Americans keep passing in and out of Silistra for visits. This week, an old group member, Kara, is here for a couple of days because she never saw this part of the country in the last two years.
Owen left on Saturday without much of a hitch. I rode with him on a bus to Ruse where he was going to catch a train to Bucharest and from there go to some small town in Romania. The train, however, was going to be 2 hours late. Oh well, these things happen.
Strange thing was, this time we were standing in line to buy tickets behind two other Americans. Normally, this would get me to snort and mutter "tourists..." under my breath, but these guys were actually very interesting. One of them was a volunteer just finishing up his two years of service in Albania. Apparently his was the first group to go back into Albania after all the mess of the late nineties.
A Peace Corps experience in Albania sounds like service in Bulgaria, only a lot heavier, and the mind games played seem a lot more fierce. He told us stories of every Albanian believing he was CIA, rules keeping volunteers from going into Albania's mountainous north. Things like that. I got the idea there was a little bit more of a sense of danger in Albania.
Like me, he had a friend visiting from America, and they were touring up through the Balkans to Bucharest. Luckily for the three of them, I was there to help out. The first train to show up had Bucharest and Sofia written on the side panels, but the way they were labeled seemed to me like the train was going in the direction opposite the one they wanted. I stopped them as they were getting on and asked a guard what was up. He said the train was indeed going to Sofia and that their train would be coming a half hour later.
So we sat and talked some more about the silly traditions and similarities we'd seen in Bulgaria, Russia, and Albania. Rakiya (Bulgaria's national drink) in Albania is similarly named and sounds a bit lighter than it is here. Everyone up and down Eastern Europe is scared of breezes through a combination of an open door and window. Fascinating similarities considering the occasionally vast difference in language.
But finally the train did come, I took a bus back to Silistra, and a new week began. It's the last days of school and the kids expect little more than grades and to go home early. It's--strangely--a little more relaxing than I remember it being last year.
Posted by Rob at June 21, 2005 04:04 PM