Withdrawl

Now I'm in withdrawl. I miss Nuno and Cem and Vlad and David and Francesca and everyone else. I slept alone last night for the first time in over a week. I woke up and there were no dried sausages, no grandmother's jelly from Macedonia, no tea, no warm rakia and no Yugoslavians.

I loved Bulgaria. Bulgarians are so warm and friendly. The hardest thing for me to understand was that nodding means 'no' and shaking your head means 'yes'.

When we went to the disco, the DJ played a song for a few seconds and then changed it. I politely asked him if he could play it again. He shook his head. "What a jerk!" I thought.

Then he played the song.

Bulgarian music is fantastic. We were constantly listening to this CD called "Bikini Heat". I can't find anything about it online but it's full of Bulgarian techno. I must find a copy in Romania.

I don't miss the Turkish toilets though. We had normal toilets in our room and the "other" kind in the halls. I do NOT recomment using a Turkish toilet:
a) when you're wearing pants
b) when you've had too much wine
c) when you're female
d) ever

Having grown up with normal, North American-style facilities, I'm not used to things like squatting or aiming. This was doubly apparent when I saw the toilets on the Timisoara-Belgrade train. They were black and red with rust. No toilet paper. I almost started to cry. Seriously, they were the grossest toilets I have ever seen. For the first time in my life, I wished I was a guy.

And I miss Momir.
He was trying to describe the situation in the former Yugoslavia ten years ago.

"How do you say...how do you say...how do you say... (a minute later) ...how do you say....DEEP SHIT!"

It became our running joke during the week.