I made it to Pavel Banya on Friday. I am really pleased with my site – it’s small, but so cute and busy.
When I was here in May, my apartment was so not ready to be lived in. It didn’t have running water, for heaven’s sake. Now, the bathroom works.
The kitchen? Not so much. No fridge (when I mentioned how much I’d like a fridge to my counterpart, she described this as being “a big problem”. Great.), my oven is nowhere near an outlet, and I can’t move it myself, AND there’s no running water in the sink.
So I’ve been eating out every day. Getting really sick of it. I like Bulgarian food just fine, but…I want to eat something ELSE. My OWN food, something with not so much oil. But anyway, these are just temporary problems, because if they don’t come up with all of these appliances, the Peace Corps will move me to another apartment.
BUT, a washing machine is not a Peace Corps requirement. Now, if you know me well, you will know that I actually quite enjoy doing laundry. I like folding clothes. It’s sort of meditative. Plus, as a side benefit, you get clean clothes! Without the washing machine, I am washing my clothes by hand, which, gotta say, not a fan.
But today I went to Kazanluk (the nearby actual city) and bought myself a little boombox. If I gotta wash my socks by hand, at least I can rock out while I’m doing it.
July 5, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Congratulations on making it to your “site”. I’m sure that you must have been feeling a little rootless these past weeks, living in someone elses’s house. I’m glad to hear that you’ve finally got your own space.
I hope that you manage to get your appliance situation sorted out soon. I would imagine that not having a fridge for the moment is not *quite* as bad as it might initially sound to American ears, since you undoubtedly have a fresh produce market within easy walking distance. I would imagine that the locals follow the traditional European habit of picking up fresh stuff every day, rather than the more American way of making a weekly run to the supermarket and loading up one’s refrigerator (big enough to park a SmartCar in!). When I’ve lived fridgeless in Europe, the biggest problem was always with milk, which is why you’ll sometimes see milk cartons in plastic bags hanging out of apartment windows at night to keep the milk cool…
Is there not a laundromat in PB, or do the locals all hand-wash? I can quite imagine that an in-home washer and dryer might be seen as the height of luxury there.
Did you like Kazanluk? I’ve heard that it’s quite pretty, but it appears that most visitors go there for the Thracian tomb and the Rose Festivals.
People I know who’ve spent time in BG have *loved* Plovdiv, which isn’t too far from you now — certainly day-trip-possible. Smaller than Sofia, but a cultural and architerctural gem. Doubt if you’ll find Ethiopian food there either, though. : (
Kasmet!
July 6, 2006 at 9:05 am
No, AFAIK, there are no laundromats in Bulgaria. Once this came up in conversation with my host sister, and she completely didn’t get the concept. I asked her what she would do if she didn’t have a washing machine, and she looked at me like I was crazy and told me she’d wash my hand. Washers are normal, but dryers are unheard of. Of course, my apartment was previously lived in by an old lady who didn’t even have running water, so of course there isn’t a washer.
Kazanluk has a really lovely center area, with a park and lots of shops and outdoor cafes. The rest of the town is pretty much post communist blech, though. I can’t wait to get to Plovdiv, I’ve heard it’s gorgeous.
As for the kitchen, you’re right, not having a fridge isn’t as big a trial as it would be in Chicago – my house is about 5 minutes from the rather nice little supermarket. (They have three kinds of olive oil! Which is fancy, considering Bulgarians almost exclusively use sunflower oil.) I could shop day by day…but having no water in the kitchen and no oven or stove is sort of a dealbreaker.