Smorgas-Bourgas

I awoke with a jolt when the train suddenly stopped in Bourgas.  What surprised me about all this is that I had actually slept at all.  The night train from Sofia had been packed, smelly, and fully of atrocious soccer hooligans* who were evidently just scream-counting to ten.  Getting to Bourgas may not have been comfortable but it was fairly easy.  From Prishtina I bused to Skopje, then immediately caught a bus to Sofia (at a terrible exchange rate in the bus depot because it was some sort of Orthodox holiday and everything was closed) and then found the Black Sea Express to the coast.  I had been through 4 countries in 24 hours, and the first thing I did when I emerged from the train at 5:30am was crawl onto a bench in the station and fall as asleep and the first thing the security guard did when he saw me was grunt angrily and poke me with a stick, telling me to leave.

I'm very much convinced that Bulgarian grandfathers are the original hipsters.

 Bourgas is great.  I think the Russians had something to do with it.  I couldn’t decide if I should stay there for the night and rest up for my big trip to Thrace, or if I should just go to Thrace and deal with the fallout later.  I decided to go to Thrace right away because there was the little matter of needing to withdraw cash.  I only like to withdraw $300 at a time, and while I could easily have blown $300 on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast on caviar and iced sweet red wine, my fiscal prudence had me counting the precious few lev I had left and purchasing a ride in a minivan (7 lev I believe) to Malko Tarnovo.  I had been to Veliko Tarnovo, so why not Malko Tarnovo?  It also was right on the border with Turkey, which I believed was a pretty good starting point to access Constantinople.

Surprise!  It wasn’t!  Malko Tarnovo, much like the name suggests, is a small Tarnovo.  This is the smallest tarnovo I have ever been in, and while I had a great mixed grill at the local hotel, there wasn’t anything indicating a means of transport to Turkey, nor a Turkish border anywhere in sight.  So onwards I walked, assuming the border was close, and minibuses were waiting to whisk me away.  I took a few twists and turns through the woods and found myself on a road, hoping it was the road the Turkey.  It’s fairly fortuitous I stumbled out onto it when I did because a car immediately stopped for me and drove me all the way to Constantinople. 

The driver’s name was Rouman and he was in logistics, or shipbuilding, or engineering, or porting, or something along those lines.  He had been to Vancouver, and much of the rest of the world.  Now he was driving to Constantinople for a business meeting of sorts and dropped me off in the centre square, which was possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.  Have you seen Constantinople?  It’s one of the biggest cities in the world and the suburbs look hot, unpleasant, and they start at the Greek border. 

C-Stan approaches.

Rouman also told me many great stories, and finally cracked the riddle of the Vauxhall mystery for me.  Evidently the Russian tsar had sent two agents to the UK to learn about railways and the two agents ended up getting disastrously drunk.  When the tsar asked them to relay all their information they could not remember a thing, and when the tsar asked what the train stops in they reached into their memories and came up with the only thing that stood out: Vauxhall, which is the name of a stop in London.  And now that name is on every train station across all the Russias.  The more you know.

And just like that, after waking up in a smelly and dingy train in Bourgas, and before that having been told by my best friend, like in Harry and the Hendersons, to “go on!” because I wasn’t wanted anymore, I was in one of the oldest and mot cosmopolitan cities on the planet.  The city was pulsing with life around every corner, so I took this opportunity to really let loose, find my bunk bed and fall asleep at 6:30 in the evening.

*AHHH!  What is up with soccer hooligans?  They are ruining Europe!  Young, unemployed men (myself excluded) are the worst thing for a society!

Chisinau's Last Straw

So as you can guess, I went to the Moldovan National History Museum and loved it.  I woke up with a start one morning and, barely conscious, exclaimed, “I need to get out of Moldova.”  I’m not sure on what prompted the urgency.  In fact, I had gotten comfortable in Moldova.  Maybe a little too comfortable.  I had started a blog, filed my tax return, was complimented on my English by some med students from Palestine*, and I dined on homemade perogies stuffed with wild mushrooms and served in a mushroom-and-sour-cream sauce; and I was growing as a person and learning new things about myself.

One of the things I learned about myself in this time is that I can walk much faster than a 45-year-old Iranian-British woman.  These are the kinds of things one learns by opening up and experiencing the world.  Or, in some cases, having the world invite itself to the Moldovan National Museum with you and expect you to translate everything into English (from MOLDOVAN), loudly take pictures in the museum that cause the museum staff to speak sternly to you and then get targeted by some old curatress with a thirst for American dollars who follows you around and offers to tell you “secrets” about the museum in exchange for a handsome tip—“nothing compared to what you earn in America.”

Actually, I’m not quite sure why I said I loved my visit to the Moldovan National History Museum.  It was one of the most stressful and uncomfortable trips I have ever made.  Normally I am left alone and can wander for three-to-six hours, taking covert pictures of industrial products from the former Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, and the agricultural bounty afforded by its almost-Mediterranean position.  But this time it was not to be, and I instead found myself voluntarily leaving a museum for the first time (instead of being told to leave half an hour before closing by a woman who just wants to go home where she can continue to sit and presumably finish her Sudoku).  

After, I opted for coffee and postcard-writing, articulating this in a way that unambiguously hinted at a desire for "me time."  Nevertheless she joined me, and spent most of the time expressing disbelief at how tragic it was that these beautiful Moldovan girls, who dressed so smartly, had only ugly Moldovan men to choose from.  I said that this was probably an unfair generalisation (here I was telling someone else that they were making unfair generalisations!  The world had turned on its head!) but she had a PhD in Sociology, or Psychology, or Physics, or in something which of course trumped anything I knew.  We also encountered a Pole who was protesting outside the Russian Embassy due to the Kaczynski Affair.  He only spoke French and I had to play translator again until finally I exclaimed, "Stop it!  Stop taking advantage of the languages I only pretend to know!  I am an Anglo-Saxon—'fluency' means being able to order beer."

As such, the following morning I awoke with a jolt and realised it was time to GTFO.  I packed my things and bid adieu to the people I had grown fond of, and headed towards the bus depot.  It was around this time that I realised it was harder to get out of Moldova than I ever could have thought.  There were no buses going in quite the direction I wanted, and none leaving at acceptable hours.  I tried for the train station and only found one going to the Ukrainian border.  The ticket was affordable—in the $1-$1.50 range so I splurged on coach and was horrified to discover we were to be packed in like cattle on the only train running on the only track in all of Moldova.  At this point I thought maybe disguising myself as a mail-order bride would speed up the process of getting out.

The train creaked and trundled along, and we gradually lost most of the people, allowing me to grab a real seat and attract a bit of attention when I got yelled at by the conductor for having the bag on the seat next to me instead of safely stowed overhead.  One woman asked why I was travelling alone, and I told her that, believe it or not, Moldova was a hard sell for my friends.  Suddenly, the Prut River was in sight and across it Romania—Europe, the EU, roads, freedom, America!  I decided to absorb the cost of the train ticket that would have deposited me on the Ukrainian border at 11 pm and de-trained at Ungheni to make a mad dash for the border.

*They told me, “Your English is really good, not like the other Moldovans.”  I thanked them heartily and went on my way.  It made my day.