In Plovdiv

Random trips.... Get on a bus. Go to a place. Explore. Go home. That's what I like. I arrived in Plovdiv, Bulgaria at 4 this morning. Lucky for me, the taxi driver I got knew of a 24-hour Internet cafe. I'm still here, although I'm not sure how I will pay, I have Euros and not the local currency, which, since I don't know what it is, I will call "bullies". The Bulgarian alphabet is the cyrillic script, like Russian, so I have no idea what it says when I see prices written. When Scott, another teacher, first came to Turkey, he didn't know the currency's name. It was written YTL (for Yeni Turk Lirasi - New TUrkish Lira) so he called them "yertles", and still does. So it is with the BUlgarian bullies for me. My taxi here cost 3 bullies. The Internet cafe will probably come to about 5 bullies. Hopefully, if I give him 5 euros, I will get bullies for change. The exchange rate is about 2 bullies to 1 euro...

 

Plovdiv. Everything about it sounds dowdy and Russian. It looks like how I imagined Russia to look back in the days of the cold war when the word "Russia" was a bad word. Looking outside, it is kinda like looking at a t.v. show from like 20 years ago. There's colour, but it's not very vivid. It feels like whole chunks of the spectrum are missing, and got taken over by shades of grey and brown. It's weird because in such a setting I would expect to find kinda greyish people walking around hunched over and standing in line for food or coal... Instead all I've seen so far are the teenage boys up all night gaming on the internet, and they are just as vivid as teenagers anywhere.

 

I'm going to go out now and take pictures of Plovdiv. See what it looks like as it wakes up. Then I'm having lunch with Georgina and Rachael. We may even meet up with Sean and Kelly as well... We'll see.

 

Off to Plovdiv!