Lindita dropped me off at an amazing hostel* near the center of Sofia Bulgaria.
I checked in, to be greeted by Marti. Marti was the kind of guy who seemed to be always surprised to see you and glad that you were there at the exact same time. I found out within the first ten minutes of our conversation that he was a part of the famous puppet theatre of Bulgaria.
There is an odd pheromone that theatre people give off that intrinsically attracts us to one another. On another occasion I found myself stranded in Macedonia (this was a completely separate occasion from the ones previously listed, but I have come to know Macedonia as the country that people get stranded in). After walking with a friend in a thicket of Macedonian villages we stumbled upon, what I can only describe as, a Macedonian hippy retreat. Hippies like cockroaches can survive anywhere, provided there are enough good vibes around, upon which to feed. Having no way back to Albania and no way deeper into Macedonia I talked to the first person that I saw who happened to be a part of a theatre troupe which had just closed a production of The Winter’s Tale.
“Exit pursued by bear.” I said, as if it were a secret password that only theatre people understood, and suddenly I was offered a free ride on the Theatre troupes bus deeper into Macedonia.
Now back to Bulgaria. After Marti showed me around the hostel and gave me my complimentary welcome shot** he handed me a map of Sofia and said,
“Have fun! Don’t get lost.” But what he didn’t realize was, that I already was lost, I was so lost that I was exactly where I wanted to be.
There are few things that I like in life more than to walk around cities in which I don’t speak the language. It is like being a toddler again, everything is new and strange and you find yourself giggling at things which are completely normal to those around you. Though they may contain the exact same things that you have seen a million times before*** because they have been recontextualized in a forigen tongue, they become wacky and neat.
Furthermore, everything becomes a story. I just crossed a street IN SOFIA BULGARIA! I just ate ice cream IN SOFIA BULGARIA! I just squinted at a subway map for twenty minutes trying to find the little dot for “where I am”…in every city I’ve ever been in. That last experience remains relatively the same.
I knew I had only 19 hours with sweet sweet Sofia Bulgaria and I was determined to get everything I could from the experience. So I walked. I walked like I was hunting for a long lost lover, or the man who killed her, or both. I physically tried to limit the amount of times that I blinked, because that was one mili-second of Sofia that I would miss. I walked until my legs felt like long packages of battered day-old salamis bought at a Mexican 99 cents store. There was no way physically they should have held together.
I want tell you everything that I saw, but I can’t. Because the signs were written in the Cyrillic Alphabet. I saw beautiful Orthodox Churches, and incredible street art. I saw bizarre meats hanging in windows and I heard people speaking in languages other than Albanian. I smelled the first subway that I’ve smelled in over two years, which immediately whisked me back to New York, as the smell of diesel and feet usually does.
After being in rural Albania I was in a city for the first time for a year and I was anonymous. And anonymity is amazing when deprived of it, and horrifying when deluged with it. One of those handy double edged swords of modern American life which I was glad to be playing with again.
When I returned to the hostel, people began gathering in the bar downstairs. I found the nearest computer and emailed my mother with the subject line, “Guess where I am now.” And after rhapsodizing about Bulgaria I joined the people in the bar.
That’s when the night got awesome.
*Art Hostel, 10 Euro a night and well worth it.
** A practice which should be adopted most places, not just European hostels, churches, banks, the gym, possibly Costco. Something to think about.
***Buildings, people, other stuff.
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