The Year in Review, Part 3: The Things

Part 3 in a 3-part retrospective of the year I've spent in Bulgaria.

This morning, I ate the last banitsa of the year I have spent in my latest home. Maybe it was the sentimentality of the event, but I would venture to declare that it was the most delicious banitsa I've had this entire year. Hot, greasy, and rife with melting butter and sirene, it was just about the most wonderful culinary way I can think of to say one last, delicious goodbye to this land of domashna xrana and topli zakuski.

If not quite as much as it has been the people and the places that have made this past year so great, the things I have experienced here have done their own small part to replace those that I left behind in the States. Me being a fat kid at heart, food has been a major focal point of my attention in this place. And, let me say, there are a few things I'm really going to miss about the food in Bulgaria. 

Ayryan. Shopska salata (although this, easily made, will be coming back with me to the US, and will continue to meet its end in my stomach, perhaps joined by a splash of rakia). The beer here--cheap and delicious--will be sorely missed. I will not welcome with open arms the chance to pay $8 for a beer again, vastly preferring to pay 80 cents, instead. Shumensko, Zagorka, and Pirinsko will join Yuengling on the list of cheap, really good beers that I will not be able to drink on a regular basis. 

Open-bottle laws will likewise be something I will not be pleased to go back to. Not that drinking in public is something I find integral to the enjoyment of my life, but it's nice to sit in the park and share a beer with people. Such bench parties are, in fact, mainstays of Bulgarian cultural life at this time of year when the weather is warm and the air heavy in the creeping darkness, and they are consistently fun and pleasant. I will miss these open-air gatherings almost as much as the price and quality of the beer.

One item of food I will not miss is the Bulgarian idea of pizza. I found myself missing a few things from the US in the last few weeks--most of them food-related--one of which was the hot slice of mozzarella perched atop a veritable ocean of tomato sauce that you can get at any reputable pizza establishment Stateside. While I appreciate the effort made on the part of Bulgarian entrepreneurs to introduce this monument of culinary excellence to the Balkans, their adaptation of same simply does not cut it. Kashkaval is not mozzarella, and ketchup is not tomato sauce. It's as simple as that, and these things add up.

But with so much good food and beer (and wine, as well) in this place, sitting down for long dinners amongst good company is a way of life, and it's something else I'm really going to miss. We have the wrong idea of eating in the States - it's typically a rushed affair, for justifiable reasons or not. Eating out, you can expect to get the check as soon your food is eaten, and you certainly never have to ask for it. But here, as long as the conversation, which can stretch on and on ad infinitum, and the drinks, which can stretch on even longer, are flowing, dinnertime abides, defying clock and circadian rhythm. I'm convinced, after spending several evenings this way, that this is healthier, more enjoyable, and a better use of time than any I can think of. 

Living in LA, I've gotten used to a complete and utter lack of public transportation to ferry people between points A and B. Sofia's public transportation, though, while universally delayed, is extensive, and there is usually a way to get between two points in the city on a tramcar, trolleybus, or good old autobus. The infrastructure leaves something to be desired, and the pace of these modes of transportation is usually equivalent to speeds not exceeding those of a sprinting human, but if it should come down to the choice between sprinting for several kilometers and riding a noisy, slightly pungent tramcar for the same distance, I'll gladly pay my lev and save myself the trauma.

Of course, if one wants to pay slightly more, one has at one's disposal what is perhaps the best institution in the city - the cabs. Taxis in every city are highly idiosyncratic beasts, but when it comes down to it, Sofia's may be the best in the entire world. First of all, they are criminally cheap. Getting from one extreme side of the Center to the other will cost you 5 leva - about $3.50. Second of all, the range of personalities one may encounter in such cars is award-winning. This year alone, I have gotten in both a shouting match with a truly despicable character who tried to take advantage of the fact that I was a foreigner, not knowing that I knew enough of the language to make rather repugnant insinuations about his mother, and an extremely good-natured conversation about the Eurocup and who should win it based on the quality of the women in each participating country (the resolution we came to, of course, being that Bulgaria should win going away). Joe Jackson was right - in this city, at least, you never know quite what you'll find, stepping out into the night.

It seems to be that, on any given weekend night, most of these cabs are headed in the direction of any one of a number of chalga clubs. Chalga is, more or less, folk music thrown in a blender with electronica, the results of which are simply stunning, and not entirely in a good way. The lyrics are vacuous, the beats are unimaginative, and the genre gave rise to this guy. But there is a goofy, intriguing subculture surrounding this music. Starting around 1 AM, clubs start filling up, week after week, with big guys--huge chests and massive biceps unabashedly on display--and their miniscule, crimped-hair, barely-dressed girlfriends. It is a thing of beauty, and something amongst which I actually wish I had spent more time.

Closely related to this institution of gaudy popular culture, for the younger folk, is the Bulgarian version of prom, which coincides with their graduations. Imagine, if you will, that for two weeks in June, the city is filled with cars honking at every opportunity--and sometimes, at the most inopportune of times--balloons and streamers trailing from their roofs, hoods (a safety hazard if ever I saw one), antennae, and anywhere else such things could conceivably be attached to an automobile, the drivers' sobriety in question, the passengers waving and calling to friends and random passersby alike. They gather in public places to display their finery, the boys, as in the States, in tuxedos, the girls in dresses that would scandalize Lady Gaga. Welcome to the Balkans. 

One of the vestiges of the country's 45 years of Communist government is a considerable amount of infrastructure remaining from these years of the People's Republic. In every city, you can see two things that will remind you that this was, in every way, an Eastern Bloc nation not so long ago: Faceless, unattractively nondescript highrises and monuments to either the glory of Socialism, the friendship of the Russians, or the heroes who died for the cause of the Revolution. Many of the highrises, originally uniform and equally nondescript on the inside, have since been gutted and remodeled into attractive units, retaining their cinderblock-and-prefabricated-concrete façades. 

The monuments, though they possess differing degrees of visibility depending on where you are, are nevertheless ubiquitous in city and village alike. Less than 10 minutes from my old apartment, in fact, is Orlov Most ("Eagle Bridge") park, at the center of which stands a sculpture, perched atop a 25-meter-tall obelisk-shaped pedestal, of a Russian soldier with his arm upraised, AK-47 held aloft, flanked on his right by a Bulgarian woman and on his left by a Bulgarian man, symbolizing the liberation of Bulgaria by the Red Army in 1944 and the eternal debt of gratitude owed to the Russians by the Bulgarian people. It is a fascinating cultural insight that monuments like this exist here, and in such prominent and frequent numbers. Imagine the attempted construction of something similar in the US. Would it ever get off the ground? Unlikely.

One of the things I think I will miss the most about living here is hearing the lilt of the Bulgarian language every day and the game of trying to make out enough words to discern the meaning of a sentence. It has been a challenge for me this year, one that I have undertaken mostly gladly, to learn as much Bulgarian as I can. Language holds the key to culture and personality, and the more of a people's language you know, the better, I think, you are able to understand them. As this was part of my goal this year, it was something I really wanted to do.

For someone who spoke no words of any Slavic language prior to learning this one, it was a impossible, at first, to make any sense of the underlying components of the way this language operated. But as I learned more and more, the mechanisms it uses to convey information became more and more clear to me. Now I'm at the point, though I still don't possess a very big vocabulary, where its structure and organization make sense. In the vast scheme of the world's languages, it is probably one of the simpler ones, despite its idiosyncrasies. It conveys information in straightforward ways, with much nuance and shades in meaning conveyed implicitly. It is a textbook example of a low-information language, contrasting sharply with English, which posseses many different ways of saying the same thing. It is also a lyrical language, with a lot of good consonants to hang onto, something I similarly like about German. I would dearly like to keep speaking it, though the opportunities I'll have to do so in the immediate future look fairly scant. 

Bulgaria has a lot of interesting, cool, pleasant, delicious, or otherwise positive institutions that have made it a really wonderful place to spend the year. All of these things I will miss, along with this land and its people. Home is not everywhere, but this year, I've discovered it many, many kilometers from the land of my birth.

Breakfast in Berlin

Things I have done in the last three days in defiance of the fact that it's still March:

• Hung my laundry on my outdoors clothesline
• Wore my flip-flops when I went out
• Went for my first outdoor run of the year
• Busked in the metro station for money (and made 12 лева!)
• Smiled at everyone and everything, because it was 21° (70°F) (!)

It's Springtime in Bulgaria. The calendar says it, the martenitsi say it, and, best of all, the weather says it. Color me exuberant.

I should preemptively apologize, at this point, for my near-certain preoccupation with the weather over the course of the next several weeks. As I mentioned before, I hate the cold, so the couple of weeks in March when it starts to get warm again and everything comes alive is one of my favorite times of year. I can get a little obsessed. So please excuse all future references to the weather from here on out.

Let's talk about my awesome trip to Berlin, though, ja?

This past Sunday to Thursday was the annual conference in Berlin of a selected sample of European Fulbrighters. For four days, this miniscule club of 600 was tasked with sitting through rather a lot of presentations and making the effort to meet every single other member of said club. In retrospect, I think we did surprisingly well.

Very early on Sunday morning, Fred and I caught a flight to Berlin by way of Munich. Arriving at Berlin's Tegel Airport around 10:20, we caught a bus that conveniently delivered us directly to Alexanderplatz, where our hotel was located. As we checked in, I found Laura--who had ventured up from Munich the previous day--waiting for me in the lobby, and we crashed for a couple of hours (as I, having awoken at 4:45 AM, was experiencing something akin to the sleep deprivation that might befall a survivor of the Apocalypse) before setting off, with several hundred of the other Fulbrighters, on a tour of the city.

Designed to be a survey tour rather than a detailed one, the bus took us to a lot of the sites important to the history of Berlin's role in the Cold War, and, of course, showed us much of the path where the Berlin Wall stood. Starting at Alexanderplatz, we soon found ourselves at the East Side Gallery, a section of the Wall that has been painted over extensively by muralists and graffiti artists alike.

The East Side Gallery

Driving past this section of the Wall for a while, we then crossed the Oberbaumbrücke into West Berlin. Driving through some of the more "artistic" neighborhoods on this side of the city, we ended up at Checkpoint Charlie, which was not, I was surprised to learn, a metaphorical character symbolic of the division between East and West, but rather an actual border crossing at the former site of the Wall.

Anonymous Soviet Soldier is watching you

After a fascinating trip through the museum that accompanies this landmark, we headed off again through Potsdamerplatz, past what I believe was the seat of the European Trade Commission and the former headquarters of Radio In the American Sector, and found ourselves at another section of the Wall that has survived, largely unaltered, since it was constructed.

Here stood the Wall

The Iron Curtain epitomized

Following this, we began to make our way back toward the hotel, along the way passing several musea, Humboldt Universität, the Berliner Staatsoper, and the Berliner Dom (pictures of that to come later) before finding ourselves back at Alexanderplatz. Our tour ended, we filtered back up into the hotel.

Resting up a bit more before dinner, I met my roommate for the week, Arthur, and we went back downstairs for the pre-meal ceremonies. Dinner itself was a raucous (and delicious) affair, with the introduction of good beer and wine almost certainly a move motivated by the desire to facilitate networking. Well, it worked. Three hours later, having met a large share of the students flung afield throughout Europe, I left the dining room to meet Laura before she had to catch a midnight ride back to Munich.

Having somehow survived this long day, I fell into bed that night and awoke the next morning with a good night's sleep under my belt, and feeling all the better for it. Monday would set the tone for the rest of the conference, as it featured several long "mini-conferences" (speeches, panels, and the like), several more "networking meals," and on Monday night, a long opening ceremony at the Federal Foreign Office featuring several speeches auf Deutsch (perhaps defeating their purpose for the non-Germanophone members of the audience), after which there was a reception filled with supremely delicious German delicacies. Said reception also featured my reconnection with a couple of old classmates at USC, neither of whom I knew were in Europe on Fulbrights. It was a Small World Moment.

Tuesday, though filled with different content, contained many similar events. The morning session featured another spate of speeches at the Berliner Rathaus (City Hall) and a Q&A session with Björn Böhning, the head of Berlin's State Chancellery. (The Rathaus also contains a very imposing and very cool painting of the Congress of 1878--which I couldn't help staring at every few moments--at whose center is a towering and dour-looking Otto von Bismarck.) After lunch, I decided to make my way around our section of Berlin to see some of the cool stuff we hadn't had the chance to see on Sunday.

Within a few meters of the hotel are Berlin's TV tower and the Marienkirche. The TV tower is rather large.

Seriously.

Just down the road are the Rathaus and its awesome (and mildly famous, I've heard) fountain.

Poseidon with the Marienkirche in the background

Another few meters down from these magnificent wonders (there really is a lot of cool stuff in this neighborhood packed into not very much room) is a Platz bounded by the Berlin Cathedral and the Altes Museum, with the Humboldt Box just off to the side. None of the following pictures will really give you an accurate impression, but one of the reasons this area is so fixating is because these structures are gigantic with a capital HUGE. Seriously. They are beautiful, and old, and large.

Altes Museum

The Cathedral, with the TV Tower in the background

Tearing myself away from this concentrated display of Old World architecture after taking 98265898356 pictures thereof, I continued my journey along the River Spree, only stopping to witness an impromptu performance by a couple of Marktsackpfeife players accompanied by a drummer.

Super cool

My next stop was the Neue Synagoge, which was built in 1866, set on fire during Kristallnacht in 1938, and destroyed by bombing in 1943. It was rebuilt after the war, and dedicated in 1966 on its 100th anniversary.

Like few synagogues you've ever seen

After that, I headed back south to the Spree and continued to follow it west. After crossing over it on the Friedrichstrasse bridge, I headed toward the penultimate stop on my mini-tour: the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament.

Approaching it from the river

BAM

After stopping to marvel--again--at how grotesquely large yet another important piece of architecture was in this city, I walked the last hundred meters to the final destination of my tour, the Brandenburg Gate, made famous, perhaps, by this photo:

Hopping the Wall in 1989

Here's what it looks like 22 years later:

With Victoria and her horses looking on

Having seen nearly everything I had set out to see, and running short on time before dinner, I made my way straight back to the hotel down Unter den Linden. After stuffing my face for the millionth time on this trip, it was time for the Music Gala, an extensive concert put on by some of the current Fulbright music students. Though I was expecting it to be good, it turned out to be really good, and it made me miss the days when I used to go to concerts all the time. (But those days are coming again soon!) After returning to the hotel, I went out to a local Brauhaus to grab a beer with several members of the Spanish contingent, plus some others, thus ending another long day.

And just like that, when I awoke the next morning, it was the last day of the conference. It was a good one, too; the morning featured the project presentations of 9 current Fulbrighters as well as a panel of 8 others who shared their experiences with such exotic locations as Finland, Hungary, and Sweden. After a lunch of some surprisingly good Chinese food (prepared by a Korean woman on the streets of Berlin - I love Europe), we had another panel regarding the future of the EU with several officials thereof. It was a great chance to learn about the dynamics currently working themselves out within the economies of Europe, ask some questions about them, and speculate about where everything was heading.

After dinner, we were all bussed to the Kulturbrauerei, a club/bar-like situation, where we hung out, danced, and got the last of our "networking" out before we had to depart. It made me realize how much fun I had had at the conference, and that it actually had its intended effect - I now know people living all over Europe, which will be awesome come this summer (more to come on that in a few months).

But alas, even after staying out until 2:something AM, breakfast the next day refused to postpone itself to a decent hour, so I dragged myself out of bed, forced myself downstairs, and had a long, groggy breakfast, mostly spent rehashing the details of the night before. After checking out, I went to lunch with Joe, one of my aforementioned USC compatriots, and then set off to see a couple more things before my 5 PM flight. The most important of these was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located just to the south of Brandenburg Gate.

The Field of Stelae

From inside

After spending an hour and change absorbing all of it, I was out of time, and caught a bus back to TXL. Fred and I got back to Sofia at 9:30, and just like that, our trip was over.

It was fun. I really like Berlin.

Now it's back to reality, and I have a mountain of work to do this week before it's off to another conference in Thessaloniki. Stay tuned for more.

Istanbul, not Constantinople

This time with apologies to They Might Be Giants.

It seems that not-even-remotely-current chronicles of my life are becoming the New Normal around these parts. While I'd like to apologize (I do) and say it has been unavoidable due to the increasingly hectic and stressful nature of the way my separate endeavors are bearing down on me (I will), let me also, before we go any further, disavow myself of the responsibility to write about my life here more than actually living it (I have). My days have been jam-packed since I returned to Bulgaria, and next entry, I'll spin a yarn that will have excuses jumping right off the erstwhile electronic page. But for now:

It boggles my mind that with as much as I've had to do, I've kept my goal of visiting another country every month in some part of my mind other than the deepest, darkest recesses thereof, let alone intact. But when my friend from LA, Carrie, swung through this part of the world on her way south from Poland, I couldn't resist the chance to come along for the ride, considering the ultimate destination of her travels was Istanbul, a town I've heard so very much about and has been highly recommended by nearly everyone in the universe. So we went.

Carrie got into Sofia one cold, bright Saturday morning (last Saturday morning, in fact), and I belatedly picked her up from the train station. After a few small business items back at my apartment, we set out so I could give her the tour, one I've given numerous times by now, of my city for the nonce. After we returned, chilled and snowed on (but extravagantly culturally enriched!), we took the opportunity to rest up, engage in various frivolities, and prepare to head out to dinner.

Dining out has generally been a genial and pleasant experience here in Sofia, and this would prove to be no exception. The act of getting to the given arena of consumption has likewise typically proven to be of minimal tsuris, but on this fateful night, all sorts of precedents would be broken, this last one first and foremost among them.

We saw the restaurant on the map, got verbal directions, and despite the gnawing pit of uncertainty in my stomach telling me to be extra sure of where we were going--since I had never been in the neighborhood--we left amid much fanfare and hailed a cab. 15 minutes later, it dumped us out on an unmarked street, the two of us having good company in failing to know where the hell we were going. So we walked. And walked. Eventually, I tried asking some passing souls for directions, receiving as many different answers as questions asked. Phone calls to the rest of our party proved to be minimally fruitful. After having a protracted conversation in German with a more-or-less kindly old gentleman, we walked some more, had more conversations with the now-frantic other members of our party, and generally grew colder and hungrier out there in the night wind, nary a sign of civilization about.

To cut an abjectly long remainder of a story short, we ended up finding a second cab, had my friend Alberto tell the driver where the restaurant was three times, and eventually found ourselves in what appeared to be Nebraska, replete with rolling fields, barns, and still no sign of civilization. Assured by our driver that the restaurant we sought lay behind the nearest of said barns, we uncertainly trudged down the long, icy driveway, and an hour after we set out, were greeted by the blast of warmth and noise one typically finds in a restaurant on a Saturday night.

Dinner passed comparatively uneventfully, save for the kitchen forgetting my order, a spate of karaoke as we were all beginning to settle into the thought of leaving, and the heretofore unanticipated charge for same. Carrie and I, exhausted from our day, elected not to join everyone else at the club when the time for leaving truly was upon us, and we instead headed for home.

The next day dawned much too early for either of our tastes, but we weathered it the best we could by concocting an overlarge batch of pancakes that somehow, to our exultant surprise, turned into crèpes in the pan. Aside from taking care of some more business (including the almost-overlooked task of going to the bus station and buying our tickets ahead of time), we spent much of the day at my apartment in preparation for traveling, also venturing out to secure some banitsa, which Carrie had never before encountered. When the appointed hour rolled around, we were ready, and at 9 PM, we set off for Istanbul.

I struggled to sleep on the bus, and when we got to the border crossing, I was awakened from my fitful slumber to the most absurd border crossing I have ever experienced. For those of you who are not familiar with intra-European travel: It is easy, fast, low-key, and, best of all, free for those traveling within the EU and countries friendly thereto. But no matter how hard I set my mind to it, I simply cannot find any way to justify using such adjectives to describe this particular crossing. At 2 AM, we filed out of the bus, showed our passports to the Bulgarian exit officers, and were more or less quickly on our way. To make it as stark as I possibly can, I'll simply state that crossing into Turkey took our busload of 5 people an hour and a half in the middle of the night.

The Turkish government, wise to the value of the desirability of their largest city, have levied a €15 entrance tax, disguised as a visa, on visiting tourists. Before you get the wrong idea, this is not a visa that you go through any trouble (that is, any official trouble) to obtain. Told that we needed such visas to cross the border, Carrie and I walked a tenth of a kilometer in the freezing cold over to what looked like a border post. Told that the office we actually needed was another few meters past this one, we set off again directly for it, all the while afraid that our bus might somehow leave without us. When we got to appropriate office, we were greeted by a large, surly man, demanding our money for what turned out to be a sticker--direct from a ream of hundreds of other such stickers--that he placed on the last page of our passports. Background checks? Nope. Picture ID's? Please. Feeling stranger about the experience with every passing minute, Carrie and I raced back to our bus, which was thankfully right where we had left it, got on, and waited another hour for the geologically slow machinations of Turkish border security to deem us fit to enter their country.

After a few more hours, I was awakened yet again and told that we were in Istanbul. The time was 5:20 AM. Disembarking, we found ourselves in a seemingly-abandoned Central Bus Station and contemplated committing the cardinal tourist sin of waving down a cab, but we decided to stick it out and try our luck with the Istanbul metro.

In attempting to buy metro tokens from a machine that was completely devoid of any English whatsoever, we encountered the first instance of a phenomenon that would prove to be ubiquitous in our stay here: People being insistently friendly and helpful. Not that I've never experienced friendliness from locals before, but over the course of the next two days, we would be treated to myriad displays of kindness from complete strangers on a scale I have never before witnessed.

The destination of this particular anecdote is that we bought our tokens and took the light rail system (akin to Germany's S-bahn) to our changeover. As we stepped out of the station, the sky was just beginning to lighten in the east, and a startling call rang out from the mosque to our immediate left. The muezzins called the city to prayer as we spent the next half hour trying to find out where exactly where we were supposed to catch the tram that would take us to our hostel. We eventually found the station by dint of pure dumb luck, and after walking onto the wrong side of the platform, the security guard indicated that he would look the other way while we crossed the tracks to the correct side.

After a short ride to Sultanahmet Square, we debarked and again tried to find our way with limited knowledge of our surroundings. There was a moment, as the sun rose over the Blue Mosque, when I wondered if I was in a dream. But I was roused from my reverie by yet another friendly, helpful stranger who walked us to our hostel, and making a quick executive decision to try to catch a little bit of sleep while it was still possibly justifiable to be abed, I passed out in our room until 9 AM.

Never has a cold shower been more refreshing than the one I took upon waking up for the last time that day. After venturing upstairs (for this hostel, we were told, featured a rooftop restaurant), I sat--completely and utterly flabbergasted, my utterly delicious complimentary breakfast spread before me--overlooking the Sea of Marmara, wondering for the second time that day if I was in a dream and I would wake up to a life in which I would not be refreshed, fed, warm, and in a place with a sea beneath me, the towers of a mosque to my left, and another continent to my right.

Needless to say, our stay had gotten off on the right foot. From there, it was all just a matter of sightseeing.

Istanbul, straddling two continents, is essentially divided into three halves. Though we didn't get to cross to the Asian side (more on that later), we spent the two days that I was able to stay exploring almost the entirety of the European side, which is bisected into two parts by the Golden Horn. Our first day, we ventured around the Old City, in the southern half of the European side.

Our first stop was the Blue Mosque, which is, in my novice opinion, the second coolest mosque in the city.

It's blue inside.

 In the immediate vicinity thereof are the Hagia Sofia,

Right next door.

the Egyptian obelisk,

That's just the top third of it.

and the Basilica Cistern, a creepy-cool underground cistern that used to be a church.

Seriously.

After drinking in these sights, we headed up the hill to the area of the Grand Bazaar, a massive indoor marketplace (The Ottomans invented malls. Who knew?). It was there that we experienced, in full force, the juggernaut that is a Turkish sales pitch. Yelled at from every angle with "special deals" and greetings that would make the person with the lowest self-esteem in the world feel valued, we made our way through, around, and between a maze of shops selling anything and everything imaginable.

Mall.

Finally making our way out of this delightfully treacherous labyrinth of merchandise, we found ourselves again on the street, and hungry. Stopping for a lunch of the most delicious döner kebab I have ever had (though it is ubiquitous and quite delicious here in Sofia, the döner in Istanbul was just the best thing ever) at a streetside truck, we then made our way to one of my favorite things on this trip, Süleyman's Mosque.

Built for Süleyman the Magnificent and finished in 1558, it was meant to be the grandest thing in the city, and I have a hard time believing it wasn't, if it isn't still. The architecture is ridiculous, ornate on a monumental scale, and the whole thing has been incredibly well-maintained. The grounds house several smaller domes, which serve as mausolea for Süleyman, his wife, and the architect that designed the mosque. Check it:

Just exquisite

And beautiful

From the courtyard

Our last sightseeing stop for the day was the Spice Bazaar back down the hill. While it bore more than a passing resemblance to the Grand Bazaar, it was entirely dedicated to food, and, of course, spices. It smelled delicious.

Really delicious.

When we emerged, it began to flurry, and then to out-and-out snow, so we decided to head back to the hostel to warm up, rest up, clean up, and get some dinner, after which we retired, having been joined in the dorm by a couple of ERASMUS students from France and Romania.

The Blue Mosque in the snow

That night, I slept hard, having pieced together barely more than five hours of sleep the previous night and topped it off with kilometers and kilometers of walking the previous day. When I awoke, awash in sunshine, the dorm was deserted, but I once again ventured upstairs and found Carrie at a table, and we proceeded to repeat the delicious morning festivities.

That taken care of, we planned our day, I checked out of the hostel (for I was to be returning that night), and we ventured out. After securing my ticket home, we decided to spend the day on the European side north of the Golden Horn, the New District. Stopping to appreciate some of the sights we had missed the first day, we made our way to the Galata Bridge and crossed over the water.

Our closest and most trusted companion on this trip was Rick Steves' guide to Istanbul. I had never been exposed to the magic that this series of travel guides represents, but I quickly became a believer. After crossing the water, we decided to travel--backwards--one of the routes he recommends. So to get there, we made our way through narrow alleyways and up tiny streets, past Italian-built (!?) towers, little synagogues nested into the rows of houses, and an inexplicable number of music shops, to Istiklal Caddesi.

Seriously. The Genoans built a tower right in the middle of Istanbul.

The most inconspicuous synagogue ever

We spent the next hour or so moseying on down this shoppers' paradise, swarmed even at the midday hour, pausing only to try some new Turkish food. We eventually emerged, unrelieved of any money save for that we had spent on lunch, and went ahead with what had been our plan all along - to head to the bridge across the Bosphorus and cross into Asia.

Though it was not incredibly far to go, the walk still took us the better part of two hours as we lacked any definite idea on how to get there and what to do, other than to walk towards it and then walk across it.

At least, it didn't look far away

We eventually found ourselves in the shadow of the bridge, but discovered that we would have to climb away from the water for quite a way to catch the beginning of it. So, again haphazardly, we followed small side streets towards what we imagined was the entrance to the bridge. Eventually finding ourselves at the top of a Long and Winding Road with the motorway close to us but no entrance in sight, I browbeat Carrie we decided to climb the steep, snowy hill up to the roadway.

Emerging onto the shoulder of the highway, our goal was in sight, and with about 15 minutes of daylight remaining, we decided to go for it. Alas, 10 seconds into our jaunt onto what turned out to be a maintenance-access walkway--and not, as we had thought, a pedestrian sidewalk--we were halted by frantic whistle blasts issuing from a police car. Our desire for completing our goal being outweighed by our desire not to get thrown into prison in a country whose language we spoke not one word of, we turned back, and settled for some picturesque, though disappointing, photos of the Bridge to the Other Side.

Below the bridge

Looking across

Steeling ourselves for the long return walk, we headed back down into town, stopping for some baklava along the way, and caught a bus back to Istiklal Caddesi. Walking back down the way we came, we found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant where we got a three-course meal for 5 lira (coming out to US $2.50). We then headed back into the Old City, where we finished our day at a hookah restaurant, relaxing and getting a private show from a Turkish folk band who serenaded us until they figured out that we weren't lying when we told them we had literally no money left to tip them.

With that, though Carrie stayed for another few days, my stay in Istanbul was over. I headed back to the bus station, barely making my bus in time, and once we were past the border crossing, I was down for the count, waking up in my seat as the bus crawled through a whited-out Sofia.

What an awesome trip. I have seen some very cool places in my time here so far, but Istanbul is definitely at or near the top. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience in almost every way, and I am going to try to go back one more time before I have to leave this wild continent.

I will get us all caught up next time (finally!), and there is a lot to tell. So until then -

A Trip to Brograde

It's been a long day at the office.

I'll admit that I'm tired from the endless hours of sitting in the library, staring alternately at unreadable Bulgarian texts and my own computer screen, but, my glut for torture has brought me to this point, to faithfully deliver to you the latest succulent narrative of a trip to an exotic, distant land.

Seeing as how I failed to fulfill my goal, last month, of visiting a new country every month for the first time, I resolved to remedy the situation by taking a trip this past weekend and crediting it to November. The destination of my intrepid compatriots and me? Belgrade, the former capital of Yugoslavia (May It Rest In Peace) and current capital of Serbia. Our host for the weekend? Keša - our old friend from FISI, law student, and party animal.

With this trip now officially in the books, I can say, without fear of retribution from the gods of Fate, Luck, Karma, or Hubris, that it went off virtually glitch-free. We ran into no problems getting our tickets, Keša booked us a cheap hostel (more on that to come), everything ran according to plan, and our travel time ending up being significantly shorter than we had expected. Though we did run into a few surprises along the way, we were able to navigate them more or less smoothly, owing to the benevolent attention from the aforementioned gods and more than a few entreating expressions.

We woke at 6 AM Friday morning and left for the bus station at 7. Our first surprise was the bus that pulled into the lot to whisk us away to our destination: Instead of the standard coach we've gotten used to in these parts, up rolled an 18-seat minibus. A mite confused, we boarded, but an hour later, we made it to the border. Not having left the Schengen Area or the EU since arriving here, we weren't sure what to expect, but the crossing went swiftly and painlessly (and, to our substantial relief, tarifflessly). Two hours later, we arrived in Niš.

My understanding of the schedule had been that we would be resting there for two hours, but upon appealing to the information desk, we were told--in Serbian, which is, fortuitously, close enough to Bulgarian that we were able to understand the general gist of what was being told to us--that we actually had to board a bus which would be departing in three minutes. The lady helping us asked for our tickets, and to our horror, ripped them out and printed us new ones. Somehow, this must have been part of what was supposed to happen, because, completely baffled by the process by this point, we presented our new tickets to the bus driver, and he welcomed us on board the bus to Belgrade. We departed, and, despite our lingering confusion, arrived in Belgrade at 2 PM.

Keša, whom Alex and I hadn't seen in 4 months, and whom Laura and Hannah had never met, was waiting for us at the station, and we went from there. Let me say this: Though I know that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, I noticed that we had a much easier time conducting ourselves around this country--of whose native language we possessed little knowledge--being accompanied by a native speaker than we had on our last trip (to Romania, a country of whose language we possessed similarly little knowledge), when we enjoyed no such company. We were successfully and easily able to reserve our return tickets, and we made our way to the hostel.

It was cheap (Costing us only 1000 Dinars per person per night, which I'm sure will sound like an astronomical sum until I tell you that it only comes out to 10 Euros), afforded us easy access to approximately 649 coffee shops, and was, all in all, a pleasant little affair. We got a room to ourselves, though we shared a (rather thin and not at all sound-muffling) doorway with a group of evil unpleasant Serbians who made a point of talking as loudly as possible as soon as 7:30 AM rolled around. After checking in, having only an hour of daylight left (Serbia apparently being a land of 3:45 sunsets this time of year), we went out for a brief foray around the city.

We passed a few of the attractions we were to see in more detail in the coming days and made our way back to hostel, where we, to our comprehensive benefit, had the opportunity to take naps of a decadent magnitude. I certainly took advantage, passing into a veritable coma for an hour, before we roused ourselves to head out to dinner.

Dinner on the first night was a cozy little affair at the "?" Restaurant. After spending the 2+ requisite hours eating and catching up on our activities of the last few months, we headed out to a bar in the old city, where we met several of Keša's friends (all law students). There, we got to spend the next few hours listening to an excellent cover band, learning about our hosts, and generally having an awesome time of it in our new, friendly, entertaining city.

After staying out later than was advisable given our lack of good rest the night before, we were roused the next morning by the probably-intentionally-disruptive susurruses of our aforementioned doormates. After heading out to a ridiculously cheap and delicious breakfast, we made our way around the Old City, spending the bulk of our morning on Knez Mihailova street, a pedestrian-only Shoppers' Paradise.

All dressed up for Xmas

This new camera is turning me into a hipster, but DOESN'T IT LOOK DELICIOUS

I just thought this was cool.

From there, we proceeded over to Belgrade Fortress, overlooking the spot where the Danube and Sava Rivers meet. Nothing I can say will really do it justice, so instead of giving you a 6000-word description, how about I just give you the equivalent in pictures?

Entering the Fortress through Stambol Gate

The meeting of the Danube (right) and Sava (left) Rivers, New Belgrade in the background

Along the Ramparts

With a layer of mist rolling in

Steeple

Despot Stefan Tower, with New Belgrade in the background

Tearing ourselves away from this Piece of Awesome, as we had other things to see, we made our way back to the center of the Old City, stopping at St. Michael's Cathedral, the seat of the Patriarch of Serbia.

The Patriarch's Palace

St. Michael's Cathedral

Detail of the Steeple

After a walking through the Belgrade Ethnographic Museum (which yielded some interesting information pertinent to my research, though I won't sully the wondrous nature of this entry by delving into it right now) and a quick dinner, we headed down to the Cathedral of St. Sava. Incredible is the only way to describe it.

There are no words

Inside

After walking past some other Extremely Cool Things (including a Beatles tribute band playing to a packed outdoor skating rink), we met up for a few hours with some of the people we had met at the bar the previous night, and headed back to our hostel.

Our final morning in Belgrade dawned damp and cold, but we managed to salvage a few more hours of sightseeing before we had to make our bus at 12:30. It was on the way back to the bus station that I saw probably the most striking thing of the entire trip - the bombed-out shell of some structure, right across the street from a seemingly-untouched, beautifully ornate government building. It was then that it hit me that this place, for all of the beautiful and wonderful things it had shown us over the course of the two previous days, had bombs dropping on it barely more than 10 years ago. 

It was a stark reminder that for all the peace and security we enjoy in the States, people in many other places live far more tenuously. Just within Belgrade, an entire generation of innocent kids--members of ordinary families that had nothing to do with any of the violence in Kosovo--grew up in an environment approximating warfare, including Keša and all the people we had met. It was a jolt, similar to the one I experienced when I visited Mt. Meron in Israel (which bore the marks of bombs that had fallen on it just the previous summer), that woke me to the fact that devastating events--that cause people to live in constant fear--take place all over the world, right in people's own back yards.

L - R: Alex, Hannah, Laura, and Keša at the head of the street. All of the following pictures were taken within 100 meters of each other. Note that, in this first picture, nothing bears any marks of damage.

50 meters down the road. Note the shells of the building on either side of the street.

The south half of the bombed-out structure, with the untouched government building across the street.

Close-up of another crumbling part of the building.

Another side of the north half of the building

It was a sobering end to our trip, but an important thing to have witnessed. It reminded me that history is always at hand in this part of the world, and the best thing we can do is to learn from it.

Our trip back to Sofia was as thankfully uneventful as our trip to Belgrade, and we made it back around 8:30 Sunday night. My three companions left for their respective cities from there. Overall, it was a terrific, and entirely too short trip. Belgrade was certainly one of the coolest cities I've been to so far, and you can be sure I'll go back when I can. Definite, unmitigated GREAT success.

Next entry - all the Fulbrighters gather in Sofia on Friday for a year-end conference. Stay tuned for a recap this weekend. Thanks to all of you for coming along for the ride.