My 2 weeks trip to Bulgaria with my parents and husbandf was quite an adventure,
affording many opportunities to laugh! ha ha ha! Since I'm sure YOU are
thinking of a trip
to Bulgaria, I'll tell you some of the things I've learned. If you want to go
there, here's
what you'll need to do.

LEARN TO NAVIGATE BY MEANS OF MENTAL POWERS
In Bulgaria, they have discovered that road signs are
a luxury item and not needed or used with any sense of
regularity. What highway signs do exist are printed
in the Cyrillic alphabet of the Bulgarian language and
do not match the town names on our map, which are in
our Latin alphabet. Fortunately, William studied
Russian in high school and was able to decipher the
signs for us. I am not kidding--there were whole
cities without a single street sign. I don't know WHY
they name the streets when they are never ever posted
on those streets. It took my navigational skills to a
whole new level. I could compete in the Olympics if
they added a map-reading sport.

BECOME FLUENT IN BULGARIAN
Nobody in Bulgaria speaks English. Okay, I admit that
I am exaggerating. We found 4 people in 2 weeks that
knew a little. Apparently, they are too poor of a
country to offer it in school. So it was back to the
old act-everything-out routine for basic
communication. This is my dad's favorite means of
vacation communication and he calls it "international
sign language" but even this does not work, as their
"yes" is a back and forth head bobble that looks much
like "no". Lucky for us, my parents brought a tour
book with a few Bulgarian words so I didn't have to
act out "I have to go to the bathroom" as I'm not sure
there is a gesture for this which can be used in
polite company. We learned the following in
Bulgarian: hello, thank you, toilet, and I'm ready to
pay the bill. If you know these words in the native
language, you can get by in most any country. I even
learned to count to 5 so as to help get our restaurant
orders right. Sometimes even showing the number of
fingers did not communicate numbers to our waitresses.


PACK PLENTY OF IMODIUM AD
Here is an essential trip for travelers: pack enough
Imodium AD for any bowel troubles you may have eating
foreign food so you don't have to ask for it by name
in a country where you can't speak the language.
Though we had the foresight to bring some along,
Bulgarian cuisine affected us all and we soon ran out.
Believe me, acting this one out for the pharmacists
(who, of course, do not speak English and keep
EVERYTHING--including cosmetics--behind the counter)
was a bit embarrassing, but it did give everyone a
good laugh both times we had to buy more.

NEVER BE WITHOUT YOUR OWN SUPPLY OF TOILET PAPER
Most travel books warn you to bring a little toilet
paper along when you go to foreign nations, especially
the less developed ones, but they weren't kidding when
it comes to Bulgaria. Not only did they not have
toilet paper, many places were altogether without
toilets. That's right, even while dining in a fancy
restaurant, you may go into the bathroom and find
yourself facing nothing but a flushing hole with foot
pads for where you're supposed to stand (in the less
fancy restaurants, it is a non-flushing hole). For
men, this is hardly a change from urinals, but for
women this provides a noteworthy travel challenge. My
advice: keep an eye out for forests along the highway.
As long as you're going to have to bring your own
toilet paper and squat anyway, you might as well go in
a place that's nice-smelling. And as mentioned
earlier, this situation reinforces the need for an
ample supply of Imodium AD.

RESEARCH TOURIST SITES WELL IN ADVANCE
You can Google "Bulgarian Tourism" and find plenty of
information on-line. This may lead you to believe that
you will also find information in the country itself.
This would be wrong. Bulgaria is not tourist-ready
and may not be so for many years to come. We only
found one tourist office in the entire nation and it
was utterly vacated. If you wish to travel in
Bulgaria, YOU have to take full responsibility find
the unmarked attractions. The road signs will not
tell you. And if you can somehow communicate your
question the locals, they will simply make odd,
indecipherable gestures. If, however, you do have the
persistence and psychic abilities to find the sites,
do not expect to find parking. World-class
archeological and cultural sites are usually without a
parking lot.

WATCH YOUR STEP
If there is a hazardous walking environment, do not
plan to be warned by the Bulgarians. You can walk
along Roman ruins dozens of meters in the air with no
guard rails. Holes in the ground, into which you
could fall to your death are not marked so do mind
your step.

BE IN EXCELLENT PHYSICAL CONDITION
Handicap accessibility? What's that? You cannot see
anything without traversing numerous, uneven steps
with no handrails. To see the 8th century rock
carving in the mountains of Madara, for example, you
must be capable of walking the 373 odd-sized steps to
reach the base.

LEAVE YOUR LAPTOP AT HOME
Despite the fact that some hotels advertise "free
wireless internet" the signal is never strong. You
can sit right on the base and get, at best, two bars
of signal. This means that you cannot do any
significant tourism research while on vacation either
so do it well in advance, as stated previously, so
leave your computer at home. And while we are on past
points, do you have enough Imodium AD?

DODGE THE DOGS
Wherever you go, you'll encounter stray cats and dogs
roaming the streets, politely begging for food in the
outdoor sections of restaurants and rummaging through
garbage bins. Unless you have updated rabies shots,
try to avoid petting them. I had no problems with the
stray dogs but the pet of some people we met, bit my
heels in their house. He was sheep dog and clearly
had mistaken me for one of the livestock, which I
still have bruises to demonstrate.

PREPARE TO PARTY
Bulgarians, the books will tell you, are "a party
people". We did not understand the inherent truth of
this statement until we tried to sleep. Bulgarians do
not seem to awaken until about noon and then they
begin partying at 10 p.m. and go all night. They
always use their outdoor voices during party hours, no
matter where they are--even when they are inside your
hotel on the floor right above you. They think
nothing of talking, laughing, wrestling, jumping up
and down, yelling and leaping off large objects at 3
o'clock in the morning. How could that possibly
disrupt the sleep of those staying downstairs? Since
you can't beat them, you might as well join them.
With the low cost of the delicious Bulgarian beers,
you can hardly afford not to party along. And you
might as well take up smoking while you're there so
you won't be the only one in the room without a
cigarette in hand.

Despite these extraordinary impediments, we had a
fabulous time and saw sprawling ancient fortresses,
Roman baths, stadiums and amphitheaters, amazing
Orthodox churches with countless fresco paintings, saw
the horseman carving 100 meters up on a cliff of
Madara, crawled inside hand-carved caves which served
as a 3rd century monastery, boated across through the
Black Sea in a flimsy boat, went to a bird sanctuary
which is one of the most important bird-watching sites
in the world, scaled up the side of a mountain to see
the blue rocks in an old, open-air ski lift, "hiked
with the car" through narrow old towns with just a few
inches to spare on each side, dodged countless stray
dogs, drove to several communist monuments on
mountaintops. stood on the banks of the Danube River
which flows through more countries than any other
river in the world, the watched Bulgarian Independence
Day fireworks from our guesthouse window, got free
grapes, energy healing work and 60-degree vodka from a
Bulgarian alternative medicine doctor who could not
speak English but invited us into his home
nevertheless, watched a narrow-gauge passenger train
(which haven't been used in the US for about a hundred
years) breeze by, were given a bottle of pear-based
moonshine from English people living in Bulgaria,
stayed at a fancy spa where I got a chocolate massage,
walked inside the tomb of an ancient Thracian king
whose belongings we'd seen earlier in a museum that
day, rented luxury rooms at the Palace Hotel in
Kazanlak that were larger than most houses, swam in
therapeutic pools with no chlorine, saw the rose oil
capital of Europe, met the mayor of Ruse, looked
across the river to see Romania, visited a trout farm,
climbed into a wine cave in the town of Melnik and
bought a bottle of wine that was filled right from the
aging barrel and corked in front of us, saw a
Bulgarian art exhibit, talked with a nun in a
monastery (she was one of the 4 Bulgarians that spoke
English), and managed to order enough food and
Imodium AD--despite the language barrier--to subsist
for 2 weeks of pure Bulgarian adventure. Oh, and my
mom received a blessing from an old peasant woman
outside a church in Plovdiv. Mom can walk but uses a
wheelchair on vacation so she can see more things.
Promptly after the blessing, Mom got up out of her
wheelchair and began to walk--thoroughly astonishing
the woman who thought she'd performed a genuine
miracle! We all squeeled and carried on so that the
woman would be convinced of her healing powers. It
was a hoot.