Month: September 2016

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A Cold Final Night in Malak Izvor

Well, it’s my final morning in Malak Izvor. I’m waiting on laundry, need to finish packing, and hope to be on my way within an hour and a bit (by 9:30). That will give me time to walk to Yablanitsa to catch a 10:45 bus or to chill in town if I get a lift.

My final day here was busy. I had a big work job and I also needed to get the house prepped for the new sitter. It’s a small house so, of course, it didn’t take long.

It had been raining off and on for a few days and so I hadn’t given the dogs very long walks since it’s simply too slippery and dangerous to go up the path when it’s raining. I took a chance yesterday afternoon and on the way home, the inevitable happened. I slipped and fell, hard enough that it took several minutes for me to assess if I broke and/or sprained anything. The dogs came back to me and knew something was wrong. They normally beat me home, but they stuck close the whole way and periodically nudged me and whimpered. They are so intelligent and I will miss them so much. 🙁

As for my feline brat, Penghu, he’s spent the last few days sleeping across the back of my neck. I can get up and do whatever, then come back, he’ll just climb right back up there. He’s actually there now. I’ll miss him, too, but not his food stealing!

It was really cold last night, so much so that I got up twice for extra blankets, and, of course, I was sore and the bed is terrible. So I didn’t get much sleep. 🙁 I’m really sore today and hope I can find more Nurofen when I get to Sofia since I’m down to just one tablet. I’m just glad I had some! I’m also glad that I didn’t fall on my “bad” side.

I’m feeling a bit weird about leaving Malak Izvor in that while I will desperately miss my charges, I’m otherwise fully ready to go and looking forward to new adventures and a final night in Sofia. I hope to have time to do a bit of exploring this afternoon before tucking into a sushi dinner! 🙂

Well, it’s time to force the suitcase to close. I’ll check in when I can. I think I have internet where I’m staying tonight (Hotel Zenith was fully booked, so I took something close to the bus station), but I don’t think I have any credit left on my phone. One of my projects for the afternoon will be to try to find out if I can use my Bulgarian SIM in Serbia. I painstakingly wrote all my questions in case I can’t find an English speaker and hope I can get a clear answer! I’d especially like to have access to the internet during my long bus ride tomorrow.

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A Message for R.S.

I tried to email you, but your address bounced. I hope you will see this. Thank you for the lovely and unexpected surprise. I appreciate your kind words and will toast you over a sushi dinner in Sofia on Thursday. 🙂

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Next Stop, Belgrade, Serbia

It felt important to me that Serbia be my next stop. It is part of a large area that was under conflict in my lifetime and I have strong memories of classmates who were refugees from the region. I’d like to see what it’s like, 20 years beyond peace. This is why I’m also hoping to make it to Sarajevo and Kosovo. Moreover, I wanted to see the contrast with Bulgaria, with one country well on its way to Westernization and the other still being aligned with Russia.

Having been in a tiny village for three months, I wanted an urban experience in Serbia. After doing much research, I came to the conclusion that my destination had to be Belgrade, even if Novi Sad or Nish, which is very close to Sofia, might be less expensive or have more to offer. Now that I’m expected in Spain just about this time next month, I’ve lost the opportunity to take advantage of a monthly rental. So I decided to look for a weekly rental in the heart of Belgrade and see from there how I will fill the three weeks following.

Thanks to Airbnb, I found this afternoon a listing that seems perfect. I am expected late Friday afternoon!

Now, to get to Belgrade.

Flying was my first thought, but there are few flights from Sofia straight to Belgrade. Many take the scenic route to Athens or Istanbul! The flights are surprisingly expensive (over 200CAD) and unless you get a direct one, they involve more than 12 hours of travel.

Next option that I investigated is the train. There is just one and it travels overnight. I did a lot of research, including spending time on Google Translate, and quickly wrote off this option. The train is considered quite “sketchy,” with lots of unsavoury characters riding it and frequent reports of theft. It would also require me to lose a night of sleep and arrive in Belgrade in the wee hours of the morning.

So that left the bus. Travel forums informed me I needed to take a bus from Sofia to Nish, just across the Serbian border, and then transfer to Belgrade. It took a lot of Googling for me to get information on that because the Centralna Avtogara website has nothing for Nish. I will do a “Sofia to Belgrade on the bus” post once I’ve gone through the experience successfully.

Thursday, I aim to be in Sofia by early afternoon. There, I will get the scoop on where to buy my Nish-bound bus ticket for the following morning. It would be then a 7:30 am departure for Nish Friday, to arrive around 10:30, which I believe is Bulgaria time, while it will be 9:30 in Serbia. I will then have an hour wait for the bus to Belgrade, to arrive by late afternoon. It will be a long day (about eight hours total door to door), I will get a chance to see a lot of Serbia since I’ll be driving clear across the country. Incredibly, the bus option is actually shorter than the train and the plane (unless you get a direct flight)!

I really don’t know why it feels so Important that I go to Belgrade next. It’s one of those intuition things, I think. There is an inexplicably strong pull and I look forward to seeing what I find there.

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Goodbyes

Max, my host, was here this weekend and just left. He’ll be back “sometime” Thursday. He’s rarely here till late morning… so we said our goodbyes and thanks. I aim to be on a bus to Sofia by 11AM Thursday. There’s one more walk into Yablanitsa in my future, unless I look pathetic with my suitcase and backpack!

That was my first thought this morning, that I had only have three full days left here… And I still only have a very loose plan for the next week. I think I’m living in a river in Egypt…

As I said to Max, my time here was exactly what I was hoping it would be. I have no regrets, except how much I am going to miss the pets! It would, of course, have been nice to have had a car, but based on how many full days of work I had, I could not have justified a car rental for my whole time here.

I think the pets know I’m leaving and Max agrees in that they have been extra cuddly, Penghu especially. Believe it or not, he was sound asleep and snoring in this picture!
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I’m so glad I came to Bulgaria, but I’m also ready to go. I really look forward to spending some time in a more urban environment in the next few weeks and eating someone else’s cooking! I really think I’ve exhausted the limits of my creativity as to what can be made with the ingredients available to me in Yablanitsa and Malak Izvor.

So I think next for me will be Belgrade for seven to ten days, then on to Sarajevo before heading south to Athens to catch a plan to Madrid. I just need to figure out how to balance travel with work! Since I’ve lost out on the chance of a monthly rental rate for an apartment, I think I will focus on looking for inexpensive private rooms in hostels and only commit to super easy jobs that don’t require a huge time commitment, just enough to cover my expenses for the day and a few days of exploration in Athens and Madrid. I don’t want to be completely off work for a full month, not with all the time off I’ve had this year!

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.

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Last Market Day in Yablanitsa

I had a tight deadline today, but also a full weekend of work ahead of me, so I decided I was best off going to Yablanitsa today, for a final trip to the market, since I’d have a better chance of getting lifts.

I had just passed the village limits when I heard a vehicle come up behind me and honk. I thought it was my chauffeur because of the van type, but no. It was a couple in a similar vehicle, which is a two seater… Let’s just say I’m glad I don’t carry my excess weight in my hips because the three of us just barely squeezed in!

They dropped me off just within the town limits, so I had a short stroll to the market. I hoped to pick up another pair of capris, but the lady wasn’t there today, the only time this has happened in all my visits to the market. Am I glad I at least got the pair I had on!

Produce was pretty usual today, but I did see some folks had cauliflower. I found a vendor who had nice tomatoes, but he was the kind who doesn’t let you pick out your own. “Kolko?” he asked me. It literally means “how,” but I’ve heard it used for “how many?” and “how much?” I said four, then amended it to five. I was very happy with the ones he picked out! I also got onions and carrots from him. I got potatoes and zucchini from another vendor who looked at me like I was a moron when I thought he told me my total was 1.20, I handed him as much, and asked if that was okay. He shook his head (which is a nod in Bulgaria) and again repeated what I thought was 1.20 before moving on to the next customer. So I’m guessing I heard right!

I was happy to do my final shop at the supermarket since I am really tired of buying and eating the same foods from there every week! I had a bit of a stumble when they were out of the two different jam brands they normally carry and the brand they had not only didn’t have clear pictures, but the writing was in lower case, which I haven’t mastered yet, and in a super fancy font. I was looking for strawberry, “yagodi,” which looks like this in “normal” Cyrillic: яагоди. Look at what the label has instead!

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If I squint, I can see the Ya letter (“backwards R”) and the o is, of course, clear. But the hard g is sort of like a backwards s, the d looks like a g, and the i looks like a u! I think they just want to confuse the tourists!

My shopping was particularly heavy today so I was glad I’d come on market day since, surely, I’d get a lift home. So certain of this was I that I didn’t pace myself heading up the hill out of town to the junction where I usually get lifts. Hmm. No cars today. Okay, maybe by the underpass. Nope… I got all the way to the village turnoff, with 2KM left to go, and thought surely I’d get a lift at this point. I even properly stuck out my thumb a few times, to no avail. By the time I limped into Malak Izvor, I was pretty annoyed with myself for having started off so fast since I had barely enough energy to get up the hill to home!

But I made it! I put my shopping away, then pulled out a tin of sardines I’d bought for the pets as a treat. Normally, Mechka and Penghu each go for a bowl and Sausage gets the tin. But today, Sausage went for a bowl. I put the tin down for Mechka and was very amused when she picked it up and carried it over to the far side of the yard to enjoy her treat in peace!

This was my last trip into Yablanitsa. If I need anything in the next week, I can get it at the village shop. I thought I was leaving next Friday, but it’s actually going to be Thursday (it was always going to be the 22nd, I just messed up the day of the week) and I have to be out of Bulgaria on Saturday. So this time next week, I could very well be in Serbia!