Plov-Diving into Plovdiv

Sadly enough there wasn't a single dish of plov in Plovdiv to dive into, and I have been subsequently scathing of my review of the city ever since.  I love Plov, despite what I was told by an old Russian cafe proprietress in Simferopol who told me that it was no good.  I suspect she was a bit racist, though, and just didn't like the Tatars.  Anyway, I actually did like Plovdiv, plov shortage notwithstanding, mainly because I really love Bulgaria and as always I regretted not spending more time in the country.  

Getting to Plovdiv was no treat, however, only made worse by the lack of plov upon arrival.  Walking from the border and trying to catch a ride was particularly difficult because no one had time for me.  Some even gave me a thumbs down, which I think reflects poorly on their upbringing.  Everyone transiting between Turkey and Bulgaria were just a bunch of busy assholes, and I ended up walking for a really long time in considerable heat.  The highlight of this walk was in a sort of abandoned retail strip zone where two men emerged from behind a container and demanded to see my identification.  Guess how I reacted.  Just guess.  

I was pretty set on not giving them my passport, despite the fact that they looked like Olympic weightlifting coaches, but when the badges and guns came out I thought, "Fine.  I will show you my passport, but if you keep it I will do something that will make you have to kill me and then you'll be greatly inconvenienced by having to dispose of my body" which I like to think guided their decisions wisely.  It turns out they were part of the EU's "green border" patrol and had to ensure any suspicious characters weren't in the country illegally.  While I tried to explain that obviously I wasn't in the country illegally, because it was Bulgaria, I just let the whole ordeal happen because getting in fights with police officers is something I've decided is no longer worth my time. 

After this brush with EU internal security I continued on the long and lonely road towards the town of Svilengrad.  After being rejected for several rides, even from a van full of French hippies, I was picked up by a man on his way to the Svilengrad casino.  He could not wait to get there and burn all his cash.  He let me off in the casino parking lot and I was forced with the very uphill task of getting myself out of Svilengrad.  For such a small town, you would expect this to be easy, but sometimes Western geography degrees have zero application in the East.  Because geography is, like, different over there. 

Ugh.  Everything makes so much sense with a bird's eye retrospective view.  The blue line represents where I should have gone and the red line represents some totally needless anabasis on my part that only exhausted me physically and emotionally.  

Outside of Svilengrad I absolutely broke down and bought a Coca-Cola, which to me is an entirely insane gesture.  I think I can count on one finger the number of times I ordered a Coca-Cola in the past year.  In any case, it was starting to get dark, I was starting to panic, and no was was starting to indicate they would like to have me along for a ride.  Suddenly, and without warning, a car U-turned in front of me and a man picked me up.  He was a border guard, and seeing as I had been having such luck with them all day, I eagerly agreed to go along with him to Plovdiv where he lived.  He told me all about guarding Bulgaria's frontier from the wily Turks and said that I looked like one of the least threatening people to cross a border.  I suppose if lined up with human and drug traffickers and other swarthy brigands banging at the gates, that would be true. 

He also told me a number of fantastical stories: a Japanese man who had been walking across Asia to Europe for three years and had budgeted to spend $3/day and had lost a couple of fingers due to the cold and carrying his rickshaw ("it was not rickshaw, but yes, let us call it rickshaw"); a 90 year old Turkish woman found stuffed in the ceiling of a train who was trying to visit her husband in Bulgaria; how his mother's father had been aristocracy and had studied at the Sorbonne but had been sentenced to hard labour once the communists took over, while his father's father came from the peasantry and was a diehard communist.  In fact, this car ride to Plovdiv was incredibly pleasant and I feel like a better person for it.  He dropped me off at the train station and I was free to find my way to the centre of town and the hostel I was to stay at.