Back From Bulgaria

After two trips to the border town of Rousse (or Pyce, depending on which alphabet you're using and how much you've had to drink), I am beginning to suspect that Bulgaria was invented for the sole reason of providing a place to eat and test the wine.

Wine-testing is my own personal service to humanity.

I have an odd relationship with Bulgaria, similar to the relationship you might have with an insane, yet beloved, uncle. There is affection. There is uneasiness. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to tell where one ends and another begins. For one thing, there is the train ride.

In normal time, it would probably take about an hour and a half to get from Bucharest to Rousse. But this is Romania, and the space-time continuum doesn't really apply here. After about an hour of travel, the train stops. Several nice men in uniforms board and ask to see your passport. They give you odd looks and ask where you're going.

Why is it, that when a uniformed man with a European accent asks where we're going, we feel lucky if we actually wind up arriving there? It's as though we half-expect a border guard to say, “Rousse?? What do you mean you're going to Rousse? You can't go to Rousse, you silly Americans.”

For some reason all border guards inevitably become John Cleese in my imagination after the fact.

I can just imagine if the same conversation attempted to take place in the U.S. For one thing, if an American gets stopped at a state border for no apparent reason, they always speak to the officer with that respectful tone that suggests there had better be an APB out on an escaped Charles Manson. Or at least suspect you of having a body in the trunk.

“Is there a PROBLEM officer?”

I can just imagine someone saying to a motorist, “South Carolina? How long you planning on being there?”

Badge numbers would be flying. And, in Georgia, the conversation may just end with, “How would your poor, sweet old mother feel about you stopping motorists for no reason and prying into their business? Shame on you, Junior, shame on you. And tell your cousin Clarisse I'll see her on Sunday.”

Here, travel involves scrutiny. And travel to Bulgaria also involves freezing weather.

It never fails. Last time we went to Bulgaria, I thought I might have a future in a museum in a thousand years or so because obviously scientists were going to find my well-preserved frozen body lying at the foot of some Bulgarian ruin. Then we returned to Romania and had an unnaturally balmy winter. Then we returned to Bulgaria and couldn't walk outside without turning an engaging shade of blue.

Except for the day when we got back on the train for Bucharest. That day it was bikini weather. Well, bikini-and-woolen scarf weather anyway.