Can you imagine?

Odessa is made of limestone. When the city was being built people bought or otherwise acquired a little piece of land, started digging in the middle of it, and used the limestone from the ground to build around the outside, leaving a courtyard in the middle. That's why there is a well/flower-pot-looking round thing in the middle of all the courtyards here and why a few buildings are sinking. (People dug too much and didn't leave enough foundation). The digging would eventually lead to the neighbors' tunnels, and now there's a whole labyrinth under Odessa. Depending on who you ask, there are between 1000 and 3000 km of tunnels going two or even sometimes three stories down. The rich people made underground ('air-conditioned') party rooms, and the really rich people had an orchestra in the first layer underground and the party room a level below that. Back when Odessa was a tax-free port, the catacombs were used to smuggle things inland. In villages outside the city, peasants dug tunnels under the fields to get limestone to sell, and when the Nazis occupied Odessa during the Great Patriotic War (aka World War II), those catacombs were home to the Soviet resistance.

You can tour part of the resistance catacombs but only with a guide, which was fine by me because even though there are now lights and exit signs it is dark and creepy down there and the thought of making a wrong turn and getting lost gives me actual chills. There were a bunch of school groups ("Oh my," said my guide. "So many children. This is disaster.") but sound does not carry down there and we only had to get a few turns away before we couldn't hear them at all--which is also kinda creepy.

The area of resistance catacombs was huge and there were various different groups operating basically independently. Some were fairly successful in that they killed a lot of Germans and Romanians. One particularly unsuccessful group had a traitor who sold them out to the Nazis, who promptly sealed all their exits. ("Can you imagine?", my guide kept saying.) Waiting to be rescued, they started rationing food. Someone started hoarding and so they killed him. Two soldiers were caught doing something sexual, so they killed them. Then they ran out of food, so they ate the dead people. Then people started going crazy, so they killed and eventually ate them. By the time the German occupation ended, there was only one guy left alive. He couldn't walk, or talk, or see, and he died about two weeks after he was rescued. (Two of the people had been keeping journals, which was forbidden but helped keep them less crazy, and is where that story came from.)

Even though we were speaking English, my guide saved the cannibalism story for the taxi ride back to the city. "If the children would hear, can you imagine?"

She's gotta have it

The downside to being a ruling empress back in the days when European royalty really ruled was that getting married would have meant losing power, and so if you had any sexual appetite whatsoever it had to be satisfied outside of marriage, which immediately meant that you had a voracious sexual appetite, and the next thing you know people are claiming you're into fucking horses. The upside was that you weren't expected to actually fight the wars you started, the way emperors sometimes were, so you could tell your general 'Get me that fortress' and it just might work, without your ever having to leave the comfort of the Summer Palace. That's how Odessa became part of the Russian empire, and now Catherine the Great is all over the city. Lots of things are named after her, including one of the main streets, and one of the squares has a huge Catherine the Great statue. There's also a smaller bust of General Potemkin who did all the work. (Incidentally, Tiraspol was also brought under the Russian crown by order of Catherine the Great, so there are some statues of the Empress mixed in with the statues of Vladimir Ilyich.) Anyway, Odessa is a beautiful city. Trees canopy the streets and it's full of old palaces adorned with actual statues and gargoyle-y, angel-y sculptures. And plus there's the sea.

The beautiful people scene here is a little too beautiful for me, though. The heels and the clothes and the hair and the make-up. And the guys, too, with the pointy shoes and hair product and expensive jeans. Even the guy running my hostel is one of the beautiful people, with his dyed hair and unbuttoned shirt and his cigarettes. I've stayed in a lot of hostels in a lot of places, and they're never run by the beautiful people. Except in Odessa. He has some kind of problems "with the business" so "if anyone asks, please tell them you are my... guest." And then he winked. I bet he has orgies on boats.

Making love or else expecting rain

I think on your first night in Odessa, especially if it's a Saturday night, you're supposed to have a cocaine-fueled orgy on a boat or something. What I did on my first night on Odessa was go to the Irish bar near my hostel, but it's ok because it was to watch Barcelona win the Champions League final. Irish bars the world over are good for one thing, and that is watching sports. ¡Barça!

Getting to Odessa was also pretty much the opposite of a cocaine-fueled orgy on a boat. I know that guide books are full of errors and so you should always double-check anything important, but when the Lonely Planet said that there are at least 24 buses a day between Tiraspol and Odessa, it really seemed safe to assume that I could show up to the bus station any time and a bus would leave soonish. I showed up around ten to find that the next bus left at two. Joder. When the bus finally did leave, it was an oversold, unventilated van with no room for luggage, but everyone had luggage so the luggage plus some people filled the aisles. I was shoved in the very back next to an old man who sweat alcohol, and the bad roads plus bad van made it so bumpy that sometimes my ass left the seat. At the Transdniestr side of the border, they made us all get out of the van and put our luggage through a metal detector. (To make sure we weren't taking weapons out of Transdniestr?) Then once we and all our stuff were packed back into the seats and aisle of the van, they made me get back off (i.e., climb over everyone's luggage) and go to a little building to have an entirely useless conversation with an immigration guy, and so then crawl back over everyone's luggage to the very back of the van... I'm realizing as I write this that it's not a good story at all and I'm just whining. Traveling in poor countries means crappy infrastructure and sometimes border crossings are slow and stressful. Deal with it.

Anyway, by the time I finally made it to Odessa, which so far looks like a lovely city, I was in no condition for any kind of orgy. Some of the other patrons of the Irish bar seemed to be, though. Hot girls in spike heels drank fruity drinks and colorful shots and made out with boys who were only sort of watching the game. Beautiful or strangely-dressed people continually paraded through the bar, and some wealthy-looking people had very important conversations with the manager. So, with the exception of TVs showing sports, even the Irish bar felt like some ridiculous night club. Yikes.

New car, caviar

How kind of boring that it's all just about money. Transdniestr has all the factories and the rest of Moldova is (more) poor and rural. Add the instability of the Soviet Union crumbling around you, and you've got yourself a breakaway republic. Well, there's also the fact that a lot of Transdniestrians don't speak Romanian, and don't want to (and more generally, Moldova is more pro Europe/Romania whereas Transdniestr is more pro-Russian, but I don't know whether that's more effect or cause), but my new Transdniestrian friend Nick says it's mainly about money.

So, no communists, same old 'freedom-to-make-money' fight--the Lonely Planet really oversold the weirdness of this place. It is kind of nice, though. There are lots of trees and a river and it's been sunny and warm and dry with a pretty bright blue sky and it's hard not to at least kind of like a place under those conditions. It basically feels like a smaller, less Romanian version if Chisinau, only with different currency and more hammers and sickles. The currency situation is a little bit of a pain in that to get cash you have to first get either US dollars or Russian roubles from the ATM and then exchange them for Transdniestrian roubles, but for your troubles you do get an official receipt, printed on a tractor feed printer, with lots of official stamps and that satisfying official-stamp clicky noise that goes with them.

Maybe the weirdest thing about Transdniestr is how nice the people here are--definitely the friendliest Russian-speaking population I've come across so far. I had a whole fleet of bus drivers trying to help me when I arrived, and wait staff look you in the eye and say you're welcome when you say thank you. Even the guy at 'border' control was, well, not exactly nice, but he wasn't mean or scary and didn't give me a hard time at all. (The one thing I'm glad the Lonely Planet was wrong about--I really didn't want to have my camera confiscated or be interrogated or have to pay some huge bribe, no matter how much better a story it would have made.) Rumors of the Soviet Union's being alive and well and living inside Moldova are definitely exaggerated.

Also, hooray for catching Ratko Mladic!

Back in the USSR?

Man, this place isn't communist at all.

Tiraspol is the capital of Transdniestr, which declared independence from Moldova after the Soviet Union split up. Transdniestr has its own police, currency, and border controls, but isn't recognized by any other countries. Going to a country that doesn't officially exist seemed like a good adventure, plus the Lonely Planet descriped Transdniestr as a last bastion of communism, or something like that. Sign me up. But, although there are hammers and sickles and communist stars to be seen, plus street names like 25 October, Sovietic, Gorki, Rosa Luxemburg (I could go on) and some Lenin statues, Transdniestr isn't communist at all. Ok, so they maybe have a president for life (whose name is Igor Smirnov--can you think of a more perfect name for the president-for-life of a post-Soviet country that doesn't officially exist? I can't.) and Russia maintains a police force here. But the government doesn't set prices. People own property and have passports (some have Moldovan passports, others Russian or Ukrainian) and can come and go as they please. There is a House of Soviets (Dom Sovetov), but it's just the city government building whose name hasn't been changed. The one supermarket may actually be a state monopoly, but the stores are bright and shiny and full of food. Not even one crummy bread line.

Speak my language

I didn't know that Moldova was a country until I saw it in my east Europe guidebook. I knew it was some kind of place, I think, but maybe I thought it was a region in some other country, or a place that doesn't exist anymore like Byzantium of Czechoslovakia. Anyway, it is a country, right now, between Romania and Ukraine, with about 4.5 million people. (That is about one and a half Brooklyns, or 15 Icelands.)

I only recently (like, within the last week) decided to come to Moldova, and I haven't really done my homework; all I know about it is what the Lonely Planet and Wikipedia have to say and what I've seen in 1.5 days. Moldova used to be bigger, and Romanian-speaking, and called Moldavia, and controlled by (of course) the Ottomans. Then the Russians got it and made everyone learn Russian. There were wars and treaties and borders changed and eventually Moldova became one of the Soviet republics and now it is independent. Stalin apparently really pushed the idea of a Moldovan identity, distinct from Romanian. He decided that Moldovan was a separate language from Romanian (fucking dictators and their linguistic decrees) and switched it from the Latin alphabet to Cyrillic. (Romanian was originally written in Cyrillic and then changed to Latin, for whatever that's worth.) Now most everyone is bilingual (I think? -- it seems that way in Chisinau (the capital), anyway) and Moldovan (Romanian, whatever) is written in the Latin alphabet again. When I hear older people talking, it's almost always in Russian. Younger people mix it up; Romanian seems to be more common. The older people get kind of excited when I try to speak Russian; at first I thought it was a political statement that the younger people don't, but it probably has more to do with the fact that they mostly speak English a lot better than I speak Russian.

Language politics are sort of fascinating to me and I would like to understand them here. But this trip (the Moldova part of the trip, I mean) is super short. I hope I come back.

Also, the Moldovan cell phone company is called MoldCell.

I did it with a wiffle ball bat

In the end, I could have made it to Moldova last night. Someone offered me a ride and a hotel as soon as I got to Iaşi. But by then I was tired and starving and had already booked a hotel and was committed to playing harmonica before going to sleep. So I stayed, and played harmonica, and some kids stared at me a lot and everyone else ignored me.

Anyway. The way to get from Iaşi to Chişinău (the capital of Moldova), unless you want to spend another whole day on a bus, is to go to this one supermarket parking lot where maxitaxis (i.e., vans or station wagons) leave whenever they fill up, or whenever the driver feels like it. My particular driver was a burly older Moldovan man with big thick hands and a Finlandia vodka hat; for someone who runs a maybe-slightly-sketchy cross-border van service, he was a surprisingly careful driver. He got out of the van at the border where between (I think among is the word I should use here, but between just sounds better) him, the passport control guy, the customs woman, and some other un-official-looking guy in a t-shirt, a few cartons of cigarettes changed hands several times. The woman in the front seat of the van was wearing leopard print and talked nonstop, on her phone or to the driver, in a really shrill, grating voice; but then at the border she wanted to see my passport and told me I look really young and I decided she wasn't so bad.

And now I'm in Moldova! I took an instant liking to it. They speak Russian here. Not that I speak Russian really, but I speak it much better than I speak Hungarian, Bosnian, Serbian, Turkish, Bulgarian, or Romanian. It's nice to at least know how to properly greet people and ask some basic questions correctly enough to be understood. My hotel is this huge Soviet concrete block and they sell kvas everywhere and you can buy pretty much everything you need to live from a kiosk on the sidewalk or in the underground passageways that you have to use to get across the main streets. Cigarettes cost about $1 a pack here. (God, I wish I still smoked sometimes.) I didn't notice how much they cost in Romania, but I assume that explains the driver and the cigarettes at the border.

So don't stay mad

I spent most of today on a sweaty bus full of grumpy Romanians. The guy who wanted to trade seats with me because he had his dog with him (I guess he thought my seat had more dog room?) got mad that I don't speak Romanian. Then when I switched seats with him, some girls got mad that I was sitting where the dog guy told me to sit. The guy sitting next to me was mad at physics for making his stuff slide around every time we went around a curve (and there were a lot of curves). And the bus driver was mad at everything. He kept muttering under his breath and yelling and honking and throwing his hands up in disgust at the slow drivers in front of him and the fast drivers going into his lane to pass and the horse carts and the pedestrians. Sometimes I find it oddly calming when everyone around me is mad. I listened to self-absorbed guilty pleasure pop songs on my iPod and looked out the window and thought about how great the world is and how lucky I am to be able to explore it.

After about four hours, I was as grumpy as the bus driver. Why is this bus not air-conditioned? Could the driver please turn that godawful music down? Why does Romania not have any motherfucking highways? The road was two lanes the whole way and went through the center of each town we passed. And why do we have to stop in each goddamn town? It's the EU for fuck's sake--why are there no direct buses in this goddamn country? And how in fuck has the guy across the goddamn aisle managed to invade my space?

What ended up fixing my mood was a series of holes in the road. They were these unmanned, barely marked craters that took the 'highway' down to one lane and left it up to the drivers to avoid crashing into each other. The bus driver kept getting fist-shaking mad and it was all absurd and hilarious and I listened to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and got back to being amused by it all. And, I saw some baby horses. Life is pretty good.

I'm not currently in the right place, though. I saw the delta; I'm done with Romania for now. But without a car or a driver, you can't get from Tulcea to Moldova in one day, and my driver-finding powers are not absolute. The Romanian transit system was not designed with my current trip in mind. So, I'm still in Romania. Iaşi (pronounced yash) seems like a perfectly nice place to spend a day or two, but I'm just using it for a place to sleep. Sorry, Iaşi.

Still singing Graceland in my head

I don't understand how I misunderstood so completely. I thought I was signing up for a little boat with a few other people, like the one I was on yesterday. (Why do I never listen when people talk to me?) It turned out to be a huge boat full of old Bulgarians in a tour group, plus a make-out couple. And me. Pretty much the opposite of finding a fisherman to give me a ride in his boat. The old Bulgarians were kind of hilarious, actually, once I got over the fact that I was on a boat with a tour group. They kept speaking loudly and slowly in Bulgarian to the Romanian boat crew. One of them brought an accordion (she was pretty good, too) and they were singing and, by the end, dancing. This one almost-attractive Bulgarian man kept giving me "How you doin'?"-type looks and offering me cigarettes, but otherwise they ignored me and I listened to the music and watched the birds in something like peace. Today's trip was basically a longer version of yesterday's, only this time with beer and pelicans (the Bulgarian word for pelican is pelican, it seems) and without the thunderstorm. And, with Bulgarian dancing.

On another note, the food here in Bulgaria and two days of Romania is good. (Another great sentence from the aspiring travel writer.) It's not life-changing or anything, but tomatoes and cucumbers with feta have grown on me, and the grilled meat and sausage are consistently hearty and flavorful and good. I like the food except for the bread, of all things, which has been consistently terrible. (Some Bulgarian menus have a whole bread section, but that means flatbread which is a whole other thing--it's more like pizza and is actually good.) Bread at a restaurant almost always means a slice or two of stale white bread. Stale. Like, probably only a day or two away from moldy. Sometimes you get rolls, which look better and so get your hopes up, but really are the same stale white bread, only rounder and with more crust. A few towns ago the hostel got fresh bakery bread for breakfast every morning, but even that was not much better than fresh Wonderbread. I don't get it.

Speaking of menus, the one I just ordered from had a cheese section whose English translations included moldy cheese and she-goat cheese. I'm going to be giggling about she-goats for a while.

Shining like a National guitar

Three towns ago, I happened upon someone's Romania guide book and I happened to open it to a page telling me that I must go to the Danube delta. So, I did. It was kind of a pain to get here, and it looks like the bus schedules will make leaving suck as well, but it's definitely worth it. Riding around here in a boat is really, really cool. (Why I will never make it as a travel writer, or any other kind of writer: I write sentences like the previous one.) Once off the river's main drag, you're in this maze of river and lakes and islands and trees growing up out of the water with birds and frogs and fisherman. (And tourist boats.) There were egret-y birds and heron-y birds and diving birds and ducks and geese and these medium-sized bright blue birds with reddish beaks that never stayed still long enough for me to take a picture. There was this super thin gauze-y layer of cloud cover that made the trees and sky look like an impressionist painting. And the water was this shiny blue-grey-green-brown-silver color that you kind of wanted to touch, but kind of didn't want to disturb. It even smelled good. Well, a few parts were a little fishy, but mostly it smelled fresh and clean and green and like flowers.

I noticed that part of the sky had turned black about four minutes before the lightning started. (Wasn't someone telling me recently that Europe doesn't get thunderstorms? I've been in three so far this trip.) We were back on the main drag and not too far from home by then but still, we were on a boat in a thunderstorm. Isn't that bad? The 'captain' of our little boat, with his handlebar moustache and fixed, sternish expression, exuded a certain competence and seemed unphased (unphased is a word, right?) by the weather. And there was nothing I could do anyway, so I watched the light show and hoped not to get electrocuted and by the time we got back to the dock the storm was mostly over.

I've been singing river-themed songs in my head all day (there are a lot of them) and I was all motivated to get back to playing harmonica. (For no good reason whatsoever, I haven't played in like a week and a half. I suck.) And then it thunderstormed again. Fuck. I did play in my hotel room, but facing my fear of public performance remains on hold.

In another country

The best thing about Varna is the park by the sea, where old ladies sit knitting and selling things they've knit and cats hang around the little fried fish restaurants and turn up their noses if you try to feed them something boring like bread. The worst part, for me, is the lack of options for getting to Constanta, in Romania. It's a biggish city, and it's only three hours away. There's a direct road. But there is virtually no public-transportation way to start in Varna and arrive in Constanta early enough to catch a bus to Tulcea, two more hours north and on the Danube delta and where I was ultimately headed. I ended up finding a guy to drive me, which worked out about as well as it could have. His ringtone was Yakety Sax and he told me his conspiracy theories about 9/11 and made a little side trip to his favorite place in Bulgaria, some really dramatic/terrifying cliffs along the coast. (So, I guess the bad Varna-Constanta transportation options worked in my favor. Still, I don't understand why there aren't more buses.)

It's funny how quickly you get sort of used to a place. Not that I had Bulgaria all figured out or anything, but now in Romania I feel like even more of a disaster than I did in Bulgaria. It may have been a bunch of coincidences, but so far Romania has more of a last century/wild west feel than Bulgaria did. We passed a funeral procession going down a major-ish highway, led by a man walking and carrying a huge cross. We passed a man aiming what looked a lot like a handgun into some bushes. We passed several horse carts. The bus from Constanta to Tulcea sold 'seats' that meant sitting in the aisle, and stopped on the road for anyone who flagged it down.

Anyway, I'm only here in Romania for the weekend to ride around the Danube delta. I'll read about Romanian history and go to lots of museums and ramble on about it on some other trip.

Mad Hot Horseshoe

Slavi and Zori, whose couch I'm sleeping on here in Varna, are getting married. They're taking traditional Bulgarian dance classes to make sure they can dance really well for the wedding, and they let me tag along. Traditional Bulgarian dance looks a little bit like Riverdance, but less rigid and done holding hands in a rotating semicircle. It looks as goofy as any traditional dance, but it also looks like fun and I liked the music. I also liked the instructor. He looked like an older, pudgier version of Vin Diesel and sounded all stern and serious the way Bulgarians usually do, to me anyway, but he was wearing sweatpants and frolicking.

...now that I think about it, a lot of Bulgarian men look like an older, pudgier version of Vin Diesel.

ot-vo-re-no

I'm still in Bulgaria. Back on the coast, in Varna. It's pretty and all that, but if I traveled specifically for beaches I'd go Mediterranean or Adriatic before Black. The good thing about the Black Sea, though, is that it's right out my window. 'My' window. I'm staying with friends of a friend in their super nice apartment that has sea views and two front doors, one right after the other. They tell me it's common, if an apartment's door isn't very secure, to put a better door right on top of it.

Anyway. No matter how hard I try, I cannot pronounce the Bulgarian word for open. I can't even come close, apparently, because no one has any idea what the hell I'm talking about whenever I try to say it--it's a good way to get people to switch to English, if they know any at all. This comes up a lot, because I can never tell if places here are open. Museums will be unlocked but dark/empty, or full of construction workers. In the little towns especially, restaurants will show Open signs but then be deserted, or empty but for two or three people who might be waitstaff but don't really look or act like waitstaff--more like some people who just chose a deserted restaurant as a place to chat. 'Are you open?' seems like the logical question to ask. Seems like they might even be expecting it. But I guess my butchery of the Bulgarian language transcends all that.

This land is my land

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Turks had lost control of most of the Balkans. If you read old history books, or talk to some of the people who live here today, it was the just and noble triumph of brave Christian soldiers over their evil Moslem overlords. Sort of like Balkan Manifest Destiny. By 1912 the only one of today's Balkan states still controlled by the Turks was Macedonia. (Russia tried to give part of Macedonia to Bulgaria in 1877, but the Great Powers got mad and gave it back to the Turks.) In the First Balkan War Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece got together and won control of Macedonia. A year later, in a fit of colossal fuck-uppery, they fought the Second Balkan War over what to do with it. Macedonia had been divided up on paper before the first war had even been fought, but then that division didn't coincide with who felt like they won what in the actual fighting. Plus, the Great Powers had decided that Albania should be independent, which made Serbia mad and also made it feel entitled to part of western Macedonia also claimed by Bulgaria. And Bulgaria and Greece were mad at each other about Saloniki and other parts of eastern Macedonia. The big loser of the second war was Bulgaria. If you take both Balkan wars together, Bulgaria did gain some land and people, but nowhere near as much as they thought they deserved.

So, to oversimplify a lot, Bulgaria's borders have changed several times, and it was once bigger than it is now, and there's been some intervention by the international community. The nice thing about Bulgaria compared to, ahem, some other Balkan places I've visited, is that that history doesn't seem to have warped into scary nationalism. That, and grilled meat.

To those of you who've called me a communist

...today I visited the building (it looks like a UFO) where the Bulgarian communist party was formed. And I peed on it.

The Lonely Planet, plus several actual Bulgarians, say that you have to rent a car here. Interesting things are spread out, and hidden, and not served by public transportation, etc. The idea scared the crap out of me, for a few reasons, so I thought I better do it. Some moral support/translation from Nick at my hotel and 30 lev (about $20) later, I was the proud renter of a Fiat Punto with 216,000km and a manual transmission. Definitely a good idea. I drove the little Punto, not necessarily in the right gear, to the Dryanovo monastery, and the Gabrovo Museum of Humor and Satire, and through the Shipka pass. (Because they have a Museum of Humor and Satire, I forgive the Bulgarians for not thinking it's hilarious when I confuse Shipka, a town/mountain pass, with shopska, a traditional Bulgarian salad.)

My only gripe about car rental in Bulgaria is that when you pick up the car it has no gas, the idea being that you'll return it with an empty tank, which encourages a stupid game of chicken that might leave you (well, me) stranded in north central Bulgaria with no gas, no sense of direction, a flaky cell phone, and no language skills. I got more gas than what the rental car guy had recommended based on my route and the little Punto's alleged gas mileage. But still the low fuel light came on less than halfway through the trip. The light probably comes on a while before you run out of gas, and it seemed entirely plausible to me that the gas gauge is unreliable on hilly bumpy roads (because of the gas sloshing around in the tank). And these were the pot-holiest roads ever. But, it also seemed entirely plausible that my crappy driving was fucking with the little Punto's gas mileage. (Should the transmission usually be at 1000 or 2000 rpm? I just couldn't remember and there was really no way to find out.) Plus, I was realizing that I didn't really know how to get to the UFO communist building, and getting lost would not help the gas situation. This was all coming to a head while the little Punto and I were in the middle of nowhere, and I stressed myself out enough that I had to make a longish detour out of the middle of nowhere for more gas. On the detour I found an empty Russian church and got to wander through the crypt, so it wasn't a total waste.

Anyway, there was also a war monument (the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, where Bulgaria became independent of the Ottoman Empire and was supposed to become Russia's big pawn but then the Great Powers intervened and it only became Russia's little pawn), and a big dramatic bolt of lightning, and some hail. Joder. I definitely didn't take the most direct route to the UFO communist building, but I never got lost lost, either. The building is entirely abandoned and in the middle of nowhere and, as far as I can tell, Bulgarians don't want to talk about it. But it's history, and abandoned buildings are cool. It's not open, but you can climb in through a broken window. It's all dark and drippy and spooky and I didn't last too long inside, but I'm glad I went. (I only peed on it because there was nowhere else to go.)

The other good thing about the gas detour was that it put me at this yogurt stand at exactly the same time as this older Bulgarian man who, when he heard me failing at trying to ask whether the yogurt was sweet (it wasn't), asked if I speak Spanish. He was based in Spain as a long-distance truck-driver for a while and was so happy to have someone to speak Spanish with that he bought me some salami. Pretty much the cutest thing ever. And, in today's installment of mildly sexist but hilarious comments made by Bulgarian men, when I told him that I suck at driving he told me "Los coches son como los mujeres: todos son diferentes."

Redneck blues

The unpronouncable Veliko Tarnovo was the pre-Ottoman capital of Bulgaria, which means it has a huge fortress on a hill. I'm a sucker for shit like that. Inside the fortress is a church, and inside the church are a bunch of murals that look exactly like what I think El Greco would paint if he were reincarnated as a graffiti artist. I got all excited and took tons of photos (which are a pain to get off my memory card, sorry). And then I took myself on a little death march (it's not really travel without at least one) over a scary bridge and through the woods and past a pond full of the loudest frogs I've ever heard to Arbanasi, a tiny little town of rich people and churches. Imagine wrapping the entire inside of a nondescript building with icon-themed wrapping paper; that's what one of the churches was like. When I walked in, a guide was telling some people in Spanish that "the Turks would not allow any beauty, so they had to hide the beauty on the inside." The death march didn't have a lot of shade, and my hair was up, so now I have a red neck.

The more I write this, the less coherent it gets, but, the other memorable thing about today was Nikolai the waiter saying that "Chicken and fish are not real meat.... Chicken, fish, and women must be eaten with hands." I'll leave it at that.

I am epic fail

Trying to buy a train ticket to Veliko Tarnovo today, I butchered the town's name so badly that the woman behind the counter made me write it down. Epic fail. The fact that I could write it in Cyrillic made me feel a little less ridiculous than I guess I would have otherwise, but only a little. She was nice about it anyway, which was unexpected. The people here in Bulgaria are mostly nice, but the ones behind ticket counters are mostly mean.

Once on the train, I shared a compartment with this guy who really wanted to talk to me. I like to meet people when I travel. But, his English was no better than my Bulgarian. (Plus the train was loud and rattle-y and I think he had some kind of hearing impairment.) He made a noble effort and I was really trying, too, for a while. But, people who don't share a common language just don't have very much to talk about. After we had both listed all the foods we can say in the other's language, he tried telling me for the third time that his brother lives in New Jersey; that was all I could handle and I had to bury myself in my guide book. I did feel a little bad. But, he wanted to exchange Skype names, so maybe someday we can continue the incoherent conversation electronically.

Mailing this one in

Rather than try to say anything more coherent, today I'm just going to tell you some good/hilarious things about Bulgaria. They are in no particular order.

There is a brand of cigarettes here called Merilyn (that's how they spell it, with an e) Slims. The ads/boxes have a pink-hued picture of Marilyn Monroe.

The Bulgarian word for new sounds like novo, but the Cyrillic letter that sounds like n looks like H, and the letter that sounds like v looks like B, so sometimes things are labeled HOBO.

A bottle of beer here means 500ml. Also, one of the Bulgarian beers is called Zagorka, which is a fun word to say.

In pretty much every restaurant, the menu is at least ten pages long, usually with several pages of salads. People here like to eat salad when they drink.

There are coffee machines--the kind that give you watery 'cappuccino' in a little plastic cup--all over the streets.

The heels on women's shoes are often very high, and the streets and sidewalks are often cobblestone or otherwise full of holes. Some women do manage to move effectively in such treacherous conditions, and it's sort of impressive; many don't, and it's sort of hilarious.

If you accidentally put yourself between one kid chasing another kid, you will get tackled.

Hangover-free, my ass

When I arrived in Plovdiv (Bulgaria's second largest city), there was a rainbow. I got lost trying to find my hotel and when I asked an old guy for directions he dragged me to two different bars and asked all of his friends plus some strangers. No one knew, and I ended up having to resort to a taxi but still, I like it here. The museums are free on Thursdays and I saw the only icon exhibition I've ever liked. (Not because of the icons themselves--they were still pretty hideous--but there were interesting descriptions of what each one represented. I've been meaning to learn more about religion in order to better understand art for about a decade now.) I also found myself a favorite Bulgarian artist. His name is Encho Pironkov and his paintings are abstract and colorful and have lots of nice shades of green. And there was a little parade with music and people in traditional Bulgarian costumes, to celebrate the first day of tourist season. Kinda cheesy and silly, but also kinda cute and fun. It was reminding me of the Basque country, where they're always celebrating something, and I was wishing that strangers would start sharing wine with me the way they sometimes do in the Basque country. Then later this wine guy pulled me into his first day of tourist season/wine tasting party. Getting pulled into a stranger's party is one of the best things that can happen when you travel. I like this place. Unfortunately, it turned out to be more of a wine spiel (complete with Power Point slides) than a party, and the guy was a sleazy American (complete with a huge thick chain and shirt unbuttoned nearly to his navel). So, I made friends with the other American woman that he pulled in and we drank all his wine. Not so much of a cultural experience, but the wine was Bulgarian, anyway.

Speaking of Bulgarian wine, I haven't heard any actual Bulgarians say this, but the Lonely Planet claims that Bulgarians claim that Bulgarian wine does not give you a hangover. I can assure you that that is entirely untrue.

Beeswax

I keep accidentally lighting candles in churches. Something will make me think I have to pay to go into the church, so I'll try to give the old lady manning the kiosk some money. She wonders why the hell I'm giving her money; I try to communicate via hand gestures and arbitrary words like two and no that I thought you had to pay. By the time I figure out that I don't have to pay, she's decided that the crazy muttering foreigner in her church must want to buy a candle. And it's much easier to just buy the damn candle than to make any further attempt at communication. Once I've bought the candle, there's not much else to do but pretend I'm Orthodox and light it. I'm not even sure what the significance of lighting a candle in an Orthodox church is. I think you light it for someone, but maybe I just made that up. On the off chance that Bulgarian Orthodox is the right religion, I hope it's not some sort of sacrilege for a heathen like me to go around ignorantly lighting candles in churches out of politeness/convenience. Then again, if Bulgarian Orthodox is the right religion, I'm probably fucked regardless of the candles.

White Whine

Relaxation is not one of the reasons I travel. I can relax just fine in my apartment. But, when you decide to go to a little Bulgarian beach town/fishing village in the off season, sometimes you have no choice. There is some interesting historical stuff here--there are ruins all over the place, with the rest of the city built around them. The museums are supposed to be open, but they're not; and it's a little town so walking around it making up stories about the ruins doesn't take very long. So I was forced--forced!--to have lots of coffee and a really long lunch and to sit for a long time on a bench watching men work on their boats (lots of sanding) while a Bulgarian radio station played oldish American music like Foreigner and Michael Jackson. I also amused (I think) some nice patient waiters with my butchering of the Bulgarian language. Getting by on my Russian is so far a huge disaster, partly because Russian and Bulgarian are not as similar as I want them to be, but mostly because I am a huge disaster at speaking Russian. I realized hours later that when I tried to order a small bottle of wine with dinner I actually used the Russian word for milk instead of small. I guess that's why he thought I wanted white wine.

On another note, I haven't said much about the harmonica lately, but I have been playing more or less according to schedule. It just hasn't generated good stories. Serbia was too damn cold to play outside. I didn't play at all in Turkey (only two days) and here in Sozopol I've been sitting on rocks and playing for the water and the seagulls. Not exactly playing in public like I'm supposed to be doing, but it's too pretty not to. Although if you're already self-conscious about your minimal talent, seagull noises (what do seagulls do? caw? cry?) sound a lot like people laughing at you.

Black cat, white cat

I maybe hit a new low in travel incompetence today when I couldn't find the bus station while standing literally in the middle of it. To my credit, or something, it wasn't really a station by my definition of the word; it was more of a horseshoe of different bus companies which, when you don't recognize the names of Turkish bus companies (none of them involve the letters b-u-s in sequence) looks like a big strip mall surrounding the metro station. Still, somewhere in Turkey is a metro employee who thinks I have the IQ of toast. Also, I forgot to tell you something about Turkey. There are nice cats there. Lots of them. It's great.

So far, there is only one nice(ish) cat in Bulgaria, and a lot of not-so-nice ones. I'll try to withhold judgment until I've been here at least a full day.

The closest I've been to Iraq

Istanbul and the area around it has a European side and an Asian side, separated by the Bosphorus, which connects the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara. There are various boats that go between the two sides, but they are confusing and we ended up on one that took us to the very top of the Asia side when we really wanted to be closer to the bottom. Going from the top to the bottom via bus seemed like the right thing to do. According to the guy at the bakery, we needed to take one bus to a place that starts with a B, and then a different bus to a place that starts with K, which is where we wanted to have dinner. The first leg went off without a hitch, and the second started out well. Some nice men made sure we got on the right bus. But then there was construction and a huge traffic jam and for the better part of about two hours the bus never moved more than a few feet without stopping. The man sitting next to my friend tried very hard to make friends with us, but the only words that he said that we could understand were Europe and Asia. So, by pointing, we covered the facts that we were in Asia and that Europe was across the water several times. The people on the bus were a lot more patient wıth its extreme slowness than I imagine people in the US would be. Men fingered their prayer beads, which maybe relieves stress, but no one was muttering to himself or banging his head against the wall. (Maybe I'm projecting a little here.) We eventually got past the construction and to the place that starts with K, and had a really good dinner; with beer, even. We were expecting the Asia side to be more conservative than it turned out to be.

I'm pretty sure I like Turkey, and I'm pretty sure I'll come back. I'll have more to say when I'm here for more than two days.

ps. Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

pps. Turkish keyboards blow.

The Cucumber Fairy

Today in Istanbul, the place to be was a particular corner in some neighborhood whose name I've already forgotten. It looked typical enough when we stopped for orange juice. (There was a chicken crossing the street, but it wasn't a very busy street. Stuff like that happens when you leave New York.) But then we noticed that on the other side of the street a man was killing a rooster. As a meat-eater, I can't really be incredulous, but if nothing else it was an odd choice of venue. He was killing the rooster right in front of a stopped taxi. The driver got out of the taxi, walked around to the front, and wiped around the headlights with some kind of rag. We didn't see the crime, nor did we have the language skills to question any of the witnesses. But the only explanation that makes any sense, to me anyway, is that the rooster was crossing the street and the taxi hit it but didn't kill it and then the other guy stepped in to put it out of its misery. Across the street from the rooster situation was a cucumber truck. The whole neighborhood seemed to be buying cucumbers out of a truck full of them from an older guy and his 10ish-year-old helper. Back near the rooster were two guys at a little table playing backgammon and peeling cucumbers for people who would then put salt on them and eat them. In the lot behind the rooster and cucumber peelers were a lot more chickens and some ducks. There was a cat, but he took no interest in the birds. One of the ducks was particularly interested in another duck. I'm not sure if they actually consumated the relationship, but one duck was on the other duck's back biting its neck for a while. Really biting its neck, like maybe ducks are into choking. The adorable old beret-wearing Turkish man sitting nearby didn't know what to do with two American girls cracking up over ducks fucking. Anyway, we decided we needed to eat raw cucumbers like the locals, so I went to negotiate with the cucumber truck guy. I tried so hard to explain that I wanted one cucumber and not one kilo of cucumbers, and I thought the cucumber truck guy and I were understanding each other, but still I ended up with a whole bag of cucumbers. Turkey isn't that poor a country, but I would have felt rotten throwıng them away. So I spent the rest of the afternoon giving them away. I gave some to two different old women asking for money, and some to a little girl playing some plastic instrument in the street for money; all seemed grateful. I tried to use them to barter with a dessert vendor; he was much less impressed. I 'gave' some to a guy selling salted cucumbers when he wasn't looking. We gave the rest of the bag to a homeless-looking man and went to dinner. We saw him again a few hours later, sleeping in front of a building, sans cucumbers. I hope he put them to good use.

We also saw some mosques, which were beautıful; and a cistern, which was dungeony-creepy-cool; and a plate of baklava and other desserts shaped and colored into a likeness of Barack Obama. I like it here.

I had my first casualty of the trip yesterday. My jeans started to rip and then they really started to rip, until I was embarrassed to be seen in them. (Plus, in Belgrade's Arctic climate I didn't need the extra drafts.) I don't understand why that happened, because those jeans weren't even tight. I guess they were just old. My feelings about Serbia were already ambivalent at best. Jeans shopping did not help things. [Insert rant about the extreme evil of the fashion industry.]

The part of me that likes to torture myself in the name of personal growth wants to learn Serbo-Bosnio-Kosovar-Croatian-whatever and move to Belgrade and figure it out. The rest of me was ready to move on. For the next two days in Istanbul I'm goıng to see my friend and eat a lot and cease with the history lessons and the hand-wringing.

This one's for you, Hari

The food here in the Balkans is good. Not great, or life-changing or anything, but it's good. I like grilled meat, and they grill meat well here. At every restaurant that's not fancy but not quite fast food, there is cevapi. (The c should have an accent on it but I'm on the wrong kind of keyboard.) Cevapi is pieces of sausage served inside pita-like bread that's not quite strong enough to support the sausages, with a fork stuck in it and no knife to be seen. I alternated between spearing the sausage with the fork and pickıng it up with pieces of bread; I didn't notice any more elegant ways of eating it. In Muslim-plurality Bosnia, they eat a lot of lamb. At lamb restaurants in the hills, they hang the lamb's skin outside to show that it's fresh. The lamb is grass-fed and kind of a big deal, but lamb is not my favorite meat under the best conditions and Bosnian lamb was just too gamey/flavorful for me. In Serbia they eat more pork; roasted and in the form of homemade bacon were particularly good. Desserts are fancy and pretty and, in my experience, not as good as they look. Oh, and meat/cheese/spinach pies are good. There are bakeries everywhere.

In addition to espresso and Nescafe, they drink what the rest of the world would call Turkish coffee, but here they call it Bosnian or Serbian coffee. The beer is adequate but nothing special; there is this Montenegrin beer whose name I forget (I think there is only one Montenegrin beer, or only one that you would see outside of Montenegro anyway) that I think is a little better than the other Balkan beers. The local (also Montenegrin) wines I've tried have also been adequate, but I haven't tried very many. Also, you know how drunks, or people who just happen to be drunk, ooze that alcohol smell? I feel like I get that way every time I have a drink here. Weird.

Ain't no tongue can tell

I happened to walk past the US embassy today. Turns out it's on the same street as my hotel. It's not as ominous-looking as Guantanamo in Sarajevo, but it has armed guards and the side street that runs next to the building is blocked off and guarded. (As I write this I'm realizing that I can't remember ever seeing a US embassy outside the Balkans, so maybe they are all like that.) The creepy part though, and I caught myself saying it right out loud as I realized what was wrong with this picture, is that the building has no windows. You can see where the windows used to be, but now they're all sealed. (Is there an architectural euphamism for boarded-up?) Incidentally, there are some bombed-out buildings on the very next block, but it was NATO doing the bombing--not like anyone was attacking the embassy. I have to admit, though, that the extreme security measures don't seem quite as ridiculous to me as they probably would have two weeks ago.

In addition to the Serbia for Serbs symbol and the occasional swastika, there is a lot of Kosovo-related graffiti here; in particular, you see Kosovo 1389 scrawled on a lot of buildings. The Battle of Kosovo, which happened on June 28, 1389 (Gregorian calendar, I think), is very important to the Serbs. There the Serbs fought the Ottomans in an attempt to curb Ottoman power in Serbia. (It didn't work.) It's part of why they (some of them? most of them? I'm not sure) feel entitled to Kosovo as part of Serbia today. (Lola got all bent out of shape telling about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand: "He had the nerve to Sarajevo on June 28!") I had some of my many 'You've gotta be fucking kidding me' moments in Balkan history when reading about Kosovo. For one thing, in the centuries after the Battle of Kosovo, Serbs moved north and Albanians moved into Kosovo. It's not like someone kicked the Serbs out of their holy land; they left. Also, says Captain Obvious, that battle was over six hundred years ago. It makes the southern United Statesians with their confederate flags look timely. And, that very important 600-year old battle that people were dying for just a few years ago? The Serbs lost. The end.

...ok, not really the end. If you're into military history, I guess the battle was probably more of a draw, although the Serbs definitely went on to lose the war. Also, now I feel bad for bitching so much about Belgrade and the people who live here. I had this hilarious waiter the other night who, when he brought me the check, also brought me this red napkin torn and folded into the shape of a rose, "Just so you can tell the people 'look what that crazy waiter gave to me.'" No one has made me feel bad about not speaking Serbo-Bosnio-Croatian-Former-Yugoslav-Republic-of-Macedonian-whatever. Older couples hold hands while they walk their little dogs. And, the sun finally came out. It's complicated.

ps. I can't find the original Onion version, but I've been thinking of this all week.

Uptown ladies with their uptown coats

When I first started traveling I liked everywhere I went, loooved everywhere I went, and sometimes I would wonder if maybe I just had no taste. So now, whenever I don't love a place, at least I'm reminded that I have opinions. I was planning on loving Belgrade, which was probably my first problem. It's not horrible. I don't hate it. But I don't love it.

To get to the Contemporary Art Museum, you have to walk over a bridge (if you're going on foot, I mean). I love bridges. This particular bridge was long and loud and concrete ugly and windy (it is freezing here) and I haven't read the right kind of books to effectively imagine myself as the heroine of some novel filled with bread lines. But on the other side I walked by the river and had it pretty much to myself and it was nice in a plotless-foreign-film kind of way. My map was a little vague, but a building appeared about where I thought the museum should be. It looked neglected--abandoned, really--but there were some sculptures in the long-umowed grass. Walking around to the front of the building, I thought I saw some modern sculptures through the second floor windows, until I got closer and realized it was crumpled-up construction (rekonstrukcija) signs. It was clearly the museum, and it was clearly not open for business. But I had walked a long way over a long cold bridge, and I wanted confirmation. I couldn't remember how to say open or closed in Serbo-Croat-Bosnian-Montenegrin-whatever, so I summoned my best Serbian accent and asked the dude hanging around the entrance 'Where's the museum?'. He was super nice, although his dog was a little growl-y and scary and the lone dude plus dog guarding abandoned building was all a little post-apocalyptic. Turns out the museum has been closed for reconstruction for four years (fucking tourist office map). It doesn't look like they're reconstructing anything, though, so it's not surprising that there's no expected completion date. The guard, or whatever he was, let me look around a little, but there wasn't much to see. Just a large building in disarray with no apparent reconstruction going on, and no art.

The National Museum is also closed for reconstruction. So is all but one small room of the Serbian History Museum. There is a Russian church here, founded by refugees from the revolution, but it is under construction. There's a Cervantes Institute (we could have spoken Spanish!) but they are in between exhibitions. I tried to go to galleries, but they were either closed or full of the kind of nautical scene paintings that I imagine a certain kind of rich person buys merely as an expression of wealth. I did find one street art gallery which was cool, but there was no employee to be found so no one to ask my Belgrade graffiti questions. It seems like there are good things here. I really do get that feeling. I just can't find them. And I already said that it's freezing, right?

I guess I'll just drink all day

Belgrade is pissing me off. It's cold and grey and windy and it makes my nose run. So it would be a good museum day, except that all the museums are closed because of the stupid Workers' Holiday (May 1), which is four goddamn days long. And there aren't enough internet cafes, and my hotel charges five euros a day for wireless. My hotel also has no maps, because of the stupid Workers' Holiday. I wandered around and eventually found a tourist office, but the tourist office maps are huge and don't fold very well and make you look like a tourist. And there are newsstands everywhere but it is impossible to find the New York Times, or the Herald Tribune, or whatever the hell it's called in other countries. Sarajevo has one-fifth the population of Belgrade, and they have international newspapers. Christ.

Get off my lawn

Novi Sad is a medium-sized town in northern Serbia. The Danube runs through it. It has nice squares and churches and pedestrian-ized streets full of cafes and bars and European department stores. It has an old fortress, part of which has been turned into art galleries. One of the gallery guys spoke some English and told me about his daughter who lives in Rome and has had shows in New York. He has a cat named Felix and made me drink some rakija (somewhere between moonshine and brandy).

Novi Sad also has more fascist graffiti than I think I've ever seen anywhere. A big plus sign, with C's (C is Cyrillic for S) in each quadrant but the C's on the left side are backwards, is some kind of nationalist, Serbia-for-Serbs-type symbol. It looks like this and is on a lot of walls and buildings. On the Catholic church in Novi Sad, they added some extra lines to the plus sign to make a swastika around the C's. Joder.

The Serbs that I've met on this trip so far are warm and kind and super generous. But whatever small minority goes around painting swastikas scares the crap out of me.

What we've got here is failure to communicate

Heading to Serbia today, I noticed some more differences between Srpska and the Bosnian Federation. (I think I forgot to say before that Republika Srpska means Serbian Republic in Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian-whatever.) You see a lot more Sprska flags in Srpkska than you do any flags in the Federation. Sometimes you see the old (pre-1998--I don't know what happened in 1998, but the flag changed) Bosnian flag in the Federation and sometimes the new one, but I've never seen a Federation flag except on the internet. The Srpska flag looks a lot like the Serbian flag.

There's this little restaurant in the woods of Srpska that has a framed picture (a drawing, actually, of reasonable quality) of Ratko Mladić on the wall. Lola assures me that they all have Muslim friends, but also that most people in Sprska wouldn't give up Mladić for a trillion dollars. (Serbia is currently offering 10 million euros in reward money.) Maybe this is just how civil wars 'work'? I don't get it.

Also, Srpska is full of Turkish toilets. Ew.

Not quite betting Gabe's life on this one, either

Last day in Sarajevo so last day to write about it. I am woefully unqualified but here goes. A long time ago in the Balkans were the Romans. I forget when they came. In the 6th century the Slavs started moving in. In the 14th century the Ottomans started moving in and eventually controlled the whole peninsula (but with constant pressure from Russia and Austria and others) until their empire started to fall apart in the 19th century. During Ottoman times, Bosnia and Albania were the two places where a lot of people converted to Islam (I dunno why that was; I don't think historians really know, either). By the time Austria-Hungary kind of took over in the late 19th century, Bosnia was Catholic, Orthodix, Muslim, and Jewish. (A lot of the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition came to the Balkans.) Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo; World War I happened; World War II happened; Bosnia lost nearly its entire Jewish population; Tito ran Yugoslavia for about 40 years. When Yugoslavia started breaking up in the early 1990s, Bosnia was (and still is) a mix of Bosnian Croats (Catholic), Bosnian Muslims (aka Bosniaks), and Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox). Some powerful people thought that the Bosnian Serbs should be part of Serbia and that the Bosnian Croats should be part of Croatia and there was a nasty bloody war that lasted until 1995, with fighting especially bad in and around Sarajevo.

So here we are 15 years later. As per the Dayton peace agreement, Bosnia now consists of the Bosnian Federation and Republica Srpska. The Federation, which includes Sarajevo, is still a mix of religions/ethnicities, although with relatively more Muslims and fewer Serbs than before the war. Srpska is almost all Serb and includes East Sarajevo, which is still being built and developed on what was mainly nothing before and during the war. The only difference I can see between Srpska and the Federation is that the Cyrillic alphabet is used a lot more often (on signs and stuff) in Srpska. (The Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian languages are very similar, but Bosnian and Croatian use the Latin alphabet whereas Serbian uses Cyrillic.) Sarajevo is now majority Muslim. Most Muslim women here don't wear the veil; for the non-veiled women and all of the men, I can't tell who's who, so I don't know whether Serbs and Muslims eat dinner together very often. I don't sense simmering tension; there's no scary police presence or hateful graffiti. Still, as a foreigner you can miss a lot. Lola says that Serbs and Muslims have good relations now but, much as I like him, I recognize that no one can have an unbiased view of his own culture. (And, their relations are sort of infinitely better now than before. They're not killing each other.)

Lola showed me his house outside the city. Before the war, his neighbors were all Serbs. He didn't seem particularly happy when he told me that he's the only Serb left (well, plus however he counts his wife who is Dutch). But then he took me to have coffee with his Muslim neighbors. What a weird, complicated, beautiful, interesting, tragic place.


PS. Today was finally warm enough to take my harmonica outside. It was still a little cold and windy though, and my nose kept running, so I had to keep stopping to blow it, which made me feel pretty silly. I also just felt rusty; I kept making mistakes and forgetting songs that I've been playing for months. I'm getting better at not caring when I fuck up, though. The hard part is sitting down and starting to play; once I get past that it's not so scary anymore. I think that's progress.