Just returned from the doctor. If baby number two decides not to come on its own, by this time next week the doctor will induce. We're excited. (What? Were you expecting Part IV of Bulgarian Memories? Be patient. Unless the baby comes tomorrow, it will be up by the end of the week.)
Bulgarian Memories, Part III
Three dozen homes that make up Tsarovo are surrounded by white walls. Think of them as tall, cement privacy fences. The homes have large yards and most of space in the yard is used for gardens. The homes are relatively big and most had red tiled roofs. Most of my time Bulgaria was spent living in the countries two largest cities: Sofia and Plovidiv. I usually lived in one or two bedroom apartments. Though convenient in a lot of ways, I enjoyed the occasional visit to the smaller cities where people lived in something other than communist approved housing. Though many of these small villages lacked the conveniences of larger cities, I had always thought that people in these small villages had the advantage of more personal space and privacy and in some ways more freedom than those in larger cities. It was nice to see places with yards and gardens away from the noises of buses and thousands of people packed into large, concrete buildings.
The house wasn't hard to find. It was the last house on the street. Off to one side were rolling hills planted with tobacco and grapes. We rang the brass bell attached to the gate and waited. A moment later a middle aged woman appeared.
"You're here!" she exclaimed. "I'm glad you've come."
"Lilyana?" I said. From her reaction I assumed we had the right house but wanted to be sure. It was nice to meet someone who was happy to see us.
"Yes, yes! Please come in," she said. She opened the gate and let us into the yard. "Come, let me introduce you to my family."
We followed her down a wide path between the house and a cement wall. Overhanging the path were grape vines. Large clusters of green grapes hung from the vines. They looked sweet and juicy. Mixed in with the grapes were squash. Instead of planting them on the ground and letting their vines spread, the tendrils of these squash plants climbed up the lattice amid the grape vines. Squash plants hung down with the grapes. I had never seen anything like this.
I must have been staring at the plants with a funny look on my face because Lilyana asked if something was wrong.
"No, nothing's wrong," I said. "I've never seen squash growing amid grapes before. Back home the squash spreads out along the ground."
"We plant them this way to help conserve space," she said. "There isn't room to let things spread out all over the ground."
The path led to a large back yard maybe a quarter of acre big. There was a small open space with grass. An old wooden table and chairs were outside. The rest of the yard was converted into a garden and from what I could see there was mostly tomatoes, cucumbers, and cabbage. Each row was separated by small stone paths. Several chickens were clucking and walking between the rows looking for bugs.
An old woman with white fizzy hair emerged from the back door. Her back was hunched and she hobbled in the direction of the garden. She called out and shook a pail of grain she carried. The chickens responding to either the sound of her voice of the sound of the grain in the bucket ran toward her, clucking loudly. The woman threw the grain in wide arcs and the chickens spread out to gobble it up.
The old woman was introduced to us as Lilyana's mother. Her name was Mila and she seemed glad to see us.
"Have you seen Ivan?" Lilyana asked.
"Ivan? He's out in the field playing with the dog," the woman said. "He should be back soon."
"I told him not to leave. He knew we were having guests," Lilyana said. She excused herself and walked out a back gate to find him. Each call for her son grew fainter and fainter.
Mila told us to sit in one of the wooden chairs next to the table. She sat next to us and asked us about home and our families and what we thought of Bulgaria. We answered her questions and tried to find out as much about her as we could. As it turned out Mila was in her late 80s and had been born and raised in this Tsarovo. Her husband, who had died ten years previously, was also born and raised here. She told us that she rarely left the village now that she was older. "I used to travel to the city but not anymore. This is my home," she said. "I have lived here and I will die here."
A dog came running through the back gate, followed by a young boy. The dog was a mutt, and looked to be a cross between at least five different breeds. It ran up to us and tried to climb on our laps and lick our faces.
"Ivan," Mila said. "Control your dog!"
Ivan called to the dog and it ran back to him then darted around the garden chasing the chickens. The chicken ran along the narrow paths of the garden. One chick fluttered in the air a foot or so off the ground then crashed headlong into the wall, momentarily stunning it.
"Ivan!"
Ivan grabbed the dog by the caller and chained him to a post near the table. The dog strained at the chain when a chicken walked by. Eventually it lay underneath the table and rested its head on its paws.
Ivan seemed excited to see us. He told us how he and the dog were playing down by the river. "I've taught him to fetch anything I throw," he said proudly, "even small rocks." As if to illustrate his point, he picked up a small stone from the garden. The dog perked up when he saw Ivan pick up the rock. Mila made a ticking sound with her tongue -- the sound of general displeasure -- and Ivan set the rock down.
Lilyana came through the back gate. There were beads of sweat on her forehead as if she had been walking quickly to stay with Ivan and his dog.
"I see you've met Ivan," she said.
"He has a lot of energy," I said. "I have a brother about his age. He runs around just like Ivan."
"You have a brother?" said Ivan, "Maybe he can come and play with me." There was an excitement at the prospect of having a playmate I found odd. But before I could say anything to Ivan Lilyana was unhooking the dog from it's chain.
"Since this is your first time in our village," she said. "You must let me show you around."
The D is for Loser
On the way to work this morning, I was listening to a sports radio station when it was announced that the Detroit Tigers fired manager Alan Trammell. The comments from the sport radio hosts went something like this.
Host #1: Now that Detroit needs a new manager, do you think someone like Lou Piniella will take the job.
Host #2: I don't think anyone's that desperate for a job.
Host #1: Come one, what's there not to love about the Tigers. They've been tearing it up for years now.
Host #2: You've got a point. They could give any AAA level team a run for their money.
I'm starting to think Detroit should replace the fancy D on their caps and replace it with a big L.
~sighs~
(For those who were looking forward to Part III of Bulgarian Memories, it will be posted tomorrow. I had to vent while I had a minute.)
Bulgarian Memories, Part II
Read Part I.
You won't find Tsarovo on even the most detailed maps of Bulgaria. I remember being surprised at this fact when I retuned to the states. My grandfather had purchased a very large and meticulous map of the country for me upon my return and one evening I was pointing out various cities I have visited or lived in to my family. When I started telling this story I looked all over the map for Tsarovo. I traced road that the bus took the village. Where the village should have been, there was nothing.
About an hour after leaving the bus depot, the bus left the main highway and drove several miles down a narrow dirt road. To the side of the roads were fields of tobacco. The plants were tall and the leaves, dark green and broad. A few field workers stood near the fence examining the leaves of one plant. The looked up as the bus passed.
At the bottom of some rolling hills, the bus stopped. The doors hissed open and the old women gathered up their bags and hobbled off the bus. I approached the driver and asked when the next bus would head back to Plovdiv.
"Four o'clock," he said. "If you miss that, you'll have to spend the night here."
I stepped off the bus and found myself at the foot of some rolling hills. There were three empty buildings at the end of the road. There were faded signs above the doorways and in the widows. At one time one of the buildings had been a store. Another a laundry service. They were probably stores that were open during the communist reign to keep people employed. Once the communist government was toppled, the stores shut down. In the smaller towns there were lots of empty buildings like this.
But empty buildings weren't what I had expected to find. I had expected to see homes and people in the streets. Instead there were three empty buildings at the foot of some hills.
"Is this Tsarovo?" my companion said.
I pulled the directions from my pocket that I had written down a few days before. The directions were vague. It said simply to walk down the main road from the bus stop to the village. I looked around and noticed most of the old women from the bus were waking past the buildings, up a road that weaved it's way through the hills.
"I think Tsarovo is up that road," I said.
We caught up to the old woman with the bag of sticks on the road.
"Excuse me," I said. "Will this road take us to Tsarovo?"
The woman stopped and set down her bag. "What business do you have there?" she said.
"We're here to see friends," I said.
The woman looked us up and down. Her green eyes were full of suspicion and mistrust. "Who are your friends?" she asked.
"Would you like help with your bag?" I offered. "I can carry it to the village for you." I wanted to change the subject. Often our presence would cause tension between those we were visiting and their neighbors. Besides, I had no doubt after today everyone in the village would know whom we had come to see.
The old woman pulled the bag close to her. "I can carry my own bag," she said.
"Tsarovo," I said. "It's up this road, right?"
"Yes," the woman said. "Up the road."
Up the road ended being a two mile walk. By the time we arrived our shoes were covered with dust. We were hot and tired. We took bottles of water from our bags and took a long drink and looked at the village. Tsarovo was nothing more than a collection of three dozen homes, grouped together on the crest of a hill. It was surrounded by other hills. The other hills were all farmland, a patchwork of greens and yellows.What surprised me most about the town however was not it's size, but the streets. The roads were littered with horse and donkey manure. Most of it was dried by the sun but there were a few fresh piles lying around.
"Do you hear that?" I said.
My companion looked around. "Hear what?"
"Listen," I said.
He stood and cocked his head to one side. "I don't hear anything," he said.
"Exactly. There's nothing to hear. There's no cars or radios. Nothing. When was the last time you were in a place this quiet? Look at the manure all over the road. Do you see any tire tracks smashing it down. Do you see any power lines sending electricity to the homes? I don't think the people here have electric power or cars."
"Who do lives a place like this?" my companion said.
I pulled the directions out of my pocket trying to orient myself. "Let's find out," I said.
I stepped over a fresh pile of donkey manure and turned down the first street.
Bulgarian Memories, Part I
It began with an early morning bus ride.
I was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and eating banitsa -- a cheese filled pastry-- and waiting for the bus. At that hour, there were few people at the bus station. Of the dozen or so people in the station, most of them were old women with hunched backs. They all carried bags. Some bags were filled with food. Others with clothes. One woman with grey hair and green eyes had a bag full of sticks. Most of them eyed my companion and I with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.
We were dressed in the standard summer attire: short sleeve white shirts and ties. I hope it is not necessary to state that we stood out. I checked my watch then approached the ticket window to make sure I had understood the ticket lady correctly when I had purchased the tickets.
"Seven o'clock. That's when the bus comes, right?" I asked the middle aged lady behind the counter.
She was puffing on a cigarette and reading a celebrity magazine. A picture of Princess Diana graced the cover. "It will come when it comes," she said not looking up from her magazine.
"Is there a bus later this afternoon?"
The woman looked up from her magazine. "There is only one bus a day to your city," she said. "When it comes get on it." Then she returned her attention back to the magazine.
I thanked the lady and walked over to the magazine stand, and tried to decipher the newspaper headlines. By this time I had lived in Bulgaria 20 months. I spoke Bulgarian well but the newspapers were tricky to read. Their headlines used a lot of slang and tricky word conjugations that I found hard to understand. But today's headline I understood all to well. A car bomb had exploded in Sofia. The subhead line said police speculated it was part of the latest, ongoing mafia war.
The old man selling the newspapers asked if I wanted to buy a paper. I nodded my head indicating no. The nodding and the shaking had been one of the more difficult parts of Bulgarian culture to master because it's the opposite from the rest of the world. Nodding your head means no. Shaking it means yes. Bulgarians told us that this custom was from the time of the Turkish occupation. Not fond of Christians, the Turks would put the point of the sword under the chin of a Bulgarians and ask if they were Christians. To nod meant death so as the story went, Bulgarians began shaking their head to indicate yes. This helped them avoid the point of the sword while at the same time pacifying their Turkish occupiers.
"If you want to read it, then buy it," he man selling newspapers said. He pulled the stack of papers toward him.
I walked back to my companion.
"Anything in the news?" he said.
"No. Nothing."
A red bus spewing plumes of black diesel smoke pulled up. The old women in the station picked up their bags and hobbled on, pausing only to hand the driver their tickets. We waited until everyone else had boarded. We boarded the bus and handed the driver our tickets. Only the old ladies who were at the station were on the bus. There were plenty of empty seats. We were encouraged to sit next to people and talk to them but the looks of those in the bus still looked at us with suspicion. Wordlessly we found seats near the back, across the aisle from the old lady with a bag of sticks.
The doors of the bus closed and the bus left the station in a plume of black exhaust.
The journey to a Tsarovo, small village in the middle of the Rhodope mountains, was about to begin.
Things That Would Only Bother Me
I was watching the local news the other day about an arrest in murder that happened 13 years ago. I like these stories as I'm curious as to what the big break was that linked the murderer to his victim. (In this case it was a scuff of paint on the victim's boot matched the paint of a suspect's car.) This news report (sorry no link to story available) included an interview the former victim's wife. It identified her as Jennifer Ruff -- the victim's widow. I then flipped to a different news channel where they ran their take on the same story. I decided to watch this broadcast simply to see if they had any new information that the first station didn't. Everything in this broadcast was pretty much the same as the first. Same background on the murder, same quotes by the same police officers, and the same mug shot of the suspect. The only thing that was different was the way the portrayed the victim's former wife. She was identified by her new married name, Jennifer Campbell (some media referred to her as Jennifer Ruff-Campbell), and mentioned that she had remarried, and had other children through her new marriage.
And though not a pivotal part of the story, I wondered why the first newscast hadn't chosen to mention the fact that the victim's former wife had remarried or even identified her by her new name. I can't really think of a reason unless the reporter was really sloppy or the station was trying build up the sympathetic image of a widow who for over 13 years had been wondering who killed her husband.
It's a small thing (something only I would have noticed) but something I can't get out my head. And I can't come up with a good reason they'd leave it out.
Pity the Detroit Tigers (Again)
After a fairly strong start to their season, the Detroit Tigers have slid hard in September. They've lost six in a row, including three to the lowly Kansas City Royals, and assured themselves yet another losing season. I didn't expect them to have a playoff worthy team this season but I did think they'd finally break the .500 mark.
Not this year.
Maybe never.
Maybe it's time I start rooting for the Inidans.
No Brains Required to Work Campus Security
I'm taking a night class at the University of Utah this semester. Haven't mentioned in the blog because I didn't think most people would be interested in the finer points of creating database driven websites. However I'll have to make an exception when it comes to last night's class -- which wasn't held thanks to the university's security department. The instructor for this class is part-time. Therefore he has no keys to the computer lab we need to have our class. For some reason the lab was locked last night and the instructor spent a good 20 minutes attempting to locate someone who had keys. Not being able to find someone, he called campus security to see if they could unlock the door.
Two beefy guys showed up about ten minutes later with a set of keys. The instructor explained the situation and asked them to open the lab. The security guys asked of the instructor had any documentation that showed we were scheduled to use the lab. The instructor produced a roll for the class which wasn't good enough fort the beefy security guys. They said they needed documentation that showed there was a class scheduled for the lab.
Then I remembered I had the receipt for the class in my backpack, printed on university stationary. It had the class, the instructor's name, room number and every other piece of information needed to prove that the lab should be open.
One of the security guys looked at my receipt for the class and said, "You could have just printed this out at home. Anyone can make this stuff nowadays."
The instructor pointed to some campus class brochures in the hall and had his photograph, name and the date and time of the class printed on them.
"I'm sorry. That's good enough," the security guys said again.
"Yeah," I muttered under my breath, "We probably just printed them off at home."
We went back and forth with campus security for ten more minutes trying to prove that we really belonged in the room but to no avail. Campus security would not open the door and the instructor was finally forced to call the class.
My favorite part of the whole exchange was how the security guys kept saying "I understand" to everything we said.
"I understand you want to get in the room."
"I understand this is frustrating for you."
"I understand you can't teach the class without computers."
It's great they're trained to understand, but would it hurt these guys to think a little? If we were intent on stealing from the university's computer lab, do you think we'd call campus security to let us in?
What was the most frustrating about the whole incident wasn't the fact that security guys didn't have a brain, but that class was canceled. This is a fairly intense class and I'd much rather have a makeup day then try to cram the missed material over the next few weeks.
~sighs~
I hope we don't have this problem tomorrow night.
Snowbird
Spent many days this week up at Snowbird, Utah for a company conference. The conference was long and tiring (but very worthwhile). But if you're going to spend some time at a conference, Snowbird is a beautiful place to hold it. Some pics from Snowbird.
Fortune Cookie
I had Chinese for lunch today. As always, the most disappointing part of the meal was the fortune cookie. Nowadays it's rare for fortune cookies to contain actual fortunes. Instead most of them aren't fortunes at all. For example a collection of "fortunes" at our table included:
Always have old memories and young hopes. Cooperate with those who have both know how and integrity.
Not really fortunes. Instead they're more like feel good or inspiring sayings. Other fortunes are so general they remind me of horoscopes or something a psychic would tell you. Some "fortunes" along these lines at the table today included:
Everything will soon come your way.
Your good nature will bring you much happiness.
It's like talking to one of those 1-900 psychics or reading your horoscope. Will everything really come my way? Everything? The Tigers are going to win the World Series this year? My boss is going to give me a six figure salary?
Are there no real fortune cookie writers anymore? Perhaps I've missed my calling. If someone would hire me as a fortune cookie writer, I promise I'd come up with real fortunes. Like the following:
Your car is a lemon.
Your spouse knows what you're up to.
You'll be shot playing poker.
Albeit slightly depressing, they are real fortunes. Notice how specific these fortunes are.The first one informs the recipient is being specifically about their car. The second one talks specifically about the person's spouse. The last one tells the person how they'll die. Forget broad generalizations, these fortunes speak to the individual recipient. How about:
You will meet your soul mate at a baseball game.
Santa Claus will bring you coal for Christmas.
Don't be a skeptic, or the Monkey Man will make you believe.
I'm selling my services to the highest bidder. Any takers?