Alaskan Bulgarian

The Cat and the Hike

Thanks to the mostly indirect efforts of three women, I now have a cat. First, another volunteer, Leslie, showed me that having a cat could be a feasible and perhaps even enjoyable experience in the Peace Corps. Next, our medical officer and I talked about my blood pressure being borderline high again, and even though she didn't mention animals as possible stress relievers, it clicked. Finally, another volunteer, Florinda, pointed out a tiny four-week-old kitten that looked disease-free, but otherwise mostly dead, on the sidewalks of Sofia.

I've been thinking about getting a cat for a while now, but always managed to put it off as wholly impractical. Litter boxes, food, travelling, it all made the whole thing seem far-fetched. But then came this series of events in the course of less than 24 hours, and well, now it all seems to make sense. So there we go. Now, the rest of the story...

I came into Sofia Friday morning planning to hop in, hop out, and get on with my life. As it turned out though, Spider-Man 2 was playing at nine PM at Sofia's Staples Center-like Arena theater. With that important fact in mind, I accomplished my first task of the day by watching the B-15s (The new volunteers) graduate, talking to them, and seeing all the PC staff members that I hadn't seen in a while. I had some conversation time with the ambassador. So I'd call that morning a success.

After that The New Sitemate and I got his boatload of things to a hostel near the mosque. After resting and changing soaked shirts (the day was scorching, muggy, and incredibly uncomfortable) we had lunch at the vegetarian place with some other B-15s. Then I left to go grab a ticket for the show under the assumption that it might be in some danger of selling out. To get to the Arena, I took Sofia's metro, a shnazzy looking subway system that carts people from the city center along one particular line to some outer block complexes. This time, in a fit of self-sustaining tiredness stemming from an overnight busride, I took the wrong road after leaving the metro and wound up having to walk an extra ten blocks or so. But I finally found the right road, got to the theater, and as I was buying my ticket, noticed on the teller's monitor that ten or fifteen seats were gone, tops. I'd overestimated Bulgaria's desire to see Alfred Molina in cool shades. But I had a ticket, so I was okay with the extra trip and made my way back to the hostel.

Now, the hostel I usually stay at in Sofia is a quiet, comfortable place. Not a hostel at all really, more of a cheap hotel with shared baths on each floor. So I settled in as The New Sitemate was leaving to go do something or other and I decided to take a nap, it being the fine naptime of 5 PM. I woke up at 1 AM, having not, of course, set my alarm.

I rolled around for a bit, gnashing my teeth and bemoaning the loss of the eight leva I'd payed for the ticket. Then I shrugged it off and went to go brush my teeth. The New Sitemate got in around this time, I told him my sad tale, he said something consoling, and we both went to sleep. We woke up at seven, and I had gotten about 13 hours of sleep which I had apparently needed.

First step of the day was helping him get his stuff to the bus station so he could properly move in to Silistra. On the street with a ton of baggage, he decided to go for a cab that wasn't either 'OK' or 'Yes!' the two companies in Sofia that consistently give people a fair meter. I warned him against it, but he said he'd cover the ride, so I shrugged and got in. Cost of ride for travelling about ten blocks by cab: 5 leva, about twice as much as it should have been. Lesson learned. He bought his ticket, I helped him get his stuff to the right section of the terminal, then I took off to go to a cafe and quietly wake up while reading The Corrections.

The Corrections is one of the few great contemporary books I've read that doesn't sell out in its ending. Franzen stays honest, realistic, and faithful to the characters and plot and the ending works better than most because of it. When I finished it, I had goose bumps and bleary eyes. It's a good, strong ending. Also, one key in a book about a family of entirely unhappy adults: Not one of them has a pet, nor are pets ever mentioned. Something to think about if you're planning on reading or have read the book.

So I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon reading and using the internet at Peace Corps headquarters. Finally sufficiently bored around 6, I hopped a bus to Dupnitsa to meet up with the rest of the group that would be hiking up to Seven Lakes for the fourth of July. We had dinner at a traditional Bulgarian restaurant and talked about things like Spider-Man 2, which most of the group had despicably watched earlier that day in Blagoevgrad. We also talked about our towns and the town we were in. Dupnitsa is a clone of Silistra with the attractive natural feature being mountains instead of the river. This makes the weather in summer a little more platable, but could have its disadvantages too, I suppose. I spent most of my time there gazing up at the hills Silistra doesn't have and imagining myself walking among them.

The next morning the nine of us got up and got a ride on a minibus to a hizha at the foot of a trail leading up to the Seven Lakes. A hizha is best described as a small lodge up in the mountains here in Bulgaria. For a reasonable rate, we got to stay at a hizha between the fourth and fifth lakes and get triple and double rooms for everybody with our reservations. They seem to fit in well with nature wherever they are and are well worth staying at if you're ever hiking in the area.

The beginning of the trail we took to our hizha was a gradually inclining, narrow dirt road among pines and spruce. As we went up the mountain, we kept running into crossroads and used the trail markers. The trail system in the Rila mountians, at least in my brief two days of experience, is incredibly well-marked. It's color coded based on the hizha you're headed for. There are signs and spray-painted rocks all the way up the hill. It's almost impossible to feel lost, even if you're on the wrong trail, as were several times that day.

As we approached our hizha, we began crossing fields that were almost muskeg after a recent rain, and had to make a few decisions about the best way to go around smaller ridges and hills.

The person who had made the last good call usually wound up leading the pack and this meritocratic system seemed to work out well enough to get us where we were going in plenty of time. We checked into our rooms, had some soup in the hizha's restaurant, then split into two packs: those who would stay and play more than one game of Uno and those who would go up the nearby ridge without packs and try to see all seven lakes before sunset.

I went with the latter group and was happy and sore for it the next day. The lakes, the ridges, the gorges, the fields, everything around lakes 5-7 is brilliantly beautiful. The lakes are a deep blue and cold, the last two were still partially frozen over. What left me sore was the incline as the trails along the ridges, though still meticulously marked, seemed to go straight up. It was a brilliant game of concentration getting down without falling backwards, but I managed to pull it off.

We got in that night, tired and happy on the Fourth, and watched the first half of the Euro Cup final between Portugal and Greece before realizing that it was an incredibly boring game and heading off to bed instead. The Greek fans downstairs cheered for their team's goal as we were going to sleep.

The next day we went down a steep dirt road and met our minibus back to Dupnitsa. That night I met Alice, Leslie's big brown cat. Although I didn't fall in love or anything, it got me thinking that a cat might be a nice thing to have around. We also all played an odd card/board game called Sequence. A little like a cross between bridge and Connect 4. Funky game.

The next day, yesterday in fact, I went to Sofia to get my blood pressure checked and use the internet at HQ. That's where I fully developed my plan. I'd kept the ticket for Spider-Man 2 in the hopes that I could someday use it, and I realized that last night was as good a night as any.

The date on the ticket is only marked once, the showtime was the same last night, and the only thing that could make the plan not work smoothly was a change in screen at the multiplex. I set about filling the hours between lunch and the show.

Florinda was in town, and we had a lunch at Subway and walked to the metro station so she could go see "Love, Actually" or whatever it was she had planned. On the way, next to a bingo parlor, we came across a black and white kitten sprawled on its side in the sun on the sidewalk.

Though bone-thin and not exactly breathing quickly, it did respond when poked. I agonized for a while, since I had been thinking about getting a cat for some time, and this one was kind of cute if it weren't diseased and could make it through the day. As Florinda--champion of cat-owning in Bulgaria--cheered me on and told me she had seen the poor thing in the same spot much earlier in the day, I inspected it for tiny sores, cuts, fleas, etc. and found the cat to be completely compliant in my hand. It was also completely clear of obvious, well, bad stuff. It was just street grimy and Florinda may have noted it didn't smell like a rose.

So I asked anyone in the immediate area if they knew who the cat's owner was and they all told me to keep it. So I shrugged and decided to keep it. I managed to get a shoebox from a sandal store and dropped my backpack off at the bus station, having missed the last bus out before 1 AM at this point. I bought a bottle of water and a cream-filled croissant and dropped drops of water into the kitten's mouth and let it lick the cream of the croissant since it was entirely against the idea of eating the bread part. At this point, the cat had let me know that it was, most certainly, alive by mewing from its box, from my arms, from anywhere it was. It was another hot day and the cat, by the time I'd gotten to the bus station, was panting.

After making sure it was healthy, I had nothing better to do before my bus. So I went ahead with "the plan." I got to the movie theater by metro, and since the cat was still mewing and obviously not enjoying the whole box experience, I let it out on the lawn near the movie theater. It explored a little bit, then realized it didn't quite like what was going on and hopped into my lap where it stayed on its own accord until it had to go back in the box for getting into the movie theater. I walked up to screen 13, the box tucked under my arm and handed the attendant my ticket, he looked at it for a second, tore the bit he needed, and gave it back to me--pointing out screen 13 down the hall. It was still the same screen. I was in.

As I was finding my seat, another attendant came up behind me and asked me if he could see something. I thought he wanted to argue about the ticket's date, so I gave that to him and prepared to discuss. He gave the ticket back to me and asked me if he could see what was in the box. I opened it up and told him there was a little cat inside. He chuckled, wide-eyed, and said everything was okay, I just wasn't allowed to have a camera. Nope, I said, not a camera, just a cat. He again told me that his was okay.

So I took an empty seat in a nearly empty row in the center (again, maybe 15 people in the theater) took the cat out, and kept it quiet the whole way through the perfectly enjoyable, great, superhero movie. Then we caught a cab to the bus station and waited an hour for the bus to Silistra.

On the bus, I confirmed my suspicions that the cat was indeed a girl, and let it sleep on my lap the whole way into Silistra. We got into town this morning, she got the wretched, hellish treatment of a bath, and is now sleeping on my leg as I type this on my laptop at home. She seems to love my lap, although my hands seem to be part of another, scarier entity out to get her.

She swats at my fingers, but doesn't hiss or anything, so it might just be kitten play. And, incidentally, she is, beyond all doubt of yesterday, alive. Between naps and light meals of milk and Whiskas, she dives, plays, swats, and generally makes a fool of herself.

And she still doesn't have a name. I tend to let pet names come to me rather than force them and hers hasn't come yet. She's just been "cat" recently,
although I've had quite a few suggestions already from interested parties.

Posted by Rob at July 7, 2004 10:17 PM