Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Bulgaria Year 1 in Review

It's been a year since we moved to Bulgaria.

We've traveled many places and made wonderful new friends (and we've already even had to say goodbye to some of them). We've worked harder than we thought we could: I discovered that teaching in a new place with a new book and curriculum was more like being a first-year teacher than a veteran, and Shannon overcame her personal fear/terror/difficulties/loathing... of teaching, confrontations, and taking authority.
We yelled at the sky and shook our tiny fists at the roadblocks and frustrations Bulgaria (and living abroad in general) threw at us.  Sometimes we wanted to buy something that would be so simple in the US (just a quick trip to Target or Wal-Mart), but we didn't know if it was for sale at all, if it was for sale where it would be, how to ask anyone to help, or even how to get there.
We dealt with the surprisingly difficult loss of independence that came from losing a car, bikes, phones, knowledge of how everything works, and the ability to communicate. I sometimes felt like an infant throwing a tantrum - I couldn't express the difference between whether I had a poopy diaper or was just hungry, so I'd just get upset about it either way. Waaaaaaa!  I couldn't say anything in Bulgarian, and lots of times just that knowledge prevented me from even trying in English (which many Bulgarians speak well).
We did things and went places that we had to keep pinching ourselves were really happening to us. It sometimes felt so normal, hanging out at a coffeeshop in London or on a rooftop terrace in Istanbul, or even grading papers at Starbucks (in BULGARIA!) that I sometimes couldn't decide whether to be amazed by it all (I'm in BULGARIA!) or underwhelmed by the ordinariness of it.

When we went back to the USA this summer, I had a hard time responding to the obvious question of "How's Bulgaria?" I don't know. Amazing. Wonderful. Frustrating. Maddening. Lots of work. Lots of fun. Exhausting. Beautiful. Ugly. Exciting.

We had some tough times this year. I hope not to have to repeat anything like the month of May again, where we spent half the time in hospital for a variety of awful things. But even in May, in the midst of many bad times, we still managed to fit in a long weekend to Prague and a road-trip around Bulgaria for a friend's wedding.

"May you live in interesting times," as the saying (sometimes called a curse) goes. We certainly do.  Whatever life in Bulgaria has been, it has always been interesting. Sometimes interesting-awesome, sometimes interesting-weird, sometimes interesting-sucky. Hopefully down the road even the interesting-sucky will just mellow out into a good story to tell.

For you Harper's Index fans out there, here's a recap by the numbers:
Countries we've visited this year: 16
Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Albania, Morocco (just Shannon), Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Norway, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, USA, Germany
      (We only drove through Serbia and Macedonia, without spending much time, and we also got passport stamps from Germany and France, but haven't really seen too much more of these countries than the airports, although we did it make into Frankfurt for a beer by the river on a hot day during a long layover, so maybe that one does count after all.)

Seas swam in (collectively): 4
Atlantic Ocean, Black Sea, Adriatic Sea, Aegean Sea


Mountains climbed (collectively):
Maroon Bells Peak (Colorado, 4315 m/14,156 ft), Cherni Vrah / Vitosha (Bulgaria, 2290 m / 7,513 ft)

(hmmm...will need to get more peaks in next year!)

Students taught
293

Care packages received
6 (THANKS!)

Power Outages
Innumerable

Laptop Deaths 
2

International Visitors
7 (Heather, Bajji, Spike, Tom S, Dad, Scott, Paul)

Medical procedures requiring overnight hospitalization 
2

Cipro (super-strength antibiotics) prescriptions given
6


Furthest North we traveled

61'44 (Jostedal, Norway)



Countries we already have plane tickets to visit in September:
3
 (tee hee)
 
Here is a short video from our postcard wall.  There are postcards from some places that we had wonderful wonderful trips (like Istanbul, and Lake Como) that we somehow never quite got a chance to do a blog post about. Maybe there will still be some "blast-from-the-past" make-up blog posts, if new adventures don't take up too much time.



We have often thought how much more difficult this year would have been without the support we received from friends and family around the world. (Thanks to the easy communication provided by Skype, Facebook, this blog, email, and the internet in general-- it's so much easier to stay connected to those we love on different continents than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago.)
Thanks to all who read our blog (especially when you make comments!), gave us phone calls, sent emails, sent birthday cards, sent care packages (you are our true heroes!) and just generally kept us in your thoughts.

Until next time...
Jeff

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Taxi Driver #2

So when we first arrived in Bulgaria Jeff wrote a funny post about a somewhat crazy taxi driver we had one evening entitled, "Taxi Driver #1."  We expected to have many more taxi drivers to talk about but for the most part all the drivers we've had have been courteous and friendly.  Until this evening.

Margaret, a friend of my coworker, Lindsay, arrived in Sofia tonight and seeing as how I was the only international staff on campus, I went to greet her at the gate (you have to have a gate pass to get in and she doesn't have one yet).  Lindsay will be arriving later tonight.

Anyway, when the taxi pulled up to the gate I expected Margaret to pay, jump out, get her bags, and we would be on our way back onto campus.  But instead it looked like she and the taxi driver were arguing.  Did she forget to get leva at the airport?  Did she not have enough?  Finally, she stepped out of the car and said, "Are you Shannon? I'm Margaret.  He's charging me 37 lv for this ride and I don't have enough money."  I was dumbfounded!  It costs no more than 8 lv to get from the airport to campus.  This is when I realized that this was not OK Taxi (the reliable and trustworthy company that we always use).  And according to the sign on his window, he charges 4.99 lv for every km.  This is absurd!

So we argued with him - me saying it should only be 8 lv, Margaret saying she would pay 15 lv if he would just give her bags to her (they were in the trunk), him saying it's his company and that's what he charges and he would call the police.  He wouldn't budge.  Grr.  I hadn't brought any cash with me to meet her, so she finally convinced him that if he would take her to an ATM she would pay 30 lv.  What a rip off!  So off they went.

When they got back about 10 minutes later she got out of the car and said, "I'm really sorry to do this to you Shannon, but the ATM wouldn't take my card, so can I borrow 10 lv?"  Poor thing!  What a terrible welcome to this country (although she had been here before). So I ran back to my house, grabbed some cash, and ran back to Margaret and the taxi driver (probably took me more than 5 minutes - it's a bit of a distance from the gate).  I gave her a ten, she had 15, the driver demanded 30 and finally accepted the 2 American dollars she had in her wallet.  We both told him how rude this was, what a rip-off it was, how if he had just accepted the 15 in the first place he could have gotten other fairs already, and finally, how he made an incredibly poor welcome to foreigners here. His response was, "It's not my problem."  Jackass.

The sad thing about this is that Margaret was well-prepared for this.  Lindsay had given her enough cash for a snack and a cab ride from the airport.  She had instructed her to only take OK Taxi and to beware of impostors.  Margaret even asked the person helping her to the taxi if it was OK Taxi and he said yes.  The truth was that the O in OK had a slash in it and they were called Softrans instead of Supertrans (in Cyrillic of course: софтранс vs. супертранс - how is someone who doesn't read Cyrillic supposed to tell the difference?!?).  In fact, their phone number was off by only one digit from OK's phone number.  So having only been here once before, having been told this was OK Taxi, and, I suppose, believing that people are inherently good, Margaret got in and didn't think to look at the price. And paid a price for the corruption that is so common in this country.

So, to finish this story, we love OK Taxi and really hate those nasty impostors.  Here is a good description of how to tell the real OK Taxi from the fake ones (especially at the airport) by our friend Carolyn http://karolinkabulgaria.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/yeah-o-k-taxi/.  This will be especially useful to anyone who might be traveling here.

We'd heard about this sort of bad experience with the taxis here, but until this evening had not had the pleasure of actually having one of these experiences.

Welcome to Bulgaria, Margaret.  I hope the rest of your stay is much more pleasant.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

WeGo Yugo Part 1: хаиде ("Hai-day").

It's been over a month since we posted, and we've had lots of great adventures, including a short trip to Norway and visiting friends and family in Colorado and Michigan. I've also got pictures from Prague saved up, as well as a "Best of Bulgaria, Year 1" picture show to post. All in due time (or overdue time). Right now it's more important to blog while the experiences are fresh.  And right now what's fresh is Albania.
Back when we found out we were heading to Bulgaria, we raided the local Bozeman Public Library for anything Bulgaria-related. Not surprisingly, that wasn't very much, and a lot of that only mentioned Bulgaria peripherally.  Much of what I could find on the region focused on the former Yugoslavia.  Intrigued, we planned to visit as soon as we could.
Last summer, I thought we'd head to Croatia. It's supposed to have a beautiful coastline, and it's really not that far (less than 300 miles by air from Sofia to Dubrovnik), at least as the crow flies or even as the crappy car drives, if there were reasonable roads, which there aren't. We tried to go to Macedonia (only 70 miles to the border from Sofia) last September but were foiled by a crappy tour agency and some miscommunication.  We looked into taking the train to Montenegro last November for our "flu vacation", but the trains there and back would have taken almost 4 days of our 5 day break. OK, we'll fly. Europe is full of cheap flights. Except not to Croatia from Bulgaria. Now have a biggish chunk of time in the prime summer travel season, and we considered going to the Alps (we love the mountains), but decided that while the Alps are relatively easy to get to on a short break, this might be the only time we could get to the "Western Balkans," as Lonely Planet calls the region. Yugoslavia road trip here we come!

Sort of. First we needed a car. We bought a car, in May, except that we didn't actually own it yet. By the time we left for the USA, we had a lovely red 1991 VW Passat parked on our lawn, that we had nick-named "хаиде" (pronounced "hai-day," Bulgarian for "Let's Go!").  We had paid for it, and had the keys for it, but it was still registered to someone we'd never met. We bought it from another American couple that teaches at the school, and they had bought it the year before from the wife of a Scottish teacher at the school, but they'd never gotten around to transferring the ownership. When we tried to take care of this at the end of the school year, we were foiled by busy schedules and Bulgarian bureaucracy (we had to have 6 months left on our residence cards to register a vehicle, and they were set to expire in June). We still drove хаиде around on errands in Sofia illegally, but figured crossing multiple non-European Union borders with an apparently-stolen vehicle was just asking for trouble.  We had a very hard time getting in contact with the owner of the vehicle, so that the whole time we were in the USA, we didn't know if we would ever be able to get our car legal.

Once we were back to Sofia, thankfully the rightful owner of the car was very cooperative, and able to meet up on our first day back. We didn't have the time or patience to change car into our names, but we got notarized documents saying we're legal drivers of the vehicle, which seemed sketchy but we were told was good enough for now. Ready to go!

Except not really. We were really jet lagged, we had no itinerary, no plan, no reservations, hadn't unpacked from our trip to the US...vacation was stressing us out. (Me, at least. Shannon read a book or two, put her feet up, and still probably managed to accomplish more useful packing/unpacking than I did while I tried to plan our next trip.)  So we laid low a bit, waiting until Friday to leave. Planning a circuit through Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, maybe Bosnia, maybe Italy, Slovenia, and Serbia (all in 12 days) we'd cover 2500 km or so in total. That would be not such a big trip in the US, but here, it's ambitious.

We decided to tackle the likely hardest drive (Sofia --> Dubrovnik, Croatia, 831 km) first, as it had the most border crossings and worst roads. Splitting it up into 2 days seemed like a good choice. We decided our first stop for the night would be Tirana, Albania, of which we knew almost nothing, except that it was up-and-coming and the former-artist mayor had used brightly colored paint to spruce up the drab Communist-era apartment blocks. Google Maps claimed it was a 7.5 hour drive. We figured Google Maps was wrong, but we had no real idea how wrong, or even in what direction it was wrong (it often over-estimated drive times in the rural Western US), and no one we knew had any better estimates for us.

It was really wrong. It took us almost 12 hours of driving, not 7.5. We hardly stopped at all. We never had to get gas (the beauty of going 40 mph all day). We didn't stop to eat (brought a cooler with snacks.) The border crossings weren't too bad (and they never cared to see our paperwork that we weren't stealing the car, of course).  Even a 12 hour day of driving might not be too bad, in the US on the interstate with a book-on-tape to while away the hours on cruise control.  But it wasn't that sort of a 12-hour drive.

хаиде is good at a few things.  The heater works (not that helpful in August, but I'm sure we'll appreciate it eventually). The windshield wipers work. And as the name says, it goes. It got us all the way to Albania. хаиде is not so good at some other things. There is no A/C. There is no cruise control.  The radio mostly doesn't work. The wheels feel wobbly. The transmission feels like it's going to fall out.  About two hours into our journey, the exhaust system blew a whole. On our first descent down a mountain pass in Macedonia, we discovered the brakes were soft. Push-the-pedal-to-the-floor-to-get-a-response soft. Good times.

With the blown exhaust system, хаиде was LOUD.  It didn't help that we had to have the windows down because it was hot and we didn't have any A/C. We started wearing ear-plugs, though this didn't really get rid the low-frequency rumble in your chest. Luckily, the brakes weren't OUT, just weak, and it was only a problem going downhill (though that seemed problem enough).  We took the biggest "through" routes we could...there just aren't too many kilometers of modern expressways in these parts...at least they were all paved without giant potholes (unlike many Bulgarian roads). There was enough traffic on these windy mountain roads that going down in 3rd gear was OK. This helped me not have to use the brakes very much, which was nice.

We arrived at the Macedonian resort area of Lake Ohrid (Trivia Time: at 3 million years old and 300 m deep, Lake Ohrid is the oldest, deepest lake in the Balkans) around 6pm.  Decision time. Stay at the beautiful lake ringed by mountains and try to get the car fixed, or push on (supposedly) 2 more hours (only 80 miles) to Tirana, the capital of Albania?  So far Google had been told us a 6 hour drive would take 5. Not too bad.  We had a hotel reservation in Albania, and none in Ohrid (on a Friday night in the tourist season). Tirana was a much bigger city (population close to a million). Where would we be more likely to find a mechanic to work on the weekend? A after a quick dip in the lake at the lovely but crowded and littered beach in Struga, we pushed on to Albania, hoping to get there by dark.

Albania is not the best choice for your 3rd country in a day with a crappy old car. It's really hard driving. We never left 3rd gear in Albania, except for stints in 2nd to climb the insanely steep route to the capital city (this was the main route, not some scenic detour through the mountains!).  It is beautiful though (many, many mountains), as least from what we could see while it was still light out. It took us over 3 hours to go the 90 or so miles from the border to Tirana, all the while with crappy brakes and the loud drone of a muffler-less car. I hope as Albania develops they invest in a few more streetlights, as the lack thereof was also a bit of an extra challenge on the way in.

If you like hand car-washes, Albania is the place for you. Every roadside establishment (and many shacks that could hardly qualify as establishments) offers "Lavazh," usually advertised by a guy holding a high-powered hose spraying into the air, just waiting eagerly to remove your road filth. For a country that didn't have any drivers outside the communist dignitaries 15 years ago, they are now very very concerned with having a clean car.  It's also a good place to find a slightly used but durable bunker. Approximately 750,000 semi-underground, concrete-and-steel bunkers (about enough for every family) were built during the Communist years, all over the countryside, and they're so indestructible that they're pretty much all still there.  Very odd sights, the bunkers and the car washes of Albania.

We rolled into downtown Tirana around 10:00 pm local time.  It seems like a really happening place. Lots of young people strolling the streets, the restaurants and bars seemed to be in full swing, and main square downtown (Trivia #2: "Skanderbeg Square", after a national hero that fought off the Turks for many years) was bright and felt safe to walk around.  We amazingly found our hotel after not too long (we didn't have a good map or decent directions), and the friendly staff at Hotel Lugano even arranged for us to have our car looked at in the morning (Thanks!).

The mechanic that was luckily right below our hotel seemed confident and helpful, but we had to go through a few different people to translate our concerns. He didn't need our translators once he put the car up on lift though: the muffler was clear detached from the exhaust pipe, the front wheels were loose "Terrible. Like you are swimming on the road," and the brake fluid was low.  He could fix the brakes today (Saturday morning), but would have to wait until Monday for rest.

Hmmmm. 
Tirana was just supposed to be an overnight stop en route to Dubrovnik. Staying an extra 48 hours would kill the rest of the itinerary. No mountains in Slovenia. :( 
But the mechanic was here, cheap, willing to do it, we were exhausted, who knows how hard it would be to find a mechanic in Croatia, and the "road Karma" seemed to suggest we should stay and check out Albania. So here we are.  Haning out in Tirana.
During our past travels in Europe we have lamented not having a car, figuring it would be so much easier if we could just go places when we wanted on our own schedule. Here we are reminded of the albatrosses of car ownership as well. We still can't go where we want when we want, and it's expensive and stressful as well. I guess independent travel can be difficult no matter how you do it, unless you pay someone lots of money to take care of all your problems for you.
[Yes, I know we should have taken the car to the shop in Bulgaria before we left to check it out.  I'll hide under the lame excuses that the previous owners had it all checked up (supposedly) before we got it in May, and we didn't know a mechanic in Sofia either, and we didn't have time, blah blah blah. It's just easier to be lazy when doing the "right" thing is so much harder, as most things still are in Bulgaria.]

So we'll figure out some interesting things to see in Albania, we'll adjust our schedule, and we'll have a great road trip, with brakes and hopefully without the need for earplugs.