Bulgarian Daze

It had been a long day. I spent the wee hours of the morning explaining to Alex, the Uni.ted ticketing agent that NO! I was not a terrorist even though the plane reservation for the flight–made by one of their agents–was in my married name and the ticket and my passport were in my maiden name (the old Dolan vs. Drake saga strikes again!). After two hours of clearing that up, we ran through the airport to security only to be the last passengers to board the plane.

Then we got to Frankfurt and hooked up to the wi-fi and decided to check out the newest Bulgarian immigration laws, which (without going into too much detail) pointed to our imminent deportation….which was immediately followed by the grand mal of panic attacks, irrational thought, and nearly opting just to live indefinitely in the Frankfurt Airport a la Tom Hanks in The Terminal.

Which was followed by profuse sweating in the Sofia airport and prayers to pass through the border. Which was followed by waiting more than two hours, only to find that two bags were missing, one of which contained A COMPUTER!!!!

So I decided I needed a hot bath in my coffin-sized tub to relieve the stress.

There I was, chilling and sudoku-ing away, when a dark fleck caught the corner of my eye.

“Hmmmm….dirt from my 24 hours of travel”, I thought as I went about my bathing. But then I noticed a few more specks. And a few more. And on closer inspection, I noticed they seemed to move against the flow of the bath water. So I flicked one up onto the side of the tub. And that peice of dirt did the best magic trick ever. It.moved.by.itself. BY ITSELF!!!

Yeah. That’s when it dawned on me. Those weren’t specks of dirt, or even long strings of dirt. No siree. They were worms. I was bathing amongst worms. Long skinny wiggly ones. Gross ones. And so I called in my prince.

“Babe, look at this. There are worms in here”, I calmly told him as I stood with only my feet in the water. (I know you don’t believe that calmly part, but truly, I was too exhausted to even care if I was bathing with worms).

“Hmmm…I think they are coming from these little never-been-used jacuzzi jets “, he pondered aloud as he pushed the ON button. (Who wants jets pounding on you when the tub is so small your hips are squeezed in between the two sides?) And then they came. The locusts worms. By the hundreds. Swarming about my ankles. It took me a minute to fully register what was occuring, but when I did, I leapt up, and with a gymnast’s balance, positioned my bunioned feet on the very edge of the coffin tub.

Indeed the entire tub filled with worms and gunk. I watched in amazement for a while, then cleaned it out, stepped inside, turned on the shower, soaped up (extra-good), rinsed, and left. **sigh**
What better end to a perfectly lousy day? And how else to be sure that the tub truly is shaped like a coffin? I mean the worms seep inside just like a grave. Which now that I think about it……no, wait, let’s not think about it anymore….

When it was still Christmas Future, it looked like we would never get here, or maybe be deported.

When it was Christmas Present, well, here’s how it went:

On Christmas Eve day, we went out around the town to do some last minute shopping. Although around here, everyone shops then, so we didn’t feel like those bachelors back home who wait until so late on December 24th that they end up buying everyone’s gifts at Rite-Aid—you know those guys??

We picked up the final ingredients we needed for our feast and then headed home to put everything together.

In the evening, we relaxed and watched a movie. In fact, Mark relaxed so much that he fell asleep 10 minutes into the movie. So, really, I watched United 93 all by myself—very uplifting for Christmas Eve, not quite the same feel as, say, going to Midnight Mass and eating enchiladas.

On Christmas morning, we woke up and walked the hound. Then we came back and opened the little presents we got for each other. Perhaps you are wondering what kind of loot we found here? Well, Mark got a new pair of shoes he needs and some bath salts (for his nasty, there’s-a-fungus-among-us feet), and some gum and candy in his stocking. I got a couple of books, some warm pajamas, and some ear muffs. Yes. Ear muffs. People wear them here. And after walking the hound this morning without my ears covered, I will be wearing them, too, even if they make me look like a hound myself!

Then I made pancakes. They were a little more dense than the kind from home, but not bad. And we had found some blueberry preserves that were most delicious on the pancakes. We took a long, long nap, and then began preparing the feast.

Let us discuss the feast.

Anthony brought over the ingredients for, and made here, a shrimp and pasta dish which was quite good. I made my first-ever banitsa, which was a bit nerve-wracking because I did not know until the last minute that Anthony was bringing his girlfriend (I try not to name unsuspecting people here in the blog, so we will just call her Girlie, ok?). And she is a Bulgarian. The LAST thing I wanted to do was experiment with a traditional Bulgarian dish in front of a legit Bulgarian. But it came out pretty good! And we had a traditional Bulgarian salad (Shopska salad) and potatoes.

And then there was Mark’s steak.

Or, better referred to as Mark’s beef jerky. You literally could not saw through it. And if you got the knife to score a piece off, then you BECAME the cow, seemingly chewing on a piece of cud for hours at a time.

Here’s a picture of the offending meat:

In all fairness to Mark, the beef here, as previously mentioned, is not of the good-old-Texas variety at home. The cows here must be marathon runners or something, because there is no juicy fat anywhere to be found. To resolve the bad cuts of meat, Girlie suggested we go to a small butcher shop just a few blocks from our flat, because she knows he can cut a good piece of meat.

“True, true”, I agree. “But how will I tell him I would like a London broil in Bulgarian”.

“I see the problem,” she answered.

I know I keep swearing off the beef here. But. It’s like a challenge now. We will find a decent piece if it kills us with E. Coli or breaks off a tooth first. This, we vow!

And so we made endless beef jokes and laughed about old Christmases when we were kids. Girlie asked if American families really do get in fights on Christmas, or if that was just something Hollywood made up for movies…HAHAHA We laughed. Of course we have epic battles at Christmas! And then we all recounted our favorite Christmas family fights and it made us yearn to be home.

She had a hard time understanding this. “Why all the stress? Why all the drama?”, she pondered. It was hard to explain to someone who lives in a country where Christmas trees are barely put up for sale a week before the holiday. Where Christmas did not exist for 50 years during Communism, and its return has been with a bit of apprehension. They’ve only had 18 years to get into the groove. We’ve had hundreds to create the consumeristic nightmare we know it to be.

“Give yourselves a few decades in capitalism”, I told her. “You’ll see!” And we laughed our knowing, capitalistic chuckle.

And so went our Christmas, surprisingly quite fun and funny (although Mark has yet to really see the humor in the Steak Incident of 2006.)

And so ends Christmas 2006. Christmas Past! On to New Year’s…

**Coming Soon: How Bulgarians celebrate the holidays, the disastrous trip here, and yes! the worm story I promised you!

(Bulgaria style)

“Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the flat
Many creatures were stirring
Even worms* and stray cats.

The stockings were hung
By the chimney radiator with care

While billows of smoke
Rose up through the air.

Mark and Kristy were nestled
All snug in their bed
While bouncy mattress springs
Poked their ribs and their head.

But out on the wood floors
They heard such a clatter.
They crawled from the bed
To see what was the matter.

And what to their jet lagged
Eyes should appear?
Well, one short and stumpy
Tri-colored hound-deer.

Tip tapping his paw-nails
All over the floor
As he jumped on the counter
To steal all the steaks and some more.

“The Basset! The Basset!”
They screamed in a flurry
As they yanked out the bread
From his mouth in a hurry.

The hound-deer was angry
And glared at their faces
With red laser-y eyes
And drool like shoelaces.

At the very same moment
He heard a strange sound
It was old Father Christmas
And he needed a hound.

So Hound-deer escaped
Out the flat, down the lift
Leaving for his owners
Not one single gift.

He flung himself into
The red sleigh with delight
Howling, “With this fat guy
I can have snacks aaaaaaaaallllllllllllll night!”

And so this is the tale
Of how there came to be
Eight Christmas reindeer
And one hungry hound-y.

Merry Christmas Everyone!!!

*Remind me to tell you about the worms that swarmed into the tub WHILE I WAS TAKING A BATH….

p.s.  I added more pictures to the gallery.  Check them out.  Be sure to click on the sub-album titled “Guiseppe’s Christmas” for more hilarious hound-deer pics. 

As promised, here are some pictures of Sofia all decorated for Christmas. These lights are strung across the two main boulevards in town, one is on our street and another is the street where Mark’s office is located (clickon the photos to see them more closely):

Day by day, more lights appear. Just today, I saw a guy climbing a tree and stringing lights on it. One big difference between here and the U.S. is that Christmas, while perhaps the largest holiday of the year, is only celebrated for a few weeks. There aren’t months of frantic shopping and decorating. They literally set up the tree lots a week before Christmas and just now there are stands to buy decorations and pointsettias. It’s a pleasant change!
Oh, and for those of you concerned about Guiseppe Vladi, the Bulgarian hound, here he is on his nightly walk in the snow with his new coat on:

He is not too fond of wearing a jacket (I had no idea he was a nudist at heart), but he kind of likes prancing through the snow. We must be careful, though, because the sidewalks are slippery and he seems a bit sore from his two long, snowy, slippery walks today….

I guess all the stress and drama of getting here is finally catching up with me. I’m sick. With an ugly cold I’m sure I got from the nasty airplane air and which especially flared up when I was all nervous and freaking out about, oh, I don’t know, the possibility of being deported!? Let’s hope the Suda.fed holds up, I only have one box for daytime and one box for nighttime. Maybe I should have worried less about space for tortillas and more about space for cold medicine?

Nah. When I get better, I’m gonna be hungry.

Well….we are here…in our flat, with our hound. When I am a little less bitter, I will tell you the traveling nightmare we had getting here, then the scary visa problems.

But for now, let’s focus on something a little more positive, shall we?

It is definitely Christmas here in Bulgaria! When we came home, we saw that the guy who stayed in our apartment and took care of our dog (I must tell you how the hound now rejects us for another!) set up a little tree in our flat so we would feel Christmas-y when we got here. Isn’t that so so so nice?

So here is our little tree:

Like all of you this year, we went fake. And to “one-up” you, we had it pre-decorated. But it’s perfect for us! And we are even making Christmas plans–so don’t feel sad that we will be all lonely. We will have Mark’s friend over and we are cooking a mini-feast and doing a little gift exchange and playing games and watching movies. Oh yeah, and eating American candy we brought from home.

Tomorrow, my mission is to find popcorn and other things I can string to make a few more bio-degradeable Christmas decorations for the flat. And on Friday, Mark’s office is having a quite the party, with catering and awards and everything. All the employees voted on each other’s websites and the winners in seven different categories are getting prizes. We are really looking forward to this weekend, as I’m sure are all of you!!!

p.s. Sorry if our gift to people in the U.S. are late–things got a little hectic the last few days and I’m not sure if I made all the shipping deadlines. Anyways, technically, Christmas lasts 12 days, you know, like the song??? So I just plan on using all 12 days.
Double p.s. Since you can’t be here (I know you’re SO jealous), I will be sure to fully document how the holidays are passed in a different country for you. Already I can tell you there is a lot of shopping here, but not nearly as much as at home–there is no frenzy. Expect lots of pictures over the next few days, as the city is decorated and we are expecting snow. MY FIRST SNOWY CHRISTMAS!!

Do you think they will figure out my trick here?
           

(You see..I surreptitiously duct-taped two oversized ski bags together to make one oversized bag, and hopefully only have to pay one fine. hehehe)

Oops! ***** (Insert bad word here), I forgot to put in the ski poles!! &@**@!!!!!

And so the saga continues….

Once we heard the crazy news that we could not get back “home”, we frantically starting calling people in Sofia. Mark’s partner contacted the attorney, who contacted someone else who contacted someone else, and you see where this is heading. Apparently, we’re in! We will be heading back as planned on Saturday, arriving Sunday. We are armed with many phone numbers of many people in case we get stopped at Immigration.

But, really, wouldn’t it be funny if we got detained (Mark likes to call it quarantined, as if we are rabid dogs) and spent our holidays in a BG jail? It would really add to our story, don’t you think? So, in an effort NOT to count our chickens before they hatch, I will not tell you what we plan for Christmas. Because it could be that I plan on eating prison food, or flying back to the U.S. in some scary “deportation” plane, while in handcuffs, or be here and in jail, or something like that. So–we have no plans as of yet.

Let’s just take one hour at a time. Heh!

Guess what?

Today, the BG Ministry of Foreign Affaris informed us we would not be accepted back in the country because we have already used up our 90 days on our tourist visa and since we don’t have a work visa, we aren’t allowed in.

Seriously. I’m not kidding.

So we’re here. For at least all the holidays, it looks like, unless our BG attorney can pull off a “Christmas” miracle.

Seriously. I’m not kidding.

Have you ever noticed that my life seems like a bizarre novela?

Well, the time has come, for us to go back to the land of cold. We will leave the mid-70s, sunshiny days on Saturday and be freezing by Sunday afternoon.

The travel arrangements, of course, have not been easy. Because nothing associated with Bulgaria seems to be easy. I had to cancel our original flight on Dec. 6th because of the whole work visa debacle (you’ll recall…we waited and waited only to be denied). I called United on Dec. 7th to re-schedule, asking for the following Friday, December 15th. Apparently the ticketing agent gave me the flight on December 8th instead. Imagine my surprise when I called up on Monday, the 10th, to get an e-Ticket and my ticket had been cancelled.

And what ensued was UGLY. Arguments, 4 hours on the phone with nearly 10 different representatives, supervisors calling me a liar–and nothing gets the ol’ Irish blood a’boilin’ like being called a liar!!–one agent sending me to customer relations, customer relations sending me back to the ticketing agents, trying to charge me a thousand dollars (yeah–you read that right) change-of-fare charge, blah, blah, blah. Until finally, finally, an agent found me a flight on Saturday the 16th that would not cost me an extra $1000. I mean at one point, one of the agents said,”Our agents would NEVER make a mistake like that”. Serious. He said that. As if they employ only perfect people who have never faltered.

Oh. And you might be interested to know that United now outsources all of its ticketing, reservations, and customer relations to a company in India. Ok, so they were going bankrupt, and they had to do something. And I even understand outsourcing the reservations, because we can all find out own flights on the internet these days, so that’s not a major job. But to outsource your customer relations???? Like the dude in India cares if your customers are happy and keep returning to give you more business. I can tell you most assuredly, he does NOT care. One bit. I’m thinking United must have been super desperate to outsource that department, but they really should re-evaluate how much business they lose compared to the dollars they save with this labor force. Just an idea.

And so continues my love/hate relationship with this airline. When we moved over to Bulgaria, the employees were awesome, taking excellent care of our dog, and always letting us know how he was doing. They made our re-location so easy. And yet, now….this! I am giving them another chance, but if they irritate me on the next flight, we will begin commuting between the countries on another carrier. I will find their arch nemesis and fly them.

Harumph! That’ll show them!

*p.s. I used to like that little ditty done by George Gershwin, but after hours on hold, listening to the same tune over and over and over again, I hope to never hear a Gershwin song again. Ever.