An American in Vienna, An Apocalypse in Bulgaria

Part 1: Travels

The thing I have probably enjoyed most about this year has been the degree of mobility afforded me by living in a part of the world with such small countries. In the States, you travel for a while, and you may or may not even be in a different state; the people still speak English; you can still walk down the road and get a pizza; your money is still green (or blue or orange or any of the other myriad colors in which legal tender in the US now comes). Traveling is just simpler, cheaper, and more accessible in the Balkans, where a completely alien culture is just a bus or plane ride away.

So to put the finishing touches on my œuvre of warmup travels that has presaged the biggest trip of my life, coming up next month (!), I took a long weekend to Austria to visit fellow Los Angeles Fulbrighter Andrea and to see Laura for a few days. Last month, I had the opportunity to be whisked through Vienna for an apocopated two-hour tour of the city (never mind that more than half of that time was spent on the U-bahn), but, that short time hardly having counted, I wanted another chance to visit for reals. So on Thursday, I made a little jump over a couple mountains and some other quasi-important stuff to go stay for a few days.

After meeting my two governesses at the airport, we scampered off to get some of the best ice cream known to man. No, seriously, hyperbole has no place in this blog, and my word here is bond. Finishing this nirvanic treat off well before we reached the safety of Andrea's apartment, we took the long S-bahn, U-bahn, and Strassenbahn ride to catch up a little and take in the Viennese scenery. Upon getting home, it being nearly 6 (my original flight having been cancelled, pushing my arrival back), we made some dinner, got settled in, and opted to chill out for the night.

The next day, us having crashed far earlier than the usual post-PM times to which I've grown accustomed, began bright and early, but with the added bonus of a decent night's sleep under our belts. We had a rather pleasant, leisurely breakfast (replete with tea and toast), and then headed out to be obnoxious American good little tourists about Vienna.

Our first stop was Schönbrunn, the summer home of the Habsburgs during their extravagant reign. To paint the most simplistic picture I can of the place: It is large, and the courtyard is huge, and it's got a lot of ornate stuff in it. Just look:

The fountain and gloriette up the hill

Looking back down, Vienna in the background

After reveling in this opulence for a few sunny hours, we made a brief foray through Karlsplatz, which included reflective, digital counters of all sorts of interesting items, like this one that was counting worldwide "armaments expenditures," AKA defense spending, since January 1st (in Euros):

€ 512 billion = A lot of money.

This being merely a transit point between where we had been and where we were going, we declined to linger, and made straightaway for Vienna's 1st District. In our jolly hours wandering around this, the city's oldest and most central part, we happened upon a large collection of Really Neat Stuff, including the Burgtheater, Vienna's most prestigious theater, the Rathaus--Vienna's city hall, all decked out for the imminent Life Ball, at which Bill Clinton was to give an address--the Austrian Parliament, the Volksgarten, and Hofburg Palace.

Burgtheater

Rathaus

Parliament, which begs the question of why our government buildings don't have stuff like this in attendance.

Hofburg Palace

While we were ogling these Old World wonders, having seen a great many cool things that day, evening fell and we moseyed back to Andrea's apartment, from which she scurried off to rehearsal, while Laura and I made dinner.

Exhausted from another long day, we feel asleep rather early that night, and awoke not-late-ish on Saturday, first to go to Yamm--a vegetarian pay-by-weight buffet that was nothing short of damned delicious--and then to go to Vienna's huge, historic cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof. As it spans more than 2 square kilometers, we didn't nearly have enough time to see all of it, but we did hit some of the more important parts. First up was the composers' section:

Beethoven

Monument to Mozart

Schubert

Johann Strauss

Brahms, in all his perplexed glory

Wolf

After that, we wandered over to what was nominally the "President's Section," though it mostly contained non-presidential, though otherwise notable, people:

Julius Raab - actually a president of Austria

Arnold Schönberg - not a president of Austria

Zemlinsky - also not a president, but cool anyway

Finally, we headed over to the Jewish section, which, to my surprise and sadness, was overgrown and in disrepair. Having somehow escaped the destruction that befell so many Jewish cemeteries during the Holocaust, it has clearly not been maintained, either by virtue of the interreds' families having permanently fled the former Reich, and so being unable to pay for maintenance of the graves, or simply through negligence on the part of the caretakers of the cemetery. Whatever the case, it was a sad and telling reminder of the recent history of the country.

Overgrown

Broken down

Needing to get home, as Andrea had a performance of Die Schöpfung to get to, we left this sobering site and took the Strassenbahn and U-Bahn back to Schwedenplatz, where, before heading home, we chilled out with some good drinks and casually overlooked the Danube.

Pretty

Andrea went running off, as had become her wont over the course of this trip (busy singer that she is and will continue to be), and Laura and I made dinner, as had become ours, and watched FC Bayern's heartbreaking loss play out to Chelsea FC on penalty kicks in the Champions' League finals.

The next day would be our last in Vienna, and while Andrea was at church, Laura and I went spazieren gehen in the Augarten, which happens, conveniently, to lie in the shadow of Andrea's apartment. It was a warm, pleasant Sunday morning, the idyllic setting of the park being broken only by the bizarre specters of antiaircraft towers, built by Hitler in the waning days of World War II, looming over the entire place.

Bizarre, ominous

After Andrea returned, we three went out for a last tour around Vienna before it was time to go, including a trip to a little outdoor restaurant where I got my first taste of Kalbbratwurst (it was delicious). I got back to Sofia late Sunday night, a different person from all that had transpired on the trip, but there was no time to ruminate on it; as Ben Folds almost said in what is undoubtedly one of the greatest songs ever written, life was calling, and wouldn't hold.

Part 2: The End of the World

I arrived back in Sofia to the welcome of fellow Fulbrighter Michael waiting at my apartment, as he had been staying the weekend in my absence. Going to bed far too late on Sunday night--the result of our lengthy discussion of my trip--we woke up Monday morning, I organized some notes, and just like that, with no time to pause and catch my breath, it was time to venture out into the world again and continue with my daily slog to fulfill the raison d'être for my continued presence here, the writing of my rapidly-ballooning thesis. So Monday passed in a whirlwind of writing and editing (Michael similarly being occupied, in his case by LSAT preparations), ukulele playing, and running.

Friend of the Fulbright Program Chris showed up in time for dinner, and after all was said and done for the evening, we three occupied my kitchen until the wee hours of the morning, me finally giving up on my work for the day as the conversation about the state of the American economy and worldwide financial policy became too interesting for me to resist. We continued in our heretofore fashion well past the hours when all but the most ardent of night-owls would be abed when the unexpected happened.

At first, I thought it was the vibration from the nearby elevator shaking the floor, but when it lasted far longer than a second, I knew this couldn't be the case. And as I nearly lost my balance from the lateral back-and-forth of my apartment up on the top floor of my Gd-be-praised-structurally-sound apartment building, ukulele still in hand, Tupac lyrics still hanging on my lips, I knew: We were having an earthquake, a big one.

My first instinct being to bolt for the doorway (the wisdom of which, as it turns out, is not entirely based on fact), I shouted, "Door!" and the other two followed me, huddling inside the doorjamb for what were 30 seconds of the 5 scariest cumulative minutes of my entire life. Finally, the shaking subsided, and we were left to slow our racing hearts and sort out what had just happened.

I came to Bulgaria fresh off of 5 years of living in Los Angeles, and I somehow managed to be out of town for both of the substantial earthquakes that struck during that period. I felt a couple of smaller ones when I was there, maybe 3.5's or 4's--just large enough to rattle some windows and shake some things around--but never before had I experienced any seismic activity as strong or lasting for quite as long as that which struck at 3 AM that morning. The official word coming out of Bulgaria's geological service is that it was a 5.6 quake, followed by two aftershocks at 4.6 and 4.3, both of which we felt and somewhat-less-fearfully reacted to.

We took it as a sign that our night should probably have ended, so we went to bed, waking the next morning to repeat our routine of LSAT preparation (Chris and Michael being identically occupied) and thesis writing. While out at the coffee shop into which we had settled, the apocalyptic phenomena continued to hound our lovely city of Sofia when large hail began to fall, leaving us to stare out the plate glass windows and wonder just what was going on and what it could mean. It made sense to me, in that moment, why ancient societies, without the benefit of scientific knowledge and skepticism, sometimes went so crazy over phenomena like these--ones that we now know to be unrelated and caused by natural forces--and assigned them supernatural, cosmic meaning. It was an interesting perspective-generating moment.

Today, on this rainy Wednesday, I've had much to do, and accomplished nearly all of it, so while I go to finish the rest, I'll leave you all to enjoy your lives, hopefully enriched by this, the tale of one of the more bizarre pages out of my own. Until next week, when we'll talk about a few visitors I'll be having this weekend, as well as the continuation of this less-fun-by-the-day process of academic pontification I find myself in the midst of, be happy and fulfilled.

Reset

My time here in Bulgaria has so far managed to divide itself neatly into more-or-less coherent, theme-oriented chapters. Chapter 1, were there to be a forthcoming book (there isn't) would detail FISI and my first two weeks here. Chapter 2 would cover the first days in Sofia up through the High Holidays, including my first trip to Munich. Chapter 3 would comprise the month of October and my trip to Romania, and Chapter 4 would be the story of the rest of my time up until the Holidays - rushing to finish the allotted amount of research, my weekend trip to Belgrade, and tackling the titanic task of finishing my Grad School applications. Chapter 5 would, of course, be about merry, merry Christmas in Germany.

Chapter 6 would be the account of how I delved back into my research, traveled to Istanbul, found out about my Grad School auditions, and began putting all sorts of undue stress onto myself because of them. Chapter 7 would be the month of February back in the States, the memories of which remain a nightmare and a scourge unto my psyche. Chapter 8 would tell all about 'Conference Month'--as I've taken to calling it in my mind--and my trips to Berlin and Thessaloniki. And Chapter 9 would include the euphoric episodes of Spring Cleaning and Passover, making my final trip to Munich, heading off to the States for my brother's wedding, and what has transpired in the past week.

On Thursday, I interviewed Kremena Stancheva, one of the featured singers of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, to ask her about how her craft changed between the time when she was an amateur singer in her home village of Kovachevtsi and when she began singing professionally in Sofia. It was truly awesome--and a little surreal--to sit in the living room of one of modern Bulgarian folklore's celebrated figures and to get to chat with her about her experiences, having her get up halfway through to serve tea and banitsa, continuing to pick her brain about the state of modern folklore, and to get what was my most direct firsthand account of the stuff I've been trying to assimilate and understand for the better part of 8 months. And when it was over--having completed my archive work on Wednesday--I was officially finished with the research portion of my grant.

In my Fulbright application, I had originally proposed a deadline of April 30 to get this done, which would give me exactly 2 months to write my thesis. While I missed that deadline by 3 days (and I won't actually begin writing until tomorrow), it's a nice feeling to be (roughly) on schedule, especially since I proposed that deadline with no knowledge of my subject and absolutely no conception of what the situation on the ground would be.

So I'm in good shape, more or less. I have 5 full weeks to pound out my first draft, which I'm hoping will come in somewhere around 50 pages. You can do the math--all I need to do is to produce 2 pages per day for 5 days a week--and it doesn't seem that daunting. We'll see how things actually progress, but I'm optimistic that I can do a satisfactory job in that amount of time, it will leave me with 2 full weeks to revise, tweak, edit, and proofread.

To celebrate the end of this long slog quest for knowledge, I headed back to the Black Sea, along with a number of my Fulbright compatriots, for a long weekend starting on Friday. I'm on the bus back to Sofia right now, in fact, and as we fly past the forests and fields of Bulgaria, we are surrounded by largely untouched, heartbreakingly beautiful landscapes that conjure up in my mind images of an isolated, far-flung pre-modern agrarian society. It really puts me in the mood to come out here, into the Balkan Middle of Nowhere, and just sit for awhile. Ah, to be a monk, with the sole purpose and quest of finding enlightenment.

At any rate, we stayed the weekend at a little for-rent apartment complex in Byala, a resort town of moderate size located on the coast halfway between Varna and Burgas. Most of us arrived on Friday afternoon and spent a few hours resting up from our travels before making dinner and having a not-crazy party before collapsing, exhausted, into bed before midnight. Yesterday was spent largely at the beach (and what a хубаво beach it was) before we packed it in to repeat the previous night's festivities. Today, we packed up to leave, spent a little more time in the sand, and miraculously made it back to Varna on time and without incident before going our separate ways. It was a lot of fun, considering it may have been the last chance we had to party mostly together before our collective year here is done.

So, this was a weekend to reset, to mentally sweep away the entirety of the complicated, confusing, convoluted process of living--academic, emotional, and personal experiences alike--that has brought me to this point, and to prepare myself to climb this last, entirely new and unbekannt mountain that lies in my path, the one through which, by virtue of the work necessary to crest it, I will earn the right to conclude my year and leave this place satisfied and at peace. After this weekend, nothing that I've done up to this point matters any longer; I am left only with the knowledge I've accumulated, the growth I've experienced, and the people to whom I've hewn close. Nothing else.

This thesis is the last thing standing between this point and the end of my stay. I'm not going anywhere, save a long weekend trip to Vienna, and my focus is now narrowed to the singular task of finishing the year up strongly. Whereas the last 8 months have been marked by variety, the next 2 will be defined by their simplicity, consisting of nothing more than writing and celebration. It puts me back in the mindset of those years when I was in high school, when, as soon as the weather turned truly, gloriously warm again (as it has finally done this week), every one of us, to a student, was checked out and ready to finish up.

But it's overarchingly strange to think that this will truly be the final chapter in the story of the year I spent in Bulgaria. I've gotten used to this place, my travels to destinations abroad notwithstanding, and while I'm definitely ready to go home, I'm finally realizing just how great it's been to me and for me. I can say with confidence, regardless of how these last two months turn out, that it has been one hell of a year, and it's been genuinely good for me.

Leaving, Again

My bags are on their way to being packed, and my dad and I are hitting the road in about an hour. This is the last time I'll bid farewell to Pennsylvania before I come back to the States for good.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it's been quite difficult for me to go through the mental process of saying goodbye today. The last two times, while they included their share of difficulties, were different, I think partly because my sentimentality at leaving was tempered with the excitement of going. I'll attribute the challenges of doing so this time around to the emotional content of this trip. My brother's wedding on Saturday was beautiful, and it made me happier than I ever would have anticipated to watch him take this leap with his wife, Jenna, and to welcome her into the family.

I suppose what it did was to throw into relief everything that my life has been over the last 6 years. And, to be quite honest, I wasn't expecting that. I hadn't anticipated just how much this would affect me. But: Here I am--a somewhat new man thanks to a dose of new perspective--and things look, from this vantage point, both a bit clearer and a bit more muddled.

Over the last 36 hours or so, I've had to take in a large part of the contents of my life and reassess where I really am. The most immediately direct and powerful result of that process has been my assessment of the relationships I've built over the last 10 years of my life, and how I've prioritized and valued them.

I certainly haven't done so in any kind of egalitarian fashion - nor could I--or should I--have. A part of being human, something I've learned as I've grown up, is that some relationships are, necessarily, more fulfilling, and some more fun, and some more important, and some more difficult, and some more instructional, and some more complex, and some more organic, and some more trying, and some more stable than others. And as we develop them and grow through them, the only healthy thing we can do is to prioritize those that are better for us over those that are less so based on what we feel and what we know at the time. We can do no better than that.

So I've been doing that, and as I've gotten better and better at it, the overall quality of the  relationships that I've cultivated and maintained has--surprise!--risen, and dramatically so.

But what this weekend--and, really, this entire week back at home--has done has been to make me reexamine some of those relationships and to really think about their places in my life. And what I've realized is that I haven't given some of them the energy and time they deserve.

I had an OK life in Pennsylvania before I went off to university. Every adolescent's existence is fraught with self-esteem issues and heartbreak, melodrama, frustration, and tough, painful lessons, and I certainly experienced more than my fair share of those. Overall, though, it could have been a lot worse, and what it did, at the end of the day, was force me to grow. But the time I had after I moved to LA and started my new life was so overwhelmingly positive and happiness-inducing (Though it was, by no means, idyllic or perfect - there was just as much drama in my life during those four years as during my previous four) that I unconsciously tore down and devalued various aspects of my life back in Pennsylvania. In short, my time in LA was so much fun that my former life seemed negative and incomplete by comparison.

And while I can now, with the benefit of hindsight and psychological insight, understand why I mentally denigrated the memories of the first 18 years of my life, I can also now see that it wasn't the healthiest or most judicious thing to do. I had a few relationships back on the East Coast that I, instead of tearing down, should have been building up.

Many of them were with members of my own family. To be sure, some of those relationships were actually served by the introduction of space into them, and have since regrown, stronger and better-adjusted. But at some point during my college years, I think I realized, luckily, that I really missed not having them close by, and this imbued me with something for them--appreciation--that I don't think I had had enough of prior to that. And so the time I spent away from them actually strengthened our relationships in the end.

This happened with my brother. He and I, separated in age by 8 ½ years, were never particularly close, and the fact that we were two totally dissimilar people didn't do anything to mitigate that. But the last 6 years, having thrown my growth process into hyperdrive, have closed the gap between us, and we've also grown more similar to each other as people. Having begun to develop a relationship with him in the past couple of years has been more fulfilling than I had ever thought possible.

I think that's part of the reason why I've been so affected by his getting married. I'm incredibly happy to see him begin his life with Jenna, who is pretty damned excellent herself, and I'm excited, as their family, to share in their household.

I have a lot to think about, coming back to the East Coast in the Fall; in particular, about what I'm going to take with me from LA and what I'll have to leave behind. And in my emotional state this weekend, I remembered something important that I had forgotten: That I have some truly precious things, things from my former life that have endured through all the changes and situations and lessons of the past few years, that I'll be coming back to. And, despite the emotional maelstrom of the last month, that makes me, at my core, happy.

And they lived happily ever after.

 

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 -