Ramblings

I saw a guy who I thought for sure was hitchhiking on the way to work the other day. I thought it was strange because why didn’t he just take the bus to where he needed to go? Who hitchhikes on a busy street in the middle of a city?

Then I remembered this German guy I met once who only hitchhiked everywhere he went. If he couldn’t walk to where he wanted to go, he would hitchhike. Every morning he hitchhiked to work. Five minutes after I met him he said he was going to go downtown to see a movie, so he walked outside and stuck out his thumb. A random car picked him up a minute later and drove away. Hermann, my friend who I was staying with, said that he was actually hitchhiking to Denmark to have an affair with a married woman. Some Europeans are really weird.

I’ve been hitchhiking a few times, but only in Europe where I think it’s more common. Maybe people there are less prone to being hacked apart and stored in a trunk, I don’t know. When I was going to Bulgaria from Turkey last year, my train was stopped at a station somewhere and the electric couplings above my train collapsed onto the roof of my car. The train couldn’t move very much after that happened. It was in the middle of night and it took the mechanics over five hours to fix it.

I slept through most of the repairs, and I awoke in the middle of the night on a train moving through a forest whose name I didn’t know. I already knew that nobody in my section of the train spoke English, and now the train’s itinerary had been made completely unreliable. At 9 AM the train came to a stop for the first time in several hours. The clerk from whom I had purchased the train ticket from in Istanbul said I would be in Plovdiv “sometime in the morning,” which didn’t really narrow it down much. At the Turkish-Bulgarian border I’d received a new Bolshevik-style ticket, which was actually printed on cardboard, with absolutely no information written on it at all. All it had was a punched hole in the middle.

Outside there wasn’t much of anything, just a slab of concrete posing as a train station. I’d already noticed that there never seemed to be any signs on the train station platforms. I asked the man next to me, whose untamed beard had probably been growing for as long as I had been alive, if this was Plovdiv and he slowly nodded his head. Eager to be off the train, I grabbed my bags and exited.

When I stepped off the train I knew I had made a mistake, a mistake I should have considered when still inside the train. I clearly wasn’t in a town. I checked the language portion of my guidebook, of course located at the very bottom of my bag.

“Many travelers are amused to find that Bulgarians shake their heads to indicate ‘yes’ and nod their heads to indicate ‘no.’ Go native and try it out yourself!”

I’ve always hated guidebooks—their optimism for adventure always annoyed me—and now I found myself reading an important section one minute too late. I couldn’t do anything. The train’s doors were already shut, and it was accelerating away, albeit very, very slowly. I thought about grabbing onto the train as it crawled away, but I didn’t. I’d have to find another way to go.

One other person had gotten off the train along with me. He looked tough and unapproachable—a week’s worth of stubble, shaved head, leather pants matched with big boots. He had the kind of arms and hands could very easily strangle a bear. Some friends in Turkey had already told me about how tough and rustic Bulgarians were as a people, much more than the spoiled American I am, they said. Bulgarians are the type of people who have to cut down wood to last for the entire winter, then eat nothing but pickled vegetables for those four months. A Peace Corps volunteer whom I had met said her foster mother could stick her hand in a pot of boiling water and laugh about it.

I walked up beside him and waved awkwardly. He stopped and stared at me.

“Plovdiv?” I asked while moving my arms around to indicate our immediate vicinity.

The man just stood there, nodding with no facial expression.

“Da ili ne?” I asked, using a helpful phrase from the guidebook.

“Ne,” he said, nodding his head.

“Great,” I said under my breath while looking out at the surrounding farmlands. I had no idea where I was.

“Do you speak English?” the man asked. He had a slight accent, but I swore it was British instead of Eastern European.

“Yes!” I said, finally feeling hopeful.

“Yes, I do not speak English,” he said, nodding his head. I nodded along with him disappointedly.

“That’s alright. I’m sure I’ll figure something out,” I said. The man just stood there, shaking his head.

“Here,” he said, hitting me on the shoulder with the back of his hand—a little too roughly for me—”you can catch car.” He indicated a dirt road, just a few feet off from the concrete slab. I walked over to the road with him and put down my bag.

“Hand,” he said, pointing at his hand, waving it up and down. “Up, down, up, down. Easy. Car come. Five minute. Dovizhdane.”

“Yes, thank you. Good-bye.” I shook his hand and he disappeared over a nearby hillside. I’d never hitchhiked before, especially not in a country I had only been in for a few hours, with no knowledge of its geography or language, or even a vague idea of where I was or where I could go. I knew I would wake up in a couple of days in a tub full of ice, short of breath after having a lung ripped out and sold on the black market. I looked in my guidebook, and it said human organ trafficking was a common occurrence in Moldova. Moldova really wasn’t that far away. I was doomed.

I looked around, but there wasn’t really much to look at. There was a farmhouse near the horizon, but who knows who was living over there. The concrete slab was empty, so I couldn’t imagine another train arriving soon. If there was a bus to catch, it probably wouldn’t be here. There were, after all, no paved roads in sight. I stood where the man had told me to wait. I didn’t start waving my hand right way. There weren’t any cars yet.

Fifteen minutes later a shrill buzzing sound started to get progressively louder. At first I was positive that I would see a moped careening over the hill, but instead I was greeted by a small Russian-made car. It looked like it had been constructed entirely out of rust.

I waved my hand up and down like an idiot, as I had been instructed. The buzzing sound from the engine was quickly replaced by a grinding sound, which was then replaced by several clunking sounds, and finally a wheezing and hissing sound as the car stopped down the road a little bit. I walked through a cloud of black smoke emanating from the tailpipe, wondering if this car managed to run completely on motor oil.

I looked inside to see a thick-necked man wearing dirty jeans and a thick plaid shirt. He smiled amicably and spoke in Bulgarian. I asked him if he spoke any English.

“English! Yes, I speak little English. I study in university.”

“That’s good. Are you going near Plovdiv?”

“Plovdiv, no. Opposite direction. I will go near Sofia. Big city—lots of pretty girls, you know?”

“How far is Sofia?” I asked. I’d already read about the city, which is the capital of Bulgaria, and was probably going to make it there eventually.

“It take maybe two hours. My name is Eohr. I am from Hungary. Please, let me take care of you.”

I got in and buckled my seat belt, which seemed to be made out of burlap. This is when I noticed there wasn’t a windshield. I decided it would probably be a good idea to wear my stocking cap, and when I reached for my bag by my feet I noticed a hole in the floor of the car easily big enough for my foot to fit through. The seats seemed to be upholstered in actual animal fur. Now I had to remember to check myself for ticks at the next opportunity. The entire car smelled strongly of kerosene, which I was probably what this car ran on, much like Russian space shuttles. Eohr didn’t seem to think the possibility of a flammable liquids spill was a problem as he lit up a Marlboro Red. I wondered if this car had been constructed entirely by Eohr from parts he found around his yard.

Eohr and I stuck to the topics he wanted to talk about: American women, the dairy industry, cars, US politics. He was a big fan of the Chicago Blackhawks for some unknown reason. He asked me a lot of dull questions, like what I ate for lunch when I was in high school, and how big my washing machine was. Eohr seemed to run some sort of grey market milk exchange between Hungary and Bulgaria, the details of which he carefully avoided, nervously saying he didn’t know how to properly explain it in English. He was nice and I liked him.

We arrived in downtown Sofia quickly, and with no problems. I tried to offer Eohr some money for picking me up and driving me across Bulgaria, but he just shook his head, scoffed at my offer, and spit out the window. This was probably because money was Turkish (the only cash I had on me), and he drove away.

I walked around Sofia for awhile, never entirely sure of where I was. The city made no sense to me. I had no map. I couldn’t read the Cyrillic alphabet. I sat down, ate some pizza, and drank a beer.

I walked around for a few more hours, eventually stumbling down a small street where I saw a building with a nice sign that said “Hostel,” and nothing else. I knocked on the door, but nobody answered, so I turned the handle and opened the door.

Inside was a woman practicing on her accordion. I mean, she was really rocking out, laying down some pretty good hooks. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t hear her outside. She turned around, saw me, and smiled.

“Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. The accordion is very powerful.”

“I see that. Do you have any rooms available?”

“Yes! Many!”

“Great! Do you have any food?” I asked, thinking there might be a small kitchen inside where maybe they sold sandwiches or omelets or something.

She reached into her apron and gave me an apple and told me to eat it because apples are healthy. I took a bite. It was pretty good.

In the basement later that night, my hostess and a bunch of other people gathered in the basement and started playing whatever instruments they brought with them. A charming English fellow pulled a ukulele out of his backpack and strummed a few chords. An impossibly cute Spanish girl beat on a small drum. Our Bulgarian hostess continued on the accordion. Most people were pretty good with whatever they brought, but this one skinny Norwegian guy brought a flute and just blew into it as hard as he could, with absolutely no regard for rhythm, tone, volume, or other people’s hearing. It wasn’t very good.

Jordan, a French guy with an impressively thick accent who was staying in my room, leaned over and shouted into my ear, “I think this guy discovered this flute this morning.”

I give hitchhiking a score of 78,153 out of 100,000.