Canberra to Bulgaria - the journey begins...

Hello again. I hope you had a good Christmas. I’ve had a busy few days, so I haven’t been blogging as much as I promised myself I would. (I usually send two blogs a week. In the past week, I believe I've spent... er, none. Well, just a couple less than usual!) I’m currently in beautiful Bulgaria – which, of course, is a long way from home. Indeed, it took the best part of three days to get here. After driving to Sydney, I had to spend 24 hours in Singapore – which isn’t so bad. In my brief stops in Singapore, I’ve always liked the city cum island cum nation. It seems to be a hybrid of some of the best that the East and the West have to offer. It’s dynamic, clean and well-ordered, like some of the great Western cities, but it has the sweetness and the friendliness (and the wonderful weather) of the East. Now, during the post-Christmas sales, it was remarkably busy. Though I wanted to try some of the food that gives Singapore its reputation of “the food capital of Asia” (no small claim!), I found that all of the food courts were too crowded, even when I returned at 3:30pm.

Then again, I was in Orchard Road, the mecca for window-shoppers (and any other shopper), a road on which mega-malls are lined up next to each other. (Paradise for a shopaholic!) Post-Christmas, it is a hive of activity. Even the place in the food hall that specialises in toast (albeit with various exotic toppings, like peanut butter) had a long queue that showed no signs of getting smaller. (A pity, as the toast looked wonderful! Seriously! I would have been tempted to try it out, if not for the queue.) I flew to Istanbul that night, arriving on Thursday morning. Turkey is a country that I have long wanted to visit… so it’s a pity that I didn’t really do it this time. Only a few hours after my arrival, I had to take a bus to Bulgaria. As I waited for the bus, I decided to at least enjoy an authentic Turkish breakfast in one of the nearby cafés. There were a few eateries to choose from. All of them are close together, in the same building, and all of them seem to serve exactly the same thing: bread rolls. As they can’t speak English, they honestly couldn’t understand it when I said “No thanks, I’m just looking,” whatever sign language I used. Eventually, I chose one of the cafes... and tried desperately to order. Sadly, the guys still couldn’t speak English – though they might have known slightly more English than I knew Turkish (and honestly, I didn’t have a single Turkish word in my vocabulary). “What do you have for vegetarians?” was threatening to sound like just as formidable a question as the one about a tree falling in the forest. As they started to panic (I’m not sure what they said, but it looked like they were panicking), I was thinking back to previous occasions when I had found myself in a town where nobody spoke a word of English. I remembered getting a haircut in Warsaw (which went OK thanks to a few photos, and the barber’s intuition), and – less successfully – trying to order lunch in Qingdao. I was thinking, “Surely an English speaker has to show up eventually.” I must have thought this with ardent prayerfulness, because almost on cue, a middle-aged guy in a suit walked through the door and offered to help. He looked a little like actor James Woods – and like James Woods, he spoke fluent English. At my request, he ordered me a toasted cheese roll and a tea (which is called “chai” in Turkish, just as it is in Bengali), then walked out the door again – leaving me to ponder the obvious question “Why did he walk in here in the first place?” God works in mysterious ways, as everyone says at least a few times in their life.