My Day Trip

Last you heard, I was on my way to a seemingly boring day in an interesting place. Here's the rest of it.
After I left the Internet cafe, I wandered around the city a bit. The plan was to visit the zoo, which seemed like an interesting place to see. One of the things I realised very quickly is that almost no one speaks English. Usually I'm not the kind of person to go to a country and not try to learn a few basic words and phrases first, but as you know, this trip was quite different. My mission was to find out how to use the public transportation to get to the zoo. One thing that I've realised is that the languages we speak are only a part of how we communicate. I got to put this to the test. The word "zoo", fortunately, seems to have made it into the lexus of many languages, so that was easy. Here was a typical conversation:
Me: (big friendly smile)
Sofian[that being someone from Sofia, not an actual name]:(smile back)
M: (still smiling) Do you speak English? (using that higher-than-normal pitched, friendly voice that we all seem to use when talking to strangers politely)
S: (shaking head) No (in this dialogue, italics mean it was in Bulgarian)
M: (undaunted and still smiling) Zoo? (pointing in many directions and shrugging shoulders using body language to ask the way)
S: (nodding vigorously and with a spark of understanding in eyes) Zoo! (then shaking head sadly) Very far!

At this point I must add some commentary. I didn't realise until then that there was obvious body language for "Very far". There is. It was extremely clear that that was what the person was saying although it was in Bulgarian. I dunno if it was the slump of the shoulders, the raising of the eyebrows, or the hand motioning in repeated air circles radiating away from the body in a clockwise direction, but it was all very obvious.

M: (mirroring sad look and spark of understanding) Ok. (then smiling) Thank you
S: (smiling) You're welcome.

I had this exact conversation with about 5 people before deciding that the zoo was too far to reach and I wouldn't be visiting it that day. Probably all for the better because I soon realised that the wather that seemed cold at 6 a.m. wasn't warming up. So I wandered around. I found a guy who sold maps of Sofia. He spoke about 4 words of English and was really excited about being able to practice them on me. Of course, they were interspersed with a liberal sprinkling of Bulgarian so it was puzzling at best. He invited me to sit with him at his newsstand and chat. I had nothing better to do, since the zoo thing was off the schedule. So we chatted for about 10 minutes about life the universe and everything, or at least I think we did... like I said, most of it was in Bulgarian. At the end of the conversation he told me that he had maps in  Swedish Russian and Greek, but none in English. I decided to try my luck elsewhere rather than paying for a map that I couldn't read. It was hard enough deciphering the street signs from cyrillic script. To then try to work it out on a swedish map was a little too much for me.

Eventually I found a map. It cost 2 leva (or what I called "Bulgarian things" in my head for the whole trip). Yes, I found out the name of the currency. It's exchange is about 1.25 to 1 for the New Turkish Lira (which is one to one million old Turkish Lira), and the New Turkish Lira is 1.65 to one Euro or 1.35 to one dollar.... So that means 1 Bulgarian Leva is worth....??? Exactly! I had no clue either. I called them Bulgarian things, changed 30 Euro at the border, and hoped it would be enough! Basically, when it came to food, I looked at the price and decided if it sounded like a decent amount of money to pay. A big slice of pizza for 1 Leva? Excellent! A sandwich for 5 Leva? I don't think so! See! No conversion required :o)

Soo I window shopped, and took in the sights of Sofia. At one point I bought some postcards (they were quite expensive - I wouldn't imagine paying more than 0.25 - 0.50 whatevers for a postcard, but these were about 0.75 Levas) in a 5 star hotel. I figured I needed to sit for a while, and I might as well be comfortable, and I wasn't buying a pen to write the postcards... So I went into this really nice hotel, asked the receptionist for a pen, bought the postcards in the gift shop, and sat in the lobby for an hour (writing postcards for 10 minutes, staring out the window for the other 50). It was nice. I then went on a search for the post office to buy stamps.

This post is too long. I'm posting.

...to be continued...