It started most auspiciously Friday night, with my phone ringing quite persistently in French (Louise Attaque on the ringtone), with Karen at the other end. I didn’t answer it because we were sorting out our train compartment with the Bulgarian conductor who refused to answer D’s query about whether he planned to cram another lone soul into our 3 bunk closet. While we were sitting awkwardly on our bottom bunk waiting for the train to pull away and all chances for an annoying 3rd party to invade our sanctuary to arrive, Steph texted to say that Karen had just rung her most persistently, saying that a friend of hers had been told upon arriving back at the airport that people with residence permits were being refused re entry to Turkey unless they stayed out at least a month. *sigh*
As a residence-permit holder en route to Bulgaria for a weekend of blue cheese, good coffee, and pleasingly aloof and eerily calm surroundings, I was haunted by twinges of apprehension, with exit strategies popping in and out of my thoughts as we pulled out of the station. It all sounded like a load of crap but given Turkey’s fickle and everchanging immigration rules, one can never totally dismiss anything wholly as a load of crap. I had fantasies of just continuing on from Bulgarian Sunday night, through the Balkans or Romania, on through to Poland perhaps, or maybe just flying to India for a month, or home. The threat of no return was quite a liberating feeling, though the thought of Lola mewling at the door, starving to death was not exactly what I wanted.
No interloper joined us and our closed door stayed closed as we opened our long-saved bottle of Bulgarian merlot with the iconic Jesus label (ah, a very good friday) and drank from stupidly expensive paper coffee cups grabbed from Migros on the way out. We stood at the open window, squashed in the tiny conpartment, and sipped and watched the edgeof Istanbul fly past in the dusk. The old city walls always impress me at night.
The border crossing at Kapkule at 3am was the usual nonsense of chaotic queus and queue jumpers and musings about the office near the passport office on the side of the tracks labelled ‘Manifesto’. Do we need a manifesto to enter Bulgaria? What would our manifesto say? Lola’s would surely be 30 pages long, spiral bound with a plastic cover and it would read ‘zzzzzziiiiaaaaaaa2332ssssssss’- which is what she wrote last month when she sat on the keyboard and signed in to facebook as zzzzziiiaaaaaaaa–.
No one said anything to me about not being able to return in under 30 days so I assumed my re entry ability would be a surprise.
The train was screechy and rocky and juddered a lot. slept, D. didnt and so was a zombie for most of Saturday in Plovdiv, even after the sturdy coffee in Gusto, even after the fruitless attempt at napping in the apartment we were staying in. The doofus at the bus station was even more out of it (on horse tranquilisers, most likely) so the combined effect resulted in a miracle that we even got out of the country Sunday night. The dialogue went thusly (approximately):
D: Do you speak English?
Bus Doofus: English no, Türkçe! Türkçe!
Me: Tamam, olur, yarn akam stanbul’a gitmek istiyoruz, saat 19:00da etc, etc.
Bus Doofus interrupted me mid sentence to ignore me in favour of a young Bulgarian woman who entered the cramped office to enquire about holiday packages in Crete. They yakked in Bulgarian for a good 15 minutes as I stood there like an idiot with my ticket request half off my tongue. He finally got back to us, and without blinking an eyelid at the fact that two random English-speaking foreigners in the middle of Bulgaria, coming in from god only knows where, are speaking to him in Turkish. He proceeded to fill in our tickets with the wrong times (he wrote 15:30, which was the time we bought the tickets not the actual scheduled bus time) and he painstakingly copied down D’s name from his passport as Doudslag Shutte and me as Mar Yanne and adamantly insisted that the bus only took 6 hours from Plovdiv to Istanbul (having rolled in to Alibeyköy at 3am, I can attest to the fact that this is not true). I carefully altered the 15:30 on the tickets to look like 19:00, using the Gusto waiter’s apron pen, and hoped that he had actually written our names down on a real reservation sheet and not the imaginary 15:30 one and that the immigration officials wouldn’t question why a certain Douglas Schutte was riding in the place of poor, hapless, Doudslag Shutte. *sigh*
Aside from a lot of stupidity abounding on all sides, it was a good weekend, very calm, unnaturally calm, with lovely illy coffees in sidewalk cafes and lots of things doused in cheese sauce or wrapped in bacon. We stocked up on Lavazza espresso at the supermarket, and some french truffles rolled in dark cocoa, and half price toothpaste and blue cheese dressing. I ate gorgeous flaky pastries filled with subtle fresh vanilla cream and tiramisu ice cream dusted with cocoa and laced with liqueur. We slept. We walked until my feet blistered and my rainbow felt bag snapped its braided rainbow felt strap. We drank Kamenitza beers in the courtyard of the hostel and marvelled at the silence.
A side note: At the Turkish customs area on our way back, which is after the long, tedious procession of passport points and pointless waiting periods, we had to haul our bags out of the bus and place them onto long rows of benches, in the open air. A lovely golden lab sniffer dog wagged by happily and people threw bits of Alpella chocolate cake at him and he was happy to oblige. We stood by our open bags, waiting. Then a random man in jeans and wool jacket came by and started poking around in our bright yellow Billa supermarket bag. He looked up and asked Doudslag in Turkish if it was his. Doudslag nodded and the man proceeded to poke around in our backpack wordlessly then went away. He had no badge or customs uniform and hadn’t told us to move on or that we were fine to return to the bus. We waited awkwardly for a few moments before hoisting our bags and going back to the bus, hoping that we wouldn’t have border police running after us with guns for leaving a search early.
We got home at 3am after taking a taxi from Alibeyköy, and I fell asleep after some effort, with Lola enthusiastically marching all over my exhausted body, purring gleefully at our return. She then woke me again at 7am with the most devastatingly loud litterbox scratching. I am tired. It’s a beautiful day though. Pity about that whole working for a living nonsense- I almost wish I had been banned from entering Turkey for 30 days.
