Spring is For Storks, St. Nicholaus is for Christmas

            There is a really cute tradition in Bulgaria where on the 1^st of March; everyone gives all of his or her friends red and white bracelets. After this point, whenever you see a budding plant or a stork, you tie one of your red and white bracelets to the nearest tree (or the budding plant you saw). When I was walking around the park on Monday it was one of the first really sunny days in Sofia. There were red and white bracelets hanging everywhere.

            When I got into Sofia I met up with my couchsurfing host. Her name is Stef, she is in her 4th year of university. We became friends really fast and she was one of the best couchsurfing hosts I have ever had. She showed me all of Sofia on foot, which was beautiful. Sofia wasn’t affected too much from WWII like other European countries; there are a lot of old style historic buildings everywhere. There are a lot of really pretty Eastern Orthodox churches, including the biggest church in all of Europe- The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

and she is in her 4

            There is also the church of saint Nicholaus. In the basement there is a small shrine to St. Nicholaus. People go in write a wish on a piece of paper, pray over the grave, and insert their wish into a wishing box. It reminded me a lot of being at a department store before Christmas and telling Santa what you wished for, except for I only saw middle aged women at the St. Nicholaus’s church J.

letter to St. Nick

Tomb

Outside of the church

Bulgaria has gone through different shades of leadership. It was conquered by the Turkish Empire until the 19^th century and was then set free by Russia; Bulgaria was later under the rule of the U.S.S.R. until 1989. A lot of the food and culture is kind of a mix of Turkish, Greek, and Russian food. My host’s mom made us dinner, which was a potato and beef casserole covered with a layer of cooked eggs called Baklah. They told me that it was originally a Greek dish, but it has been around so long that it is considered Bulgarian. It was Yummah.

It is interesting to me that in different languages, the noises that animals make is different, even though we are hearing the same noise. My host had two Siberian huskies and she kept saying “Bow-wow” to them. In Bulgarian the “noise” that dogs makes is “Bow-ow” instead of “Bark-Bark”. Interesting, right? Body language is also different. Instead of nodding your head to mean yes, it means no. It threw me off for such a long time until I finally asked someone if it was different. I was buying food at a store and asked if I had the correct amount of money, she kept shaking her head but saying yes. I was so confused.

Today I went to a little town about 2 hours away from Sofia called Plovdiv, which is the oldest continually inhabited city in Europe, it is 8,000 years old.  You can see different remnants of the different ruling periods. There is a large Mosque in the middle of the old city; there is also an old Roman Amphitheater. Anyways, at about 2 P.M.  I decided I wanted to make sure that my train was leaving at the time I thought it was. Surprisingly, the train I was taking had been cancelled and I needed to catch it in order to catch my overnight train back to Bucharest for my flight home. I decided I needed to go check the bus station to see if I could get to Sofia in time to still catch my train. Sadly no one I could find could speak English. I finally found one lady who spoke English and told me a bus was leaving from Plovdiv in 10 minutes to Bucharest and it was only 4 hours (the train takes about 10.5 hours from Sofia alone). I really wanted to catch it. The clerk kept telling me it wasn’t going to work out. And she kept walking away, not answering my questions, and blowing me off. A flock of Bulgarian women became really worried for me because I seem frustrated by this clerk. One by one, a new lady came up to me to try to figure out what I needed and where I needed to go. Finally a lady came up who spoke perfect English and she translated what the clerk was trying to say to me. It turns out that it was too late to catch that bus, but I could take the bus to Sofia in time and catch a shorter bus from Sofia to Bucharest. It was really sweet that all these really sweet Bulgarian women who couldn’t speak English, were so set on helping me. One of them even offered to drive me to another bus station just in case I could get to Bucharest easier from there. In the end I took the bus to Sofia with the woman who spoke perfect English and her mother. We had a really good and long conversation and we really connected. It seems that every time I get on public transportation I meet someone new and interesting and we end up bonding and becoming potential pen pals. On the train from Sofia to Plovdiv I met a cute teenage couple and we also had a really good conversation about Bulgaria and their views.  I like this style of travel much more than just sleeping in a hotel every night or sticking with other travelers at hostels, but to each his own J.

 

I am now back on my way to Bucharest on an overnight bus, then I’ll spend my last day in Bucharest and my flight back to Jerusalem on Tuesday. It’s been a good week J.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Sca(red)

If I could name the top three things that have been life changing for me they would be

Religion

Education

Interactive Travel

I think interactive travel is actually just education. Whether you might think it is social (learning to interact with new people) or historical (I go to way more museums and hear more stories about the past first hand when traveling). My couchsurfing host definitely showed me a view on Eastern Europe that I don’t think a history book could.

 “The Red Scare” is something I have heard about all of the time growing up, but never really understood. My couchsurfing host grew up in Romania, was born before 1989 and was a little kid when the Iron Curtain Fell, he now lives in free market Romania. He didn’t ever say that he liked either period more than the other, but he did talk a lot about what was positive and negative about both. First, he talked about how consumerism controls our lives. There are a lot of negative things that happen now in Romania that didn’t happen pre-1989.  According to him, people weren’t so jealous of each other, girls didn’t have eating disorders, advertising didn’t make people feel inadequate, there was no such thing as drug trade or homelessness, and families were stronger because there were less distractions because of material belongings.  (You can’t waste your time working overtime trying to outdo your neighbors and get a bigger TV if there is only one TV available to get). The conclusion he came to was that there are good and bad to all types of governing, but the biggest factor is the responsibility and morality of political leaders. Even under democratic governance Romania still isn’t doing well- the average pay is the equivalent of 250 dollars a month for wages (3,000 dollars a year). Almost everyone I talked to were annoyed/upset/disgusted by the leadership of Romania. A lot of people I talked to (most were young) said they were planning on leaving Romania, which is sad.

In any case, I’m not saying that the U.S.S.R. was a great thing- I know how bad the living conditions were, how it was impossible to leave the Romanian borders, jobs being decided for you, a lot of corruption, etc. I think as “Westerners” we look at anywhere in the East as some scary Russian speaking land, making “their” way of life seem so foreign and alien compared to “ours”. In the end, we will always be more comfortable with the way we were raised, and if you have any recollection of life before 1989 or have taken a class on European history, chances are that the word communism has a negative connotation to you.  It is definitely a topic I want to study more.

            Despite all of the equal-ness and communism, Bucharest has the world’s second largest building (according to square meters). The biggest building in the world is the Pentagon. It was build and called “The People’s Palace” and it now where the parliament meets.

            Romania has actually been one of my favorite places to visit. There is a ton of nature, history, nice people, and a lot of really cool things to do. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Transylvania

Romanian is sooo cool. It has so many different backgrounds and influences that when I listen to it, almost sounds like a mixture of languages. That is definitely a generalization, but let me give you some examples. Thank you is “merci” (same as French); potato is cartolfen (same in German) yes is “da” (same in Russian). There are Latin and Slavic roots all over the place.  There is a lot of Latin based because the Romans colonized Romania in the 1^st century B.C., A German king later ruled Romania in the 14^th century, Russia had it’s influences too.

Transylvania is SO pretty. There is a huge mountain range and tons of really cool medieval castles and towns. The air is fresh and things are completely beautiful no matter the season. There are a lot of ski resorts that I would say are almost equivalently cool as in the mountains of Utah.

There are two stereotypes that I have heard a lot of people have about Romania, neither of which are true: 1: Everyone is a vampire here. 2) Romania is full of gypsies.

If I say Romania, is the first thing you think of a vampire? Well pop culture has made vampires seem like the dominant characteristic of Romania. This came from the Book “Dracula” by Bram Stoker and was later made into a movie. It was a myth based off of Vlad the Impaler- who used to impale and torture his enemies (the Turks from the Ottoman empire who were invading at the time). He would try to make their death as long and agonizing as possible. This story was somehow exaggerated and shifted to Dracula the blood-sucking vampire. Even the castle that he allegedly lived in pleasantly wasn’t as touristy as I would have expected- there were only a couple of shops selling vampire products and there was only one room in the castle that mentioned Vlad the Impaler and the book Dracula. Maybe I should read the book to see what all the hype is about. In reality, Transylvania is just a really pretty place. I got to go see three castles while I was there: one of which is the castle imaged as the castle that was “Dracula’s”.

The other stereotype I think is mostly only popularly known in Europe. When gypsies are seen in Western Europe people automatically think they are from Romania and vice-versa, if a person if from Romania people assume that they are a gypsie. I thought that being a gypsie was the title of the profession, like someone who begs. Wrong. Gypsies are an ethnic group that is stereotypically beggars. Most people think it would be dangerous to go to Romania because of the association with gypsies. I met some girls at the hostel I was staying at last night who are teaching English in Spain, they said that everyone they told that they were going to Romania for vacation told them that it is really dangerous and scary (even though they had never been there). When I was in Spain last summer I heard a lot of bad talk about Romanians. A lot of Romanians are really annoyed with this stereotype because gypsies make up a small proportion of Romania and even then not all gypsies are thieves or beggars. When people in English say “You got Gyped”, it is referring to gypsies- which can actually be thought of as racist considering it is an ethnic group. Roma is the preferred and more politically correct title.