21-VIII-2012.: Bulgaria
On 20th, we said our farewells to the oldwave gang. Didn't have much to pack, just the nanovo and what we bought*, and got into the car to drive to Sofija. The Sićevačka valey is where we made the first stop, just to stretch our legs and make a bunch of shots - but then it's the wrong vantage point, you don't get the idea of how deep and narrow the valey is.
The proper džezva, as in old times.
Got to Pirot again, and had some beans - nothing to write home about, the cook will be pardoned as soon as the firing squad starts aiming (and they say you can't fuck up the beans), but the coffee was the old style turkish. Though they stopped calling it turkish while we were away, it's now called domaća (domestic), but at least it came in a real traditional džezva, just like it always did.
Crossed the border fine. It's been decades since our last trip east, and that was to Romania; this is the first time in Bulgaria. The economy seems dismal - the 50km from the border showed little local traffic, and what billboards we saw had overwhelmingly empty frames. Not just content free, but empty, not even a board, birds can fly through them. The only advertiser was some bank, offering a generous interest. Now the bulgarian word for interest is lihva, and in serbian lihvar is an usurer. Doesn't bode well.
We got into town alright, and Lena navigated fine (I guess the new GPS we bought from Nena and Rile's shop), except that when we got into the place where we should just cross the street and get into the little alley where the hotel was, that street turned out to be a six lane boulevard, what with tram lines, and I didn't dare cross all that, it seemed like some kind of rush hour and on this crossing there was no light. So I took to the right, trying to get back into the street by which we came here, then skip this street in which we were and emerge from the next, then take a left to the hotel. Yeah, right, I made six kilometers, this is an old european city where nothing goes straight and right angles are few. At some point I was on cobblestones, between market stalls, parked cars and tram rails. Still, managed to get there by 15:10, got into our room, and heard that David still hasn't arrived. Pulled out the nanovo and found the phone number my UA pal left, called him and he knew where we were (just two blocks behind the parliament building), and arranged to have him come at 18:00.
By 17:00 David still hasn't arrived. This being the EU and the hotel being spanking new, built above the walls of the roman colosseum, we just sat outside on the steps and smoked. It was still hot but now bearable. Eventually, he appeared, greeted everyone, left his stuff in the room, and we went to meet my old UA friend. Who didn't appear as scheduled, but then the place where we were supposed to meet was just around the corner. We started going, and then I noticed a pair of feet in funny blue plastic sneakers, with space for each toe separately. Then I did a doubletake - and so did he. We recognized each other from those tiny 96x96 avatar pictures on UA, one of the rare places on the net where people post their real pics (except one italian guy who put Brad Pitt - and later turned out to be not too wrong about it). So we sat there at Count Dondukov's, had dinner and a couple of beers, and of the many pictures we made almost all were blurry, as eos40, for some reason, went long exposure, even with flash on.
Roommates with David again, after five years. In the morning, we tried to have a breakfast in the hotel, but that's charged extra, at 3€ apiece. However, the desk clerk told him 10€, which is the luxury version. We went to the girls' room instead, and nibbled on what we bought in Niš, plus that excellent cheese from Pirot, and some local butter from the supermarket. This grocery store seems to belong to the same chain as the Maxi at home, even though the names differ, but the Food Lion logo is a giveaway. Just like the bank where we lifted some levs (via serekeš, of course) is the same as the one we use, different name, same logo.
Then we took a cab to that clinic. They showed us around; we even had to wear the lab coats and head and shoe wrappers. Nothing for my beard, though. The layout of rooms is labyrinthine; my first question when we finished the walkabout and sat with the big guy was "how do you find the door?".
The presentation went quite well - took rather long, too, because we spent half an hour just showing how far we can do cyrillic. Then it was a barrage of questions about how do we connect to this or that machine. In the end, big guy's son took us to Niagara restaurant, complaining while we walked there how there's fewer Bulgarians every year, while the Gypsies multiply, and the clinic is doing its best to counter that a little. Once there, we fought our way through a very rich meal, which was about the double size.
It's, BTW, a private clinic, but it wasn't the clinic who invited us, it was about a half of it, in prepraration of splitting the business in two, which they plan to do by the end of the year, and want to have the app from first day. The main doctor is some guy Malinov, and his son's first name is Javor, and David once ran it through a translator and got Maple Raspberry, which he first thought was a joke. But then he's a man of the world, he knows how funny names can be.
In the evening, went up the hill from the hotel, by the national theatre, where they have the square paved with the yellow brick (aka keramit) - felt like home. The beer was right, even though they didn't have the bolyarka, but the nice waitress said the kaltenberg is just the same, from the same brewery. Smelled of some almost familiar spice (turns out it's the summer savory, very popular here). David insisted on paying, even though we had a few dozen extra levs that we couldn't possibly spend, the plan being to zap home in the morning. He eventually bought them off for 20$ (american). No shots there, as I've been shooting for the whole week and finally managed to run out of space on the memory card (8G then). I moved them onto the laptop and then still somehow managed to run them through my naming script (so they kept the timestamps), but somehow didn't put the proper eos&underscore; prefix, so it stayed with canon's imgnnnn format, which then confused me regularly, because it made me think these were from someone else's camera. Could have just as well left them as they were, because the next day we left after breakfast (some garden on a square on one of the squares above the hotel), left David with two liters of brandy (an apple and one of dad's apricots). Drove off and didn't feel like stopping anywhere, nor like taking any pictures. Just drove straight to Belgrade, where we arrived around 13:30, in five hours something. Left Lena at her place and went home. johana, Donald and the black one were quite thin and very happy to see us. Went to Čankovo and picked a bucket of tomatoes. There was practically no fruit this summer, so we didn't even pull out the still, made no brandy this season.
The epilogue of this travel was that we never heard from Malinov again. David called a few days later (he stayed in Sofia for at least a day longer, perhaps he caught some chick, I think he has one in each city), when he arrived in Toronto, just to report that „the brandy is beneficial in action, it improves the mood and acts as a mellowing agent“.
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* the kačkavalj cheese we bought in Pirot and what drinks we bought from Jović, except I gave the box with the bottles to Škrba, to leave at my dad's on his way back, as I didn't feel comfortable smuggling booze to Bulgaria and back. Which turned out fine, he did as we agreed, just that he mistakenly left half a bottle of drenovača in my box. Wikipedia says dren is Cornelian cherry dogwood, so there weere drenjine, i.e. dogwood berries, at the bottom of the bottle. We tried it, awful. One doesn't stuff berries into good brandy, it's good as it is, it's the fuckups that they try to cover. Whenever I see fruit in the bottle, I expect bad booze, and it usually is.
Couple of months later Škrba called to check if we found the bottle. Yes we did, when do you want it back? No no no no don't return it, keep it, just checking how much my memory is slipping and how much can I restore.
We didn't drink it. Probably poured it into the next year's mush and redistilled.
Mentions: Čankovo, David Berton, Donald, eos40, Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Johana, nanovo, Nevena Žaja (Nena), oldwave, Rista Stančulov (Rile), serekeš, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian