Bulgarian Daze

I’ve given you a few food nightmare stories, but I think it’s time you hear about the yummy side to life here. There are a lot of foods here that I’ve never seen back home or even heard of, but they are delicious!!!! For some reason, many of the best foods end in “itsa”, I don’t really know why this is, but here are a few examples:

Banitsa
Banitsa is a croissant like bread that is light and flaky. In the middle of the bread is a layer of feta cheese. It is REALLY GOOD!!! You can buy banitsa in cafes and at stands out on the sidewalk, but it is not nearly as good as the home-made stuff. How do I know, you ask? Well, because Mark’s partner’s wife made us some. She made us a whole bunch and we ate every.single.bite. until we rolled out of their apartment, down 6 flights of stairs and about one kilometer home. Here’s a picture of banitsa:

Lutenitsa
Lutenitsa is a sauce-like “salad” (they call it a salad) that is made from tomatoes and peppers pureed together. It looks like a thick ketchup or a thick salsa, but it tastes a little more peppery. “Lute” means hot, like spicy, so that’s why it’s called lutenitsa, although in truth, the salad really isn’t spicy at all. They just call it that because it’s made from peppers and you could, theoretically get hot peppers. Even so, it was really good, and I think it would be extra tasty on the banitsa……hmmmmm…. Here’s a picture of lutenitsa:

They also have really good ice creams here, like crème brule ice cream. Sounds weird, but it is actually quite tasty. When it’s not raining (a rare occasion lately), we like to walk the dog down to the ice cream stand and get a couple of cones and eat them on our way back. They have mini ice cream stores right out on the sidewalks here, so you don’t even have to go inside to buy it. They must know how much we like it!

And the white meat….they really know how to cook a piece of pork here. I have had a fear of pork for, well, my entire adult life. Part of this stems from my mother’s really horrible pork chops we were forced to eat as kids (sorry, Mom, but it’s true). It also comes from Mr. Price’s biology class in high school where he told us all pigs have worms called trichinosis and if the pork is not cooked well enough a worm will live inside your arm muscle forever. I’m serious. That’s what he told us. So I went 10 years without eating the meat of a pig. But I overcame it. Now, here, I am learning how to cook it.

They usually cook a pork chop type piece of meat and serve it in some yummy sauce with mushrooms and put it over rice. I really like it. They prepare chicken in a similar way, though sometimes the sauce is lighter and there may not be mushrooms.

So there you have it, food is not all weird here. It is actually usually quite good. We have never eaten anything bad when we are out. The problem just comes in shopping and ordering, but we can usually get an English menu. It gets a little scary when you don’t know what you’re eating! So, sorry, didn’t mean to frighten you…come on over, it’s safe to eat, really!

*Kids–this is probably going to be boring reading for you, so you may want to go check out my pictures or solve the math problem instead.

Well, this may seem weird to you, but I must end (for now) my small series of history lessons. Two times now, I have had strange people write long comments on the small errors in my history lessons. You see, the history here is not like the history in the United States. Our recorded history is short, only a little over 200 years. The history here goes back thousands of years. And throughout all this time, other countries have come into Bulgaria and taken over the land. This, of course, leads to arguments about who is right and who is wrong. Think of our situation with Iraq, only people have been arguing over this for thousands of years.
Since I am writing this blog to be “kid friendly”, I do not include every single detail. I guess this angers some readers. They think I leave out the information in an attempt to change history and not admit the truth. This problem is even more intense because of the current political situation over here. Perhaps you have been following the news???? Bulgaria is trying to join the EU and they will do so on January 1st, provided they meet certain requirements (more on that in another post). This apparently brings up all kinds of political situations which hearken back to years past.

So, when I innocently write a general description of history here, I risk upsetting Greeks or Turks or Macedonians or Slavs or who knows who else. The question really is…how are they finding my little blog??? I think they must be consulting Google for the History of BG or something.

But I do think the history is important, so I am determined to find a way to write about it without becoming the subject of political rants. I will probably have to not use key words people could find when searching, or using a “code” so they can’t find me, something like: His.to.ry of Bul.gar.ia. Then I can hide, and continue my non-political, brief overview of the past without all the hassle of hearing how I offended one of the neighbors.

Sheesh!! You come for a little stay, try to do a little educating and the next thing you know, everyone’s mad at you. Touchy, touchy!

p.s. Don’t go looking for the long, obnoxious comments–I already erased all of them!

p.p.s. Seriously, though, one dude wrote like a three page term paper on the finer points of history I missed. I mean, GET A LIFE peeps, really!

Well, once we lost the Amazing Race, we went on to Vitosha Mountain anyways.  We rode the orange Hallelujah-we-finally-found-you! gondola up to the top.  Well, almost to the top.  The view was beautiful.  There are forests and meadows and you can see the whole city of Sofia:

We decided to go check out where the main path led first.  After a short walk (in case you forgot or never read the first part of this story, you should know that we had been walking for two hours already), we found a rocky overlook area where we could relax a bit and take some pictures of the city.

We hung out here for a while, but then our hunger started to set in.  In our frenzy to win the race find the gondola, we hadn’t eaten lunch.  So we each ate a few Altoids mints as lunch, for now.

Then we headed further down the path.  Here, there was a grassy meadow where Mark decided I should go pretend to be Maria from “The Sound of Music” and spin in circles.  Of course, I never turn down a cheesy opportunity like this.  After all, that was me who went to San Francisco and took a picture on a cable car with a Rice-A-Roni box.

So I started to head down to the meadow and I realized this is no little grassy meadow.  These bushes are thick and go up to my knees.  I mean, there could be snakes or bears hidden in there.  But I took a deep breath and did it anyways.  I never pass up a dare!  And here are the results:

I know, I know.  Get me a nun outfit and I could totally be in the movie!  Well, on my way back up to the path, I found some little blueberries on these bushes.  I thought they were blueberries.  Here, check this out, and I think you’ll agree:

Seeing as how we still hadn’t eaten, I picked a few and we ate them.  Turns out, they were not blueberries, they were juniper berries…oops!  As we continued down the path, I also found raspberries. Now I am sure these were raspberries.  So we ate those too.  Finally we found another rocky area that had a stream running underneath it.  Again, we rested.  By now, our feet really were hurting.  It seemed like we had walked hundreds of miles.  So we headed back to the area where they gondola had left us.

When we got there, we noticed there was a little snack shop where you could buy chips and drinks with a little area outside that had tables and chairs.  We bought some food (finally! I was getting weak with hunger) and sat outside in the sunny, but cool air.

A family came over and asked to share our table with us, and we, of course, agreed.  Well this family had a black Lab just like the two dogs we left at home, Lola and Dakota.  We were dying to pet the pup, but we wanted to be polite.

“Do you speak English?” we asked.
“A little”, they answered. “Sprechen sie Deutsch?” they asked us (that means—Do you speak German?).
“No…where are you from?” we asked them.
They laughed. “Sofia”.  And here we thought they had come all the way from Germany.  “Sprechen sie Bulgarian” Mark told them.

Ahahahaha.  He is sooooooo funny.  Well, the family at least thought so.  Good, now we have our “in” to pet the dog….

“So, what is your dog’s name?” we asked, all sly.
“Leo”.
“Ahhh, like Leonardo daVinci”, I said.
“Like Leonardo diCaprio”, Mark said.
“Like daVinci, not diCaprio” they said.

Oops again.  Good thing they were forgiving!  We asked to pet him and they let us.  He was so so so so cute, just like ours back home.  While we were playing with Leo, we realized how much we missed our dogs and got a little sad.  So we decided to head back down the mountain and go look at pictures of them…

Even though we had a rough start to the day, we really enjoyed our time on Vitosha.  Living in the city is loud, dirty and full of people.  The mountains were clean and quiet and had fresh air.  And now, Mark is already planning like 200 ski trips to all the mountains around!

I generally try to post every day during the week, but I skipped a day or two because…it was Mark’s birthday! That’s right, he’s the big 3-7 now…So, how do you celebrate a birthday in Bulgaria?

Well, here’s how we did it. I wanted to do the usual–get a cake, buy some presents, go to a nice dinner. But not so easy! Shopping here is, ummmm, a bit difficult. Besides the fact that it is hard to find a store that sells what you are looking for, the sizes here are different. I wanted to buy Mark some slippers or some shoes, but what size should I buy him? And it would be REALLY difficult to return something if it didn’t fit. So, I decided against the shoes, or any clothing for that matter. What else? After trying to fit everything for one year into two suitcases, I knew that if I bought something he doesn’t really need, we’d never be able to bring it back to the United States. So, the present idea was OUT!

On to the nice restaurant. Mark had spotted a nice restaurant on one of our dog walks and he had been wanting to try it. So, we got all dressed and ready to go, walked to the restaurant, went inside the restaurant which seemed to be open (the tables weree set and the candles were lit), but nobody was there. I mean NOBODY! Strange. So, the nice dinner was also OUT!

The birthday was not so successful so far. I needed to save it. I had found a cute, cozy pizzeria place during my walks, so we ended up eating dinner there. Instead of a gift, I took dog walking duty for three days and gave Mark a foot and head massage. But, the cake. Oh, the cake. SUCCESS!

I had secretly called Mark’s partner, Niki, and asked where I could get a cake. He offered to get a cake for me and meet me in secret. So Niki picked out a beautiful, little cake with fresh fruit on top. I hid the cake inside the house, sent Mark to do some housework in the bedroom and set up the cake and a card. Now you know we didn’t have any candles. You know, us?who can’t even find a pencil? For sure we never found candles. But we did have incense sticks. So I stuck an incense stick out the side of the cake so the ashes wouldn’t fall on the cake, and…voila!..we had a birthday cake! Guiseppe and I sang, we removed the incense, and cut the cake. The inside looked like chocolate. Turns out, it was made with some type of dough and passionfruit (similar to guava). This wasn’t quite what we were expecting, but hey! we had a cake!

It felt a little like a Survivor-type birthday with just making the best out of what we had. I suppose we could have busted open a coconut and lit the incense inside of that. But all in all, we had some good laughs about the whole situation and decided we’d go shopping for slippers together this week.

!!!!!!!!!Happy Birthday, Mark!!!!!!!!

See–you think I am talking about a job, like should I get a job or should I not? But, no. I am not talking about ME working. I’m talking about things in general working…

Every morning I wake up and begin this new little “game” where I walk around and see what is and is not working that day. This allows me to plan for my busy events. No electricity? Well, that’s a day for reading, writing in my journal, and Sudokuing. No internet? That’s a day for writing blog entries and saving them, or learning how to doctor photos so I look 23 years old again (seriously, though, I really have learned how to remove all my wrinkles). No toaster? Well, that’s a day for cereal. You get the idea.

But I draw the line at the TV. It is 100 % unacceptable for us not to have a functional TV. Granted, there isn’t much to watch on TV here. Here is a list of the stations we get in English:
1. CNN News
2. CNBC Business News
3. Animal Planet
4. Discovery
5. Discovery/History
6. Discovery Civilization
7. National Geographic

They usually play about 6 hours worth of programs, then play those 6 hours again and again and again. So, with such boring TV, why must I have it? The short answer is I don’t know. I just know that the sound of the TV in the background while I work relaxes me. You know where this is going….

Yesterday, the TV stopped working. No channels, only that gray/black/white static stuff. So now the toaster, DVD player, and TV aren’t working while the internet/phone, and electricity work sometimes. Ok, I’ll admit it. I got mad. Really mad. The problem is that there is nobody to get mad at. At home, I would simply call the cable company (and the internet, electric, DVD and toaster companies). But here, I can’t. There is nobody to understand me in English and I don’t understand them in Bulgarian.

Mark finally called the landlord on his vacation. We were feeling all guilty about interrupting his week off, until he called back and explained the problem. You see, in his haste to get to vacation, he had accidentally forgotten to pay the bill. Hopefully it will be working by tomorrow afternoon, he says.

I say, Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

p.s. The good thing about all this is that I am now an expert in downloading movies and TV shows off the internet and burning them on to CDs…every cloud has a silver lining, blah blah blah.

*This is the title of a great children’s book–read it if you haven’t already!

**Don’t read this post if you are eating.

One of the things Bulgaria is known for is its cheese. They use a goat cheese, similar to feta, on everything from salad to french fries. Now, I love cheese as much as the rest of you. My favorite kind is that powdery, yellow astronaut-looking cheese you mix with milk and put on the macaroni and cheese. You know the stuff. I also enjoy a slightly rubbery, individually wrapped American single on a sandwich or in a quesadilla. If I’m feeling really fancy, I’ll cut up that jalapeno havarti cheese, or eat some brie on a cracker (this is especially popular at the thousands of baby showers, bridal showers, and tupperware/Mary Kay/Pampered Chef parties women force each other to attend).

But the cheese here….well…it’s probably something fantastic to you cheese connoisseurs. To me, it hurts. It smells like old Teva sandals worn for a few too many years. I can almost taste the curdling milk (kids–hate to tell you this, but cheese is made from milk after it is no longer good enough to drink). That being said, I like it in small doses on the salads and french fries, but not on sandwiches or crackers.

I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but Mark and I shop by looking at pictures and guessing what we think the food is. It’s a fun game we play. Sometimes we hit a homerun, like with this tomato-y salsa stuff. Other times we don’t, like today.

It looked like hummus. The roasted red pepper hummus that is especially delicious when you buy it fresh from Henry’s and slather it on pita chips. We got some crackers (as close as we could get to pita chips) and headed on our way. I made a nice ham sandwich, gathered my “hummus” and “pita chips” and relaxed into my lunch. I layered my cracker with a tomato and a giant scoop of the roasted red pepper hummus and bit right into it.

Turns out….NOT ROASTED RED PEPPER HUMMUS at all!!! It was the stinky feet cheese doctored up with some red I-don’t-know-what spice disguised just to trick me into tasting it one more time. Needless to say, I spit that right out of my mouth and ended my dining session right then and there.

Perhaps you are thinking–well, Kristy that was fairly stupid of you to just bite into something before you knew what it was. And I agree. It won’t happen again, I assure you!

Yes, that’s right! Besides being a world-traveler, Guiseppe is also famous. I can tell what you’re thinking:

“Oh, no, Kristy has lost it. She is so lonely that she has become one of those people. You know, the ones who spend hours talking with their dog about world politics? Sometimes they even dress their dogs up (gasp!). You know those type of people? Well now she’s one of THEM!”

That may all be true, but I am telling you the truth. Guiseppe can barely walk down the street without people stopping and staring. They point and talk. In all fairness, we don’t understand anyone here, so we don’t know exactly what they are saying, but we imagine it to be something like this:

“There it is…the most famous of all dogs. I never thought I would see one in all my life. And yet, here he is!”

Why is he so famous, you ask? Well, it’s his rugged good looks and charming breath. And the fact that he is a Hush Puppy—you know of the infamous Hush Puppies shoes? Perhaps you are too young to know about this brand of shoes (go ask your parents!) Hush Puppies are still worn over here. In fact, we even found a Hush Puppies store. And on that store was a giant picture of Guiseppe, only dressed in brown and white fur instead of his normal black and white fur.

This explains a lot. At first, we thought people were laughing and pointing at us, being the out-of-place Americans that we are. Then we thought maybe they were laughing and pointing at us because we do something nobody else here seems to do—we pick up our dog’s poop off the sidewalk. Everyone else just leaves it and then you step in it. (I did this once while wearing flip-flops! Gross, I know. Let us never speak of it again.) But we dutifully take a bag and scoop up Guiseppe’s gifts every time we go for a walk. Perhaps they found this funny? Out-of-place Americans scooping poop off Bulgarian sidewalks?

But, no. They were laughing and pointing at the hound. Eventually, people got brave enough to try to talk to us, but that never goes very far due to our inability to speak or understand Bulgarian. It usually sounds something like this—blah, blah, blah, Hush Puppy, blah, blah, blah. Although we have had two HILARIOUS exchanges:

#1: We were walking back into our apartment building when a man with a loud booming voice said, “Oh look at his ears! THEY ARE LONG, BEAUTIFUL EARS! May I just touch them, please?”

Of course we obliged. This gave Mark an idea—let’s start a business where people pay to touch his ears, he thought. Ummmm, no!

#2: I was walking Guiseppe down a very crowded street on our way to a park for the afternoon. A man was walking next to us and I had a feeling he was trying to speak to me. He kept trying to talk to me even though I didn’t answer back. So, finally I turned to him and said, “Sorry, I only speak English”. He said, “Ahhh” and held up his hand, signaling me to wait a minute while he thought of the words in English. Then he smiled all big, pointed at the hound, and exclaimed:

“SOOOOOPERRRR STARRR!”

“Yes”, I said. “He’s a Super Star”, and we shared a good laugh.

Well, needless to say, this has all gone straight to Guiseppe’s head. He is even acting like he’s famous now. Take, for instance, this photo, where you can see him lounging on one of OUR blankets.

Of course he would choose the leopard print.

Furthermore, he DEMANDS walks early in the morning and in the evening, not caring if I am too tired to walk a hound RIGHT THIS MOMENT. He steals bread off the countertops and if I try to take it back, he sinks his teeth in further and plays tug-o-war with me. Of course I lose—my hands are no match for his death grip.

I’ve tried to talk to him about his unruly behavior. I told him I thought he was getting a little big for his britches. But he just waved his paw at me (was that flashy thing a pinky ring??) and said something like, “Daahhhhhling, without me, you are invisible in this country. Your only chance to finally make it into People Magazine is as my doggie walker. So, puhleeze, stop bothering me with your complaints and cook me up some fresh meat”, as he puffed on his pipe and straightened his silky, red robe.

And so I did. I mean, he had a point. How else am I ever going to get into People Magazine???

…and it’s all Mark’s fault!

One of the main attractions here in Sofia is to go about 10 kilometers (6.6 miles for you Americans) out of town and take a ski lift up to the top of Mount Vitosha. You can see this mountain from our balcony:

We really wanted to do this before it got too cold. So, Mark asked his partners how to get there, and they said to just show a taxi driver the map and point to the area of the ski lift. Make sure to point at the right lift—there are two, one that is just the little chair and one that is a gondola.

No problem, we thought. So, on a Sunday morning we set out to take a taxi. Mark showed the man where we wanted to go, negotiated a price, and we were off! After a pretty short taxi ride, the man dropped us off on the side of a road. Now this was a main road, but there seemed to be little around it. We tried to ask him where the ski lift was, but he just waved his hand, collected his money, and left.

Well how hard can it be to spot a gondola? I mean, really! We started making all our funny jokes about being on the Amazing Race and where were the little gold and red markers indicating we were on the right path? hahaha. We walked up a little mountain road and began our search for large cables that would lead up the mountain, you know, possibly carrying bright orange gondolas. But we couldn’t see any. What we could see, though, was a huge, fancy hotel out in the middle of nowhere. So we went in to ask for directions.

Mark kept saying, “We are trying to get to the gondolas”. I muttered, “They don’t understand the word gondola, try to use the word ‘lift’”. But no, he insisted on using the word gondola, trying to show with his hands how a gondola would head UP the mountain. They just looked at him. I kept muttering the word lift. Finally Mark used the word lift, as if it had magically popped into his brain. And magically, they understood. Harumph! The lady said something about going back to the main road, turn left before the center of town and a river will be on your left and cross the river, or something like that. I felt we had all the necessary information—go left, cross a river, don’t go past the center of town.

I should have known better than to think I would understand the “center of town”. I foolishly expected there to be a TOWN. But there was a bus stop, a hidden restaurant and a snack shop. Later, we would learn that this area was indeed the center of town.

So, we walked on the main road. Lo and behold! There was a bright orange gondola!

(Look closely, you can see the orange gondola!)
Eureka, we thought! Even though we wasted all that time with the lift/gondola confusion, we were surely headed the right way and we could beat the other teams if we just hurried up! We turned left (remember?The lady said left! For sure this was the right way!) and headed down a small road. The gondolas were even above our heads. At this point, we praised our own navigational skills. Lesser humans would have never figured out to turn down this path. Muhahahah!(Think evil Austin Powers laugh here.) We were skipping along when we realized our little road was quickly becoming a farm road, and then even more quickly, becoming….A DEAD END. There seemed to be no way to reach the gonodolas from this road. So, we headed back up it. I thought I should just try to jump on one, Superman style:

Then we went back down the main road. We looked down each little road but Mark kept saying, “I can’t see the end. This must not be it”. Who was I to argue? Should I point out that if a road turns, you can no longer see the end? Or dare I say that if a road begins to head down a hill, you may not see the end? Well, yes, I dared say it. I DID say it, several times. But we continued to head down the main road, AWAY from the gondolas, AWAY from the river. I pointed out that the other teams in our imaginary Amazing Race were beating us now. His grand plan was to head down the main road, find a taxi that would take us directly to the lift gondola.

Yeah, because that plan worked so well the first time.

After a good half hour of walking IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, Mark found another hotel and asked for directions. Turns out…we were headed in the wrong direction. You don’t say? And, oh yeah, the lady said no taxis or buses go straight to the lift. We would have to walk BACK THE OTHER WAY and take the little road by the church. You know, the road Mark couldn’t see the end of? That one? Yeah, that one.

So, we hiked back up to where we had just come from, found the church, turned left and went to…ANOTHER DEAD END. At this point, I gave up on winning the million dollars.

But, look closely…is it really a dead end? I mean there was that little dirt path covered up by weeds and knee-high brush. Aha, the road continued here:

through a meadow, a construction site,

and a rocky path, to end up at the base of the gondolas. And look, just look!, what we saw when we got there:

Yes, folks…cabs DO indeed come right to the base. And so do cars, buses and even horses. I mean, you didn’t really believe that during ski season, people cut down brush and trounce through a snowy meadow just to get a ride up the mountain, did you? That would just be silly!

Upon our arrival at the pit stop base, that skinny, blonde Australian host of the Amazing Race stood next to a Bulgarian folk dancer and informed us, “Mark and Kristy, you are the last to arrive. I’m sorry you have both been eliminated”. And that was how we lost the Amazing Race. Like I said, it was all Mark’s fault. Just don’t ask him his version….

**Oh…you want to know about the mountains? You mean, what did we do when we got there? Well, that’s a whole other story…

September 15th is always the first day of school here in Bulgaria. Even though today is a Friday, it was still the first day of school here. We had read that there is always some sort of celebration on September 15th, but we had no idea!

We were out walking the dog at about 10:00am and there were school-aged children everywhere. Hmmmm, we thought. If it’s the first day of school, shouldn’t the kids be in school? Turns out…….no! Apparently, on the first day of school, all the students bring their teachers flowers, go to an orientation for about an hour to learn the school rules, then go home and have a celebration.

That’s right, my teacher friends! No teaching on the first day of school. Only getting gifts! Imagine it….not a bad idea. I think we should try this back home in the United States! Kids–think about it…you just bring flowers to your teacher and get the rest of the day to have a party. You see?? It works for all of us.

Now you understand why we like it here!!

**A note about flower giving in Bulgaria. Flowers are given in odd numbers, so 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. You never get an even number of flowers unless you are going to a funeral. Also, if you visit somebody’s house, let’s say they invite you over for dinner, the visiting man brings flowers and candy to the house. The flowers are for the lady and the candy is for the children in the house.

Just saying–they really know how to treat us women (and children) over here!

The Good: I got a little job today. And I do mean little. I am a freelance journalist for the English newspaper. Basically, I write a couple of newspaper articles a month, they pay me a couple of dollars a month (Not kidding about the couple of dollars!). First up, a story on another foreigner living in Bulgaria and a restaurant review. The job I am really after is as the copy-editor of the newspaper. That means I would edit the paper every week. I am competing against a man from England for this job–we both will do it for 2 weeks and see who gets it.

I will win.

The Bad: Our internet was down for the past day. That happens here sometimes–the internet disappears and reappears, like magic. Problem is, our phone is also linked through the internet. So, about 2 minutes after I finally sent out my phone number (local to San Diego so people can call me FOR FREE), and I’m thinking surely I will finally hear a phone ring in my house, the internet dies. Fun times.

The Just Plain Ugly: New fact about our flat. Our neighbor on the third floor controls our electricity, and when he is bored or unhappy, he likes to turn ours off. Usually right about the time I am putting dinner in the oven, effectively squashing my hopes of a home-cooked meal. And my hopes of hearing my phone ring…It often comes back on right about the time we call the landlord. Again, like magic.