Plovdiv

Greetings from lovely, rainy Plovdiv. It rains like Seattle here, which is comforting.

R, F, and I made it into Bulgaria, despite some drama at the border. First, our train was 45 minutes late leaving the station. (And I was even able to decode & understand the garbled only-in-Serbian announcement over the station's PA system.) At 5 in the morning, a Bulgarian border guard came onto our train - her yelling could be heard long before she reached us. We had to get off the train & stand in a little building beside the tracks. A Maltese-American fellow traveller assured us that such things happened to him the week before. We were handed slips of paper & told to fill them out. It would have been nice if they had told us before we were dragged off the train that we would be needing a pen. So we stood there dumbly, preparing to be yelled at again. And we were. Finally, we were offered a pen, along with a scowl.

Forms filled out and passports scanned, we were back on the train. We arrived in Sofia 2.5 hours late, but otherwise without incident. A bus ride spent listening to the mix given to me by the brother brought us to the rainy delights and good company (some Peace Corps-ing friends) of Plovdiv.