World from Seinfeld. The country is obviously very poor, but the people seem as though they are trying so hard to appear as though they are loaded. The women walk around in the most ridiculous outfits. Imagine a ton of flourescent bright colors, really tight spandex dresses, and heels at all times of the day, even on the beach. We would get dinner at a cafe on the main pedestrian road and just ignore eachother for at least an hour, each of us completely absorbed in our people watching. We saw a lot of mother daughter pairs in equally skimpy outfits, 4" heels and bright turquoise and lavender eyeshadow walking hand in hand. I almost bought Jan and I some matching florescent yellow minidresses to sashay down Tiburon's main street, arms linked, when I get back home, but then I thought about how the nursery school would probably ask her to resign and she would get kicked out of the Marin Women's Tennis League, so I refrained. Sorry Mom, no presents from Bulgaria.

We spent a day at the beach and a lot of time walking in the parks, where the sights just got weirder and weirder. There were about 4 babies per Mom (and I swear we didn't see one mother over the age of 25), but the kids were fully entertained by the odd array of petting zoos, balloon sellers, stationary plastic animals (that I personally thought were real scary looking) that kids could sit in and be rocked back and forth, and the concerts being performed every half hour by a choir of senior citizens. The number of stray dogs wandering in packs was astounding and we noticed that each dog had been tagged in its ear...I'm not too sure what the Bulgarians were trying to accomplish with this, but perhaps its good they are making the effort to keep track of the stray dog population?

We are pretty sure the diet of Bulgaria consists solely of popcorn, corn, and fro yo. But I was especially ready to get out of Bulgaria when we walked by the snake tent that had been set up, pictures of pythons out front enticing visitors to come in. My intense phobia of snakes mixed with the jenky, broken cages stacked up on the side of the tent was a sign that we had to move on.