| On the
Road: From Turkey to Bulgaria |
| by Jay
Winfrey |
| My legs
cramped up immediately. This is nothing new to me. Things
in other countries never seem to be built with my size in mind, much less
my comfort. I imagine that there are few seats in any bus or train
or airplane that remain comfortable after 11 hours. Sitting for that
long in claustrophobic quarters is like asking a dog to stand for 11 hours…attacks
are likely.
We rode in
absolute silence…the only sound being the driver’s Zippo every half-hour
and the sound of his first exultant exhalation. As the sun slowly
disappeared to the west and the clouds of a cold rain built to the north,
I imagined myself in the villages we passed; growing up with everything
planned out, going to the mosque and playing soccer in the grazing fields. |
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I stared out
the window like this watching the sun smooth out and die as a finished
smoke flung itself out of the driver’s window, and the weather seemed to
grow colder.
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We met Steve
outside of the bus as we stamped our numb feet and waited for the word
to move to the next checkpoint. The border seemed to be just that; a long
paved highway of checkpoints and crumbling gun bunkers from more “important”
times.
The thing that stuck out the most about Steve, other than being an American
living in Istanbul, was that he just didn’t belong in this sort of situation. |
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| He was unnerved
by the wait and made it known several times that he should have just crossed
over to Greece to get his visa renewed. We listened with a mixture
of patience and joy at hearing someone else complain as wonderfully as
we could.
We talked and
danced around in the frigid air, smoking and laughing at bad jokes…nervous
laughter. Soon, however, a crowd began to form around us and we found
ourselves deep in the midst of a full-blown multicultural conversation.
Sardar, a Turk working in Sofia, kept offering his bottle of duty-free
scotch to me and I accepted, a bit too often.
His cousin,
a hawk with what looked like a goiter kept whispering on about how badly
he wanted to have sex with the Russian prostitutes on the bus. And
the three young, tired-looking girls just sat and smoked, with their legs
crossed protectively. |
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Offshore
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| We chatted
with two Bosnian doctors, who kept pointing out mine and Jason’s obvious
weight issues with kind, yet disapproving looks. We were flanked
by Turks and Kurds…and throughout all of this, all I could think of was
where the bathroom was hiding. Someone pointed to one of the low,
slit-windowed buildings along the side of the road and motioned covertly
with his hand what the building was for. As I descended the stairs
into the old bunker, my throat clenched. My life flashed in front
of my eyes and I literally thought I would die if I continued down the
watery decline into the toilets.
Inside.
I made it, but not without second thoughts. The floor was littered
with feces and trash. Condoms and empty bottles of beer and liquor
were shattered and piled up next to the walls, which were discolored from
some unknown contaminant. Public restrooms, I would later find out,
were all pretty much the same. Little more than a hole in the ground
with no running water and no way to “clean up” after the job was done.
I grappled
with my camera bag and my gag reflex and managed to take several photos
of the room before staggering back out just in time to get back on the
bus and move another 100 yards down the path. |
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| After a brief
stop at a border town called Svilengrad, where Steve was offered a cigarette
vendor’s daughter for little more than the bottled water he bought and
a rather raucous, desperately quick meal at an all night food shack, we
began our final descent into Bulgaria.
Between sleeping
and staring at the darkness outside of the bus, Jason and Sardar continued
to talk until the scotch bettered him and Sardar faded back into his seat.
We dropped off some people in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city,
and began the steady climb into the highlands of the country, where Sofia,
the stronghold of Bulgarian barons and kings, clings to the base of Mt.
Vitosha. Mt.
Vitosha towers
above and protects Sofia from the elements, but not from the rest of the
world; the Magyars, Turks, Celts and eventually the Nazis and the Soviets
have successively sacked the city. |
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| The remnants
of the last invasion are still pasted to the face of the city in
the form of soulless concrete apartments, architecture that was designed
to last forever, but built to crumble in a matter of generations.
Other buses
labored into the parking lot behind the hotel and people milled around
kicking trash and smoking. Street vendors stirred by the sound of
the arrival crept closer and closer and the inhabitants of the makeshift
campers along the perimeter of the lot creaked with the sounds of disturbed
sleepers.
My breath mingled
with the layers of dust and grime floating in the air and froze almost
before I had rid myself of it. As I choked along in the morning glare…across
the frozen river into town, I caught the mountain looking down on us.
It seemed to be leaning in, inspecting the city below and regarding it
with some dismay. The buses sped along, sputtering and forcing out
anemic clouds of black smoke. The river, even frozen, reflected this
appearance…as did the people that we passed on the street.
Faced with
the undertow of stark hopelessness and depression. I made myself
smile almost compulsively just to look approachable, to ease the fear and
distrust skating across the faces. It didn’t work. Eye contact
was limited to suspicious stares, the wrenching away of mildly curious
eyes and the refusal to acknowledge that we were there.
I adjusted,
like any traveler and found myself staring at the ground out of a mix of
politeness and humility. I became intimately familiar with the
Bulgarian way of life: the dirt on the ground and the unattainable
hope of Mt. Vitosha towering above, a focal point that nobody seemed to
look to anymore. Old habits are like favorite clothes, and communism
sinks it’s teeth in far too deep. |
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