Waking up at the ass crack of dawn, we made our way to the Gatwick airport in London for the 6:30 flight to Sofia. Once at Sofia, Benjamin, the groom, (or Ben for short) was actually waiting at the airport for us and we were transferred to a small but cozy apartment where we'd be staying for a couple days. We were to stay at Ben's soon-to-be wife's brother's friend, Владислав's, place. So, to simplify things, it was Ben's brother-in-law's friend's place. I'm not sure if that makes things any clearer, but it's good enough. We'd arrived in Sofia before noon and so, we had the entire afternoon to go about sightseeing and such.
At night were the bachelor and bachelorette parties. Seeing that I was neither a man nor a friend of the bride, I had the evening free to myself. After exploring the city alone at night, I headed back to the apartment. Late the next morning, as we were getting ready to go to the wedding, Paul seemed a little disapproving of my outfit. I did not have a single dress in my closet back in New York so instead I'd brought a business suit. A simple white shirt with a black jacket and black pants with a pair of high heels. Apparently he thought it would be more appropriate to wear a dress than a business suit. It was too late to buy a last-minute dress or change outfits so we headed out all the same.
The Bulgarian wedding was a little different from the handful of American weddings I've been to. First of all, we didn't go immediately to a church or some other place for the ceremony. The first part of the wedding involved going to the town hall to have a "wedding" there, which involved paperwork, official documents, marriage certificate, and the like (or so I assume). Then the second part of the wedding took place at a church/cathedral.
The bride's family was very... nontraditional (I'll explain later) so the actual wedding, though it took place in the Bulgarian orthodox cathedral, wasn't exactly a typical traditional wedding (or so Анатоли explained to me in a mixture of German and Russian). I couldn't understand much of the Bulgarian, but I don't think the whole speech in Bulgarian was dramatically different those all-too-familiar wedding speeches at American weddings. It was still a little different though. First of all, we held candles and no one was sitting. We all stood around the bride and room as the priest chanted things in Bulgarian. The parents of the bride and groom stood directly behind them while we were encircling them in a sort of half-circle, all holding candles. The bride also did not wear white but wore blue. Actually, I'm not sure if that's a wedding tradition to wear blue or not. It might have been the bride's personal preference to wear a different color. Like I said, it was a nontraditional family. In any case, the wedding itself didn't take that long and the ending was almost the same as an American wedding. They exchanged rings, kissed... then the bride and groom tried to step on each others feet. It was weird. I later learned that it's a tradition and whoever steps on the other's foot first will dominate in the household. I guess Александра will be the head of the household, because she won the stepping contest =) Oh yeah, another different thing I noticed. When people make the "cross" in Bulgaria (you know where you touch your head, heart, shoulders - people who are Catholic will know this immediately, I'm sure), they do it with the cross ending on the left shoulder. Normally Catholics end with the cross on the right, but yeah, even that was different over there =)
After the wedding at the church, it was off to the reception at a restaurant. The entire place had been rented out for the wedding. The food was traditional Bulgarian food and alcoholic drinks were provided. They had it all. "Ракия" (rakiya - apparently a traditional Bulgarian drink, if I'm not mistaken), beer, wine, vodka, мастика (mastica - reminds me of the word "masticate" in English, and I think there may be a connection here - which I thought was weird-tasting vodka as I drank it), and cocktails served to order, including one I tried облак (oblak = "cloud" - an allegedly popular Bulgarian cocktail). Despite the abundance of alcohol, I've been educated by my mom never to drink too much at a wedding, so, I was far from being drunk.
Paul was the best man for the wedding, so we got to sit at a large table with the bride and groom's parents not too far from us. The groom's parents contrasted starkly with the Bulgarian bride's parents. They were very conservative Britons, the type of people you'd imagine sipping tea outside during "high tea time" with their pinky fingers sticking out, discussing weather or interior decorating or some other boring topic of limited interest on my part. The bride's parents were very... unconventional and different. I learned from the bride that her mother had recently announced to the family that she was lesbian. Her brother, Анатоли, who believes in "God" and is rather conservative, thus refused to look at his own mother at the wedding, not even sitting near her. Александра, the bride herself, couldn't have cared less. She said it didn't matter if her mother was lesbian or bisexual or whatever her sexual preference was. She seemed super chill though... I don't know, there was some kind of passion that was missing in her. Everything she said, she said nonchalantly in a very bland manner, without too much life or laughter. Perhaps that is just the way she learned to speak English since her way of speaking Bulgarian was noticeably different than the way she spoke English. Her English was perfect, don't get me wrong. She just spoke English with less... less gusto than when she spoke Bulgarian.
The father of the bride was also something. He drank quite a lot during the reception, which started out with a toast of ракия and eventually, I found out that he spoke Russian, most likely remnants of Soviet times. He spoke slowly, perhaps because he was tipsy, so I was surprised at how much I actually understood. The groom's parents didn't speak a word of any other language other than English so it was fun to act as a sub-par interpreter for basic phrases between the two sets of parents. I gulped down a few shots of мастика (which I mistakenly thought was strange vodka) in hopes of improving my language skills. Luckily I didn't have to feel bad that I was preoccupied with attempting to play interpreter since Paul was having fun drinking and talking with his friends.
One thing was particularly shocking. The bride's father told me that he was an old man but he still enjoyed life very much because he had a 28-year-old lover in the north. He then told me to translate this to the groom's parents. I hesitated. "Давай, давай!" he insisted, seeming to grow impatient. Being a horrible liar and unable to come up with a creative lie on the spot, I translated it. The groom's parents seemed less than impressed and their expressions clearly showed their disapproval of such an affair. They also had no idea that the mother was lesbian, but I was really afraid of their reaction to that, being the conservatives they were. They were very nice, though, despite their conservatism and they were really happy about their son marrying Александра, whom they deemed to be a perfect match for him.
After hearing about his 28-year-old lover, I felt awkward translating any further details for him so I spent the rest of the night with Paul and Александра's brother, Анатоли. He contrasted starkly to both his parents (who were not your average parents and the cool, laid-back Александра). Анатоли was very conservative and religious, but nice all the same, at least based on what I understood him say. He knew approximately 20 words in English but spoke fluent Bulgarian and German. So we conversed in a mixture of German and Bulgarian, relaying information to and from Paul in English. Quite interesting, I must say. After the food, drinking, dancing (including the хоро, a traditional Bulgarian dance), the festivities came to an end and we all dragged our feet to bed.
The next morning, I'd planned to hitchhike back to London but my wishes had to be held back for another day. Paul and I were convinced to spend another day in Sofia, and Владислав showed us around the city, we ate more Bulgarian food, and at night, we partied and drank 'til we dropped. Late Sunday morning, we woke to find that it was Easter. Invited to an Easter brunch, we couldn't refuse, we were in Sofia for another half a day before we bade everyone farewell and left for London.
Hitchhiking in Bulgaria was rather easy. We had no major problems and though we did have some issues with language barriers, we managed to make it to Northwestern Bulgaria before it was too late. We then hitchhiked into a small town to eat dinner. At the restaurant we met a bunch of Romanians also stopping for dinner before heading over to Romania who invited us to join them. We agreed, believing them to be friendly enough. Friendly they were... but we got drunk and somehow stupidly agreed to go to Romania with them!!! My memory is very hazy as to how exactly we got to Romania, I remember we took a ferry from some Bulgarian city to Romania. Once in Romania, we woke up to find ourselves on the floor of an small house in Transylvania. They were very hospitable, but we realized we'd backtracked about a day or two so on the 13th, we had to hitchhike west, hitchhiking throughout much of Transylvania. I have to admit, I love the Transylvanian accent in English! It is so incredibly sexy. Unfortunately, we didn't always hitchhike that often with English-speakers. More often than not, they spoke French and sometimes German. We managed with no major problems and what was weird was that they usually asked for money. It reminded me of hitchhiking in Mali and Senegal where people would ask for some money whenever we hitchhiked there. We didn't have any Romanian lera, so we said we could pay them in what was left of our Bulgarian лева and euros, which they accepted (more happily euros than Bulgarian лева).
Romanians know how to party! Our last day in Romania, we hitchhiked with a bunch of Romanian students on vacation and we hitchhiked to a border town of Hungary, injected ourselves with alcohol and partied. It was just amazing. Language barriers did not even exist after a few bottles of beer. In the end, we were sad to leave them and even Paul, who was unsure and skeptical about hitchhiking at first, seemed to change his mind a little after that experience.
Crossing into Hungary on the 14th, we tried to recover lost time and was able to make it all the way to Austria by the end of the day. I hate the Austrian police as much as I hate the German police. They didn't give us a lot of trouble, but it was annoying all the same when they demanded us to show them our passports and interrogated us while we hitchhiked. Eventually, we ended up in a tiny town in Austria with an Austrian student visiting his parents during vacation. He was unable to host us but he found another friend to keep us for a night and we went out for Austrian beer before crashing on his friend's floor for the night. His friend was pretty hilarious. "No acts of procreation in the living room, please," he said to us as we wished him good night. We listened to his request =)
Crossing into Germany, I learned how to hitchhike like a pro in this country and I also learned that Germany is probably one of the best countries to hitchhike in, in spite of the annoying, anal police officers. Many people who picked us up were businessmen or middle-aged former-hitchhikers who were happy to pick us up and talk. Sometimes their English wasn't super, so my deteriorating German skills were forced out of the back burner and utilized to its limits. With amazing speed, we hitchhiked across the entirety of Germany and were in the outskirts of Köln (Cologne) by sundown. Again, we'd managed to befriend our driver and he agreed to host us for the night. We went out to Köln for drinks that night, which ended on a wrong note at least between Paul and I, but the next morning, we were ok again. I guess you can't spend nearly 2 weeks with one person, seeing them every day, and spending nearly every waking moment with them for a week without having at least one argument.
By the morning of the 16th, we crossed the German-Belgian border and hitched a ride with a group of Belgians who invited us for a late lunch. They were a bunch of the craziest people I've ever met in my life. That's all I'm going to say about that experience for now.
After Belgium, by late afternoon, we crossed the border into France. Paul and I both speak French, so that was no problem (and we also got to use French in Belgium as well, though the people we hitchhiked with spoke English). They were friendly enough, though friendly in that particular French way. There wasn't much distance to cover in France since we would have to take a ferry over to the UK. We got on the ferry and what was amazing was that we hitchhiked on a BUS! I didn't know whether the driver would entertain the idea of two hitchhikers getting on his bus for free to go to London, but he did! He was a friendly Irish bloke and Paul was also surprised that he let us in. Paul still claims he only let us on because I was American, whatever that's supposed to mean. In any case, we were in London by the night of the 16th, with no major problems. It took a day longer than I anticipated but we'd spent 4 days hitchhiking from Sofia to London.
Once in London again, although we were both a little tired from our thumb-traveling adventures, we went out for drinks the last night and came back around 3a.m., waking up at a decently early time to catch brunch before my flight from London to New York.
The End!
Today's Random Picture:
