11-30-00

Dear Family,

While you were all safe and snug in your little houses and watching the football games and eating your pumpkin pie we were having ourselves a thanksgiving adventure. Of course we could not celebrate on the true day, so we decided to celebrate on Sat. with some other Peace Corps volunteers. We had been invited a few weeks earlier by another volunteer to come to their Thanksgiving dinner. They were throwing a large Thanksgiving party for the people they worked with at the governmental building and for about 10 Americans in the little town of Dryanovo. Here is where the adventure begins. We decided to take the 6:00a.m bus from Silistra to Veliko Turnovo. This is a 5 hour bus ride and we made this trip with no problems, other than the early hour. In Veliko Turnovo, which happens to be the old capital of Bulgaria and extremely beautiful, we decided to walk around and sightsee before catching the train to the small town of Dryanovo down south. Turnovo was beautiful as we were told and we got some great shots of the old castle and chapel. After we were finished sightseeing we decided to find out when the train took off for the small town of Dryanovo. We were told that it should be about a half hours train ride to Dryanovo. When we arrived at the station we found that the train would leave in about 20 min, so we lucked out. The next train being two hours later we would have been cutting it close for the dinner, which started at six. We met a man at the station who was quite a leech and a character. He spoke in broken English, told stories about other foreigners, asked many questions about us, told dirty sexist jokes to Josh about Bulgarian women right in front of me and then proceeded to give Josh a roman coin and told him that he was his friend. We escaped the man when the train came shortly. We were on the train for about 10 minutes when we stopped for our first stop. Since neither of us really knew where we were going we were rather anxious and jumpy and ready to jump off the train at any time. All the sudden Josh jumps up and says he thinks we should get off the train. He asked our traveling companions and they said yes, when Josh said in Bulgarian “Dryanovo, right?” So we got off the train. Guess what!! It was the wrong stop! We were just outside of Veliko Turnovo with nothing around but a scrap yard and a small station. We spoke with the conductor and he confirmed that this was the wrong stop. We did not want to wait for 2 hours, so we asked them to call a taxi from Turnovo to take us to Dryanovo, which we knew, was going to cost us. When the taxi arrived about a half hour later we travel to Dryanovo in the taxi. After we arrived in Dryanovo we still had a problem. Were was the party. WE both had read the email that was sent to us but not very carefully! Ooops! I had talked to one of the guys a week earlier about the party and he had explained to me that the party was near the monastery right outside of town next to two hotels. But the problem was, we thought, was that the monastery was the next stop down and the taxi driver had already taken off. We again asked the conductor and even asked him if he knew anything about the Americans in the town. After no luck here we decide to walk the tracks, yes the tracks to the next stop. This walk was about a 45-minute walk, which turned into an hour because we were walking on the tracks, through the country, dodging trains and wondering if we were going to make it. We finally made it to the monastery and the hotels to find out that no one was there! Ahhhh! We were frustrated! We asked some people if there were any other hotels in the area and they replied that there was one 20 minutes down the road. It was totally dark by now. We happened to meet up with two women on the road who led us to the hotel. In the hotel we were about to give up because again no one was there. I asked the receptionist if she knew anything about the Americans and she knew both of them and just happened to have one of the phone numbers. We tried not expecting to get an answer, but we did! It was Seth and he just happened to be home for 5 minutes picking up something for the party that was in Dryanovo! Ahh! Seth called the only taxi to pick us up at the hotel outside of town. After the taxi driver ripped us off we finally found the party. I asked myself “ Was having turkey and seeing these volunteers worth all of this?” We had spent all of our money traveling so we didn’t have any to help out with the costs of the party! The party was a success and I was quite impressed with the amount of Bulgarians that were there, 4 full large tables. The turkey was delicious also! It was fun to be eating off of a real bird that they said was gobbling just a few hours before. We enjoyed our thanksgiving, did you all?

Love,

Kate and Josh