Bulgaria: And Then There Were Two

Admin staff: Hello, Nick? There seems to be some problem with your work permit.

Nick:           Oh?

Admin staff: Yes, it looks like you will need to go abroad to renew your visa to give us some extra time to work on your permit.

Nick:           Hmm, OK. How long do I have until it expires?

Admin staff: It expires on Monday. You have until then to renew it.

Nick:           But it's Wednesday.

Admin staff: Hmm, yes, thank you.

Chris: You get this news about your visa too?

Nick: Yeah, bullshit huh?

Chris: Eh, whatever...Bulgaria?

Nick: Bulgaria.

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Instead of getting upset at the fact that we had just a few days to leave the country and reenter on a new visa, Chris and I were turning this obligatory border run into a little mini-holiday. We all had Thursday and Friday off so we headed out on Wednesday night. Other colleagues had mentioned taking the train to Bulgaria so we formed a gruesome six-some: Chris, Lee, Layla, Aaron, Alethea, and I booked tickets on the night train to Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

Lee, Layla and Aaron were co-workers of mine. Lee, from the UK, and Layla, from Kentucky, were a married couple looking to spend a couple of quiet days at a winery and Aaron was always looking for an excuse to go to Bulgaria. To quote Aaron, “Bulgaria is by far the best thing about Turkey.” Alethea was also no stranger to Bulgaria and was always looking for an excuse for a border jaunt.

As it turned out, Alethea was instrumental in me acquiring my present position at Bilgi. I met her where all friendships seem to be forged in Istanbul: at a pub. She was a friend of my girlfriend’s at the time and we got to talking. We talked about this and that and then somehow got around to talking about how I had recently sent in an application to Bilgi University and without really knowing me very well, she offered to put in a good word for me to Aaron. When Aaron asked Alethea if she knew me well or could vouch for me in any capacity, it was a resounding no on both accounts. But despite this, she felt that I was a good guy based on the truncated time we had shared in each others' company up to that point. A risky assessment and maybe something most people would not have done given the same circumstances.

So then there were six: Chris, Lee, Layla, Aaron, Alethea and I. As any good overnight train travel should start, ours started at the bar opposite the train's departure platform. Shots were taken, cheers were given and memories had already begun to slip into that precarious area of drunkenness that makes memory recovery incredibly unlikely. The train straining out of the station set the pace of the trip and forged our path on a collision course with calamity. While many things have been left in the drunken haze of Bulgaria, a few finer points were remembered that can be succinctly summed up as words of advice and caution to future Bulgaria border run travelers below:

1. Pork binges should be undertaken with care and responsibility. If this is not abided by you will undoubtedly be asked to pay for these past transgressions of gluttony in the most uncomfortable of ways.
2. Apprehension to co-ed nudity is over-rated. The things that are figuratively and literally allowed to hang out in a good old fashion naked sauna session amongst good wine, great cheese and better jokes is something everyone should experience.
3. The high tides of energy and waves of anticipation that accompany the start of a trip of this design can never be replicated on the return trip home. The laughing, smiling, pork-devouring group that you may have encountered in the first hours of the motivated march towards Bulgaria would be reduced to a slow-witted, under-slept, physically and mentally afflicted group who sat in complete discomfort without uttering 1 coherent sentence for the 8 hour duration of the trip back to Istanbul.

The ride up was great. We had erred on the side of caution and made sure that we were not lacking in the alcoholic beverage department for the trip. We had music, a deck of cards and our passports. We were sorted. As the night progressed, Lee and Layla retired to their sleeping birth, Aaron slipped away into the comatose state he is known to frequent while Alethea, Chris and I stayed up talking and laughing about things that to this day not one of us can recall. We all woke up the next day with the vague recollection of a time well spent and the stomach muscle aches from laughing to match. Many attempts have been made to recount the events of the night to no avail. If there are ever any memories that you want locked away somewhere inside your mind, never to be rediscovered, you want them to be these type of memories: the "what you said" and the "why you said it" being nowhere near as important as the "who you said it with".

Unbeknownst to any of us, since we were still asleep, our train pulled into the station 4 hours later than scheduled. We grabbed our stuff, jumped off the platform and greeted Plovdiv with the most enthusiasm and energy that we could have possibly mustered at that point. Plovidv greeted us back with dreariness, dampness and a chill that cut through the light jacket I had opted to bring. It seemed an adequate and balanced trade-off. But moods were quickly altered as we sat down for our first meal of the trip – something or other with bacon I imagine.

Later on, we made our way to the domestic bus station to take us outside of the city. Lee and Layla were running the show on this trip. I really had no idea where we were going or what we were doing until we were doing it. I carried no baton and offered no advice. I relinquished all command to the couple's more than capable hands and I acquiesced to all decisions in the realm of food, drink and accommodation. I simply slipped into the jet stream of their Lonely Planet-advised conclusions. We were headed 30 minutes outside of Plovdiv to a village called Brestovitsa. Apparently Brestovitsa had a popular winery called Todoroff Winery. 

Now, I will make one more reference to the advice I listed above. If you ever find yourself in close proximity to a sauna and a bar, tread with caution. Though sauna nakedness is advised, extended sauna naked sessions with alcohol is not. If you disregard this morsel of advice, I will have no sympathy for you when you have a debilitating hangover and are reduced to a quivering pile of foetus-positioned patheticness under a shower faucet whose water is no longer warm but you have yet to figure out a way to quell the vomit that seems to make its way up through your body whenever you try to move out of the shower's direct trajectory of cold water. You have been warned.

The days were spent walking around the countryside, getting massages and touring wineries. Touring wineries, I have found out, is completely and utterly wasted on me. Not only do I not care about how many years the casks have been fermenting or which forest fruit has been infused into the vintage (I always thought it was just grape!) but I feel that a lifetime spent with an omnivorous approach to all things food and drink has left me with a lack luster palette that can no longer astutely distinguish between the subtleties of different wines.

The nights were spent eating and drinking which then lead to monologue speeches, Celine Dion renditions, and an arrival at the idea that sometimes you'd rather be doing a tough crossword than receiving oral sex.

The last day of our trip was spent back in Plovdiv's city center walking around its downtown promenade and buying pork for the return trip. It was somewhere along this walk that we discussed our respective tenures in Turkey and my relative newness in comparison. It could be surmised like this:

Alethea: 10 years

Chris and Aaron: 6 years

Lee and Layla: 3 years

Myself: 1.5 years

I guess, not illogically, I was the least jaded, badly influenced and disgruntled by Turkey due to my newbie status. As with any other place, Turkey can get to people after awhile. The glaring differences in culture and traditions become more and more irritable and require more and more patience. Our walk around Bulgaria had everyone talking about how amazing Bulgaria is compared to Turkey and how no one wanted to go back. Any love I had for the country was merely because I hadn't been there long enough. They equated it to me starting a new relationship with someone they had all previously dated. I was on cloud nine about her, excited about the new trajectory my life had started on but they all knew that she has been fucked 6 ways from Sunday.

Being an expatriate does not come without its difficulties. Whether it be cultural, religious, interpersonal or just plain inexplicable, problems arise that test your patience, virtue, and ability to be flexible and thick-skinned. The odd expat rant about the country you are living in is common. Everyone does it. Reasons may differ for the ranting but they seem to boil down to only a handful of reasons in the end. Homesickness, love life, language barriers, lack of critical thinking skills, laziness, etc.  This is a list of what an expat might deal with, but I imagine that if you lived somewhere else, you would have a list with different qualms on it as well. Its in our nature. We bitch.

So what keeps it all together on the bad days? The days when nothing is going well and you want to pack a bag and move home? Go somewhere where you don't have to buy your groceries in a different language or (if you are a girl) get harassed by taxi drivers and shop owners. Why put up with the bad when its list of complaints gets to be so long?

Growing up, my dad used to say, "Wherever you go, there you are." Growing up, this was just some annoyingly old sounding thing my dad would say; proving how out of touch with everything he was by saying nonsensical things to me and my siblings. But now, looking back, it's almost as if dad had been around for some time and knew a thing or two about a thing or two. It was less annoyingly old sounding and a lot more patriarchal awesomeness. I am not sure at what age I started to understand it to be less of the former and more of the latter, but I wish it had been earlier.

Wherever you go, you take your personality, interests, skills, adorable idiosyncrasies, worries, fears, laughter and anecdotes with you. You are a fitting receptacle for like-minded people to share all of  these things with - you just have to find them. Wherever you go, there you are, and when you get there, people gravitate towards one another. Whether romantically or platonically, people gravitate towards one another in an attempt to seek people out that they want to share meals with, flats with, or in our case, cabin berths. The "what" and the "how" matter very little compared to the "who". The "who" gets us through it. The "who" makes it all worth it. The "who" is what matters.  

I wrote the beginning of this story shortly after coming back from Bulgaria in 2010 (thus the incorrect amount of time that I said I have lived in Turkey), but didn't sit down to write the end of it until recently. I guess if I had, it would have been a completely different story from the one I had started several years ago. I suppose although some things have not changed at all since then, other things have changed quite a bit. I have been back to Bulgaria several times (but never to that winery) and every time I go, I understand more and more about what they were all talking about back then - I still love living here, but the occasional jaded frustration will make itself known. 

In the years following this trip, most of the original six-some has left Turkey. We are now down to 2: Me and Alethea. This is another thing that expats have to learn to deal with. Friends leave. People you spend months or years getting to know get new jobs and leave. I have no pictures of this trip (no idea why) but I recollect the events fondly. I might not remember what we talked about, but I remember the "who" - and the strained stomach muscles. Alethea and I have spent the last several years justifying what she seemed to know about me on the first night we met: I was worthy of a recommendation for a job and of a subsequent friendship that would validate that recommendation for years to come.  

Wherever you go, there you are. And there are your friends. And that is enough.