February 04, 2004
That Weekend I Was Talking About
So, the weekend. The…weekend. Well, I went down to Burgas for the first time to check out a sanitarium for the summer. I stayed with one of the new B-14s who was, coincidentally, throwing a weekend-long birthday party for two other volunteers. In the Peace Corps there’s always room on the floor for someone willing to chip in on supplies. Jeff and I, who are the logistics people for this camp, got into Burgas on Friday night with Jeff’s new sitemate, Oliver. I had met him before, but I got to know Oliver well this weekend, and we had a whole lot of fun with what seems to be Peace Corps Bulgaria’s height policy. Jeff, Oliver, and I are all over 6’4 and we’ve all been stuffed into the northeast corner of the country.
In fact, there was a little bit of jealousy and hostility flowing when we were all together for so long. As B-14 #5,786,494 asked me how tall I was and how big my shoes are, Jeff grumpily and loudly went through the whole list of tall person questions with me. We make fun of it all the time, but when we don’t get the questions and see someone else getting them, well, tall people can get pissy. Just because he only wears size 12s, Jeff thinks he has a right to get snippy when people ignore him. Bastard.
Saturday, after a good night of conversation and floor sleeping, Jeff and I hopped on a bus out to Sunny Beach, where we found the sanitarium, and Sunny Beach was an experience. I’ve lived in a tourist town and gotten used to the influx of summer people and the emptiness of winter. Sunny Beach, as all the maps call it, doesn’t seem to have any permanent residents, and there’s nothing more like a graveyard than a resort town in the off season. Hotel towers soared over the beach, the water splashed up on shore, the sky was crystal clear, and you could walk a mile down the main road on not see a soul.
Everything was empty. The town had McDonaldses, Happy Bar & Grills, Irish pubs, and only one or two of them were opened. The rest of the city was closed and sealed tight. The only sign of life were the construction workers building new hotels every mile or so. It was great seeing a lot of construction happening in Bulgaria, but the rest of the city felt like a graveyard. We saw the sanitarium, communist-like but good enough for a camp, and went back to Burgas after lunch.
Getting back, we watched Kill Bill on our host’s computer, the only way we can see it in Bulgaria at this point. While it deserves to be seen in a theater, it was still obvious that Tarantino filmed exactly what he wanted to. His opinion that there is more blood than water in the world has now been fully fleshed out. I can’t wait for the character development that’s supposed to happen in the second part, although between the beheadings, stabbings, and necrophilia of the first half I saw quite a bit of growth. Can’t say the movie bored me, but it left me very tired at the end. I’ll watch the second part, and I’ll see the first again in a theater because I have an appreciation for Tarantino’s general style. I suppose that’s some kind of recommendation.
After the movie ended and we were all looking for a way to cheer up, we went to eat dinner. Reservations had been made and twenty Peace Corps volunteers ate at a Bulgarian tavern, it felt like a wedding reception. Oliver didn’t get his meal until the rest of us had gotten our checks, the salads were delivered with the main courses, it was chaos, but tova e Bulgaria, as the good Bulgarians say when things go kinda, sorta wrong. We all got a meal, Oliver ate his alone, with everybody watching, which is never a good way to eat. You have to say that you’re a fast eater, it’s required. You could be the slowest eater on the planet, but if yours is the last plate delivered, you have to tell everyone else that they won’t have to wait long. And you have to look apologetic, even when it isn’t your fault. Oliver followed through nicely and we all shuffled off to Burgas’ lovely karaoke club, and surrealism ensued.
The Bulgarians covered just about every song of the last decade that has come to be associated with drunken singing in clubs. It was all in English, and surprisingly, some of it was pretty good. A girl did “Cabaret” really well, and one of the regulars did Frank Sinatra twice to huge rounds of applause. There were some pitiful efforts, and the B-14s plucked their way through a couple of classics nicely. So basically it was your average night at a karaoke club, which means it was a whole lot of fun.
The next morning we woke up late, talked about ways we could watch the Superbowl, and I went home. That was the weekend. Nothing really to write home about, but that’s why it’s here, isn’t it?