The lack of entries over the past week has come due to bouts of travelling around the country and long periods of laziness. The laziness, of course, was inspired by the prospect of a walk across town to my favorite internet club when the idea of sitting down with a good book was just sooo much better. The travelling came at the end of last week when I dropped down into Lovech, in Central Bulgaria, and spent a day in Pleven.
You may or may not remember Aaron, who was part of my group in training two summers ago. Since then, he's been teaching down in Lovech and I had never taken the time to go down and visit him. I've been remiss, apparently, because Lovech isn't a bad place. It's more or less similar to Silistra, only their river is much smaller and the surrounding hills there are far more interesting. Aaron gave me a tour of everything I really needed to see and I left pretty satisfied, but without any photos since I forgot to bring a camera. Oh well, all the more reason to go back in spring.
The first thing any Bulgarian will bring up when Lovech is mentioned is the covered bridge over the River Ossum, which isn't the real wooden bridge as designed by the famous Bulgarian architect Koliyo Fitcheto but a wood and steel replica built after the first bridge burned down. It's still a nice bridge, and the sun lights up the interior beautifully through the windows along the side. There's also a statue of Bulgarian hero Vassil Levski at the top of a nearby hill, overlooking Lovech's historic quarter. Fascinating little stories about Levski and Lovech.
Levski, of course, was the hero martyr who led the first stages of the Bulgarian revolution against the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. He did his planning in Lovech, and he was betrayed in Lovech. He was then hung in a central square in Sofia. Now Bulgaria is free from Turkish rule and Bulgaria's currency (the Lev) is named after him. So the statue of Levski looms over the town and can be seen from pretty much anywhere in the city. Apparently, the descendant of the person who betrayed Levski still lives in Lovech. I didn't get a chance to meet him, but he is quite popular and has a certain amount of pull in town. The pull was, in part, handed down through the generations, since his ancestors were powerful enough in the city to be a part of Levski's inner circle.
Aaron and I talked about the fact that the great-grandson of a betrayer could be so successful in the town where his family did the betraying. We decided that it made sense. After all, if some fictional descendant of Benedict Arnold was still around and famous for it, he's probably have a kind of giddy notoriety. It certainly wasn't his fault, after all, but the story would still circulate and everyone would know his name. He would have to popular.
After the bridge and the looming, judging statue, Lovech is a collection of interesting projects of dubious necessity. It all starts with the second largest zoo in Bulgaria, perched on the top of a hill and completely hidden if you don't know it's up there. It's not even on the map in the town's brochure. It really should be though, since I was going in set for an hour of heartache at the poor plight of the animals and came out satisfied and actually very happy with the way the animals looked and acted.
It was built back in the late sixties, when Lovech was making an effort to be Bulgaria's premier, interior tourist destination. Most of the cages are from the sixties, but it only really shows in the bird exhibits, where no bird really has any room to do anything but hop. Most of the other animals have all the space they seem to want or need.
Every pen really surprised me, but among the most impressive were the two bison, chewing on their hay. They were immense things, and they didn't do much except eat and stare at us, but we could get close to them. We could have touched them if we wanted to, and the bars in the gate were so open a person twice my size could have gotten in and run around with them. It's an impressive thing to see a bison that close. I could understand how some idiots could want one of them for a trophy. It wouldn't just be a cow head on the wall. It would be something. But, much more than that, I failed to understand how someone could ride up on a horse and do anything but simply stare in awe at a herd of these things galloping. Shooting one of them seems beyond all bounds of human decency.
So we watched the bison doing nothing for a very long time and then walked around and saw the ostriches walking along the trenches in their pen, and then up the hill, past a small duck/swan/goose/pelican pond to the polar bear pit. One polar bear sat on our level and looked at us occasionally. The water at the bottom of the pit didn't really look like something a polar bear or any living thing would want to swim in, but the bear looked healthy and full and just like a polar bear should. He may not have been the largest polar bear I've seen in a zoo, but seeing any kind of a bear always impresses me.
The brown bear in the pit just down the hill was a little less impressive. He looked like a circus bear who'd gotten lost and just decided to work at the zoo instead. He was a small bear (No one would ever dare calling him a Grizzly), and when we came up to his fence he sat upright on a rock, looked at us, and yawned. He was, it seemed, very used to having food tossed his way when people showed up, and we disappointed him.
Moving on, we found the three lions and two lion cubs in simple lion cages and two jaguars and two jaguar cubs in cages next to them. They don't get a copy of the Savannah like the big cats in San Diego, but they looked content with their easily defended territory and watched us suspiciously as we went by. Nobody, I was glad to see, was pacing.
Then we came to the baboon, who probably seemed the most unhappy with his lot in life. He slapped the ground through a hole in his cage, demanding food as we passed, and when we didn't give him anything he went under his tree and sulked. Up the hill there were deer, and wolves and foxes all in big, new cages that had been built with the help of the UNDP. They had just been fed and the wolves didn't give us any trouble at all when we passed.
After seeing everything we left, and talked about how surprising it was that everything in the zoo was pretty much what you would expect at any small American zoo. It wasn't an ecological playground like San Diego, but the animals seemed content and everything was reasonably well-kept.
After climbing all the hills and exploring the zoo, there wasn't much left to do in Lovech. There is what is said to be the biggest climbing wall in the Balkans, but Aaron tells me that it's never open and sits there unused. And, as in any Bulgarian town, there's the massive project left unfinished. In this case it's a pedestiran bridge that was supposed to connect the city's central plaza with another plaza under the zoo's hill. The bridge was built, and statues were built right alongside it, but communism fell before they could build anything on the zoo side and the bridge ends in a pile of rocks underneath a cliff, still waiting to be blasted after all these years.
On Saturday, we both decided to go to Pleven, since I hadn't seen the Pleven-area crew in about three months and there was a chance the movie playing in town wouldn't be bad. As it turned out, the movie was the Jimmy Fallon/Queen Latifah thing "Taxi," which we decided to skip, and the whole Pleven crew was in town for the weekend. We had a great dinner at Kate's place and talked about all the gossip that I hadn't heard in such a long time. I'd forgotten how insular and out of the loop I'd gotten in Silistra.
Being in Pleven brought a rush of personal information and talk about people's lives that I really wasn't prepared for. I just had to sit there and soak it all in. Nicknames had developed for certain people that didn't have them when I last heard the same stories, and new stories had, of course, cropped up about the nicknamed folk. We also talked politics, religion, and all of the other highly-charged stuff that makes a Peace Corps dinner worth living through. We were about to watch "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" on DVD, but the conversation overpowered it. No matter though, the conversation was great and I'll get to see it in a theater at some point here.
Aaron and I took a taxi back to Lovech and I went back home through Pleven the next day. Everybody there was on the verge of leaving and I picked up my ticket and hung out at Kate's apartment before my bus left. Then I was in Silistra and all of a sudden, Jody (the former PC sitemate who still lived here with his Bulgarian wife, Radost) sent me a message that the time had come and that he and Radost would be taking off for Sofia and then America on Monday. By all obligations known to friendship I jumped off the bus, dropped off my stuff, said "hello" to the cat, and took a cab over to the hangout, where an informal little gathering was already in full swing.
I probably stayed out far too late for a Sunday, but it was worth every second. Jody's been a great guy to have as a sitemate, and he felt the thanks from everybody at the gathering. No one left until Jody decided to leave and then I went home and got a quick four hours of sleep before school, unfortunately, interrupted all that good vacation.
And since then, classes have been the usual. No great daily breakthroughs, but no disasters either. Today, the routine was briefly jumped on by Peace Corps running an emergency drill. I got a call from headquarters, and as I have been burdened with the Great Responsibility of being a regional warden, I called the two volunteers on my "team" and relayed to them the valuable message that Peace Corps was using as a stand-in for something more urgent and critical. And that leaves me here, back in the school pattern once again. Expect more posts to come.
Posted by Rob at January 11, 2005 07:04 PM