Ping-Pong Park

My glorious return to Sofia was mostly comprised of three things:

Games, Baths, and Food

So be prepared for a lot mention of each of those things in this post.

It was a really weird feeling when I arrived back in Sofia after two and a half months of bouncing around the Balkans. I got off my bus and knew exactly where I was going, I had the correct currency with me, and getting back to the apartment was just so familiar. When I arrived at the apartment Mr. Toad let me in and I finally got to open my Christmas stocking that my mother had sent back in December. It had arrived the day I left Sofia and so I was now finally opening it on March 16^th. The rest of the day consisted of chatting with Mr. Toad and Portia, playing Carcassonne & cribbage and eating Indian food and drinking wine. I unpacked and repacked my bag for Veliko Tarnovo, taking all of my winter gear and storing it away in the closet as I would not be needing it again for several more months and headed out with Mr. Toad the next morning.

After our weekend in Veliko Tarnovo we returned to Sofia. When we arrived back at the apartment Portia was busy making up a delicious meal of burritos. There are few things as wonderful in this world as entering a room where someone is making you food. That evening I began my yearly weeklong ritual of shaving my face, rocking different ridiculous facial hair everyday for a week.

Apparently it had snowed a few days before I arrived back in Sofia, but you wouldn’t know it based on the weather during my stay, with temperatures getting up to 22˚C (72˚F) multiple days, and with the skies staying mostly clear during my whole stay. This wonderful weather was part of what prompted Mr. Toad and I to head out to a nearby outdoor ping-pong table nearly every day we were in town together, and play for hours on end. These outdoor tables are all over Sofia and some, such as the one that we used, were in very odd locations. The place we played wasn’t really a park so much as a patch of land outside of an apartment building. Outdoor ping-pong adds a couple different elements to the game that you don’t get with an indoor table. One, is the uneven ground and the other even more game-changing element is the wind, which required you to shoot off the table at times so that the wind would bring it back on.

When we weren’t playing ping-pong and Portia was at work, that usually meant that Mr. Toad and I were playing Carcassonne, or occasionally cards, however my time back in Sofia also consisted of having to take care of some real world things. While I was back I received my new debit card in the mail from my mother, as the card I had was set to expire at the end of the month. It took a while to actually activate it.  I tried a couple different applications to call my bank and then received an error message when I finally got through. My debit card wasn’t the only financial situation that I had to address while I was back. There was also the matter of my taxes.  It was weird not doing my taxes until mid-March. Most years I am so anxious to get my refund that I file my taxes within the first week or two of January.

With my responsibilities taken care of there was something I had been thinking of for the past few weeks that I was quite excited to do now that I was back in a fully stocked kitchen, completely at my disposal. When Mr. Toad left to go to a Bulgarian lesson in the afternoon of movie night, I headed down to the store for supplies. I arrived back and began to cook. I had perfect timing as I pulled the cinnamon rolls I had been dreaming about for nights on end out of the oven minutes before it was time to head out. The cinnamon rolls were a big hit at movie night, but I don’t think anyone enjoyed them quite as much as I did. I’m not sure why I had never made cinnamon rolls from scratch before, but I will certainly be doing it plenty of times again. Every month there is a different theme for movie night and March was movies with strong female leads, so we watched First Wives Club. When we were leaving, Portia called a cab. When the cab driver pulled up it was one of the weirdest experiences that I have had taking a taxi, as the driver was really concerned with what was in my pan and seemed like she was going to refuse to take me until she saw that it was cinnamon rolls and then she was fine with it. I don’t know what she thought was in there, but her concern seemed to stem from a deep desire for cleanliness, with her cab being by far the cleanest cab I had ever been in.

On Friday night we were all invited over to one of Portia’s coworker’s apartments for a small get together. Mr. Toad was feeling a little under the weather, so he stayed home while Portia and I went out. We stopped off and picked up some wine before we arrived and spent the evening drinking, eating, playing Cards Against Humanity for a little while and then watching some CNN as Trump whined and blamed the democrats for the fact that he couldn’t get the bill shredding health care reform through a republican controlled congress.

On Saturday Mr. Toad and Portia left to go away for the evening with Gordon and Fred (our hosts from the evening before). So I had the place to myself until I left to board my bus to Belgrade the next morning. I made some pasta for dinner and then spent the evening reading in the tub with some snacks and drinks.

The next morning I woke up and gathered all of my things together, checked that I had everything I needed, and then made my way to the bus station, dropping my key off in the mailbox on my way out. I took the subway out to the bus station and went to the spot where the bus was supposed to leave from. I arrived there about 15 minutes before the bus was scheduled to depart. A couple minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave it still hadn’t arrived so I went into the ticket office and asked about it, and was told the bus had left an hour before. The woman at the window then came around from behind the desk and went to the clock on the wall and changed the time an hour forward. That’s when I realized that daylight savings time had begun the night before and that I was not leaving town that day. I headed back to the apartment, coming across this random release of a bunch of balloons along the way.

When I arrived back at the apartment I sat outside watching Netflix on the wifi that extended out from the apartment to the entryway below. Finally one of the neighbors left the building and I was able to get through the first security door to the mailbox, where I used my pen to fish out the keys and reenter the apartment.

I ended up staying in Sofia for several more days before leaving on Friday. Portia and Mr. Toad returned on Sunday night, surprised to find me still there and stayed until Tuesday, when they left to fly to Belgrade for a school thing, where I would meet them a few days later. While they were gone I spent most of my evenings enjoying the fact that I had access to a bathtub and nobody to fight for it. A book, a bath, some wine, and some snacks of fruits and chocolates were how I closed out my evenings while home alone. It was delightful.

Since I was still in town on Tuesday I ended up getting to attend a another movie night. This time the Movie was Thelma and Louise, which we watched while eating the customary movie night pizza. Watching the end of the movie was interesting, because not everyone had seen the movie and those that hadn’t had somehow managed to also avoid seeing any pop culture references to the movie, so I got to watch the end of Thelma and Louise with people who didn’t know how that movie ends, something I never thought I would experience. Not quite as fun, but similar to if I got to watch the original Star Wars trilogy with somebody who doesn’t know who Luke Skywalker’s father is (don’t worry, I won’t spoil the surprise if you don’t know, but if you don’t, please invite me over so we can watch it together).

One day while in town after Mr. Toad and Portia had left I decided to go out for a run. I took a roundabout route down to the nearby park and once I had run around the perimeter of the park for a little while I began to switch up between running and walking. I had been to the park before, but had never walked all of the way around it and had apparently never really looked at it on a map either because I really didn’t realize just how big this park was. Well over an hour later I finally had gone around the whole park and headed back to the apartment stopping on the way to pick up some strawberries. When I got back to the apartment I made my first of what would end up being several strawberry lime slushies. It was delicious.

Speaking of delicious being back in Sofia I of course had to return to my favorite restaurant Hadjidraganovite Izbi. I met Mr. Toad there one evening during my first week back in town and we enjoyed another absolutely incredible meal. I once again ordered the Lamb Hlebnitca (lamb soup in a bread bowl) and the trout on fire, but I changed out my salad from last time for a Salata “Bulgare” (a shopska salad with hot pepper, fried zucchini, roasted red pepper, an eggplant puree, and fresh cheese), I swapped out my bread and cheese appetizer for Nevrozna Raziadka (salt-free cheese with chili paste, walnut oil, and toast), and this time I got the Chop Pork with seasonal garnish for my main dish, along with a bottle of wine. Just as with my first visit I wondered if I was in heaven as I savored every bite of this incredible meal.

Cinnamon rolls weren’t the only thing that I was excited to cook upon my return to Sofia and the fully functioning kitchen there. Here are a few of the other things that I cooked up while in town. I made some pizza, making the dough from scratch and topping it with pesto, olives, sausage, onion, mozzarella, feta, and tomato, which I accompanied with some cabbage salad. I made pasta with garlic, basil, onion, tomato, gouda cheese, and eggs. I made a giant caprese sandwich with a large loaf of French bread with balsamic vinegar and olive oil drizzle, fresh basil, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella that I broiled in the oven.

In addition to these simple meals I cooked up two feasts for my lovely hosts and myself. The first feast consisted of deviled eggs, cucumber salad, homemade potato chips seasoned with red wine vinegar and salt, slices of baguette dipped in olive oil and fried before being drizzled with balsamic vinegar and topped with fresh basil, mozzarella, and tomato, with a main dish of paninis with curried chicken, spinach, onion, pineapple, and mayo, and mojitos (made with crème de menthe as a substitute for mint, which I was unable to find at the grocery store). For my second feast I once again made some potato chips seasoned with red wine vinegar and salt, and once again I crisped up some baguette slices that I had dipped in olive oil, but instead of making them into little caprese bites, this time I served them as they were along with 5 different cream cheese dips that I made (curry, lemon pepper, olive tapenade, pesto, and red pepper), the main course for the feast was a scramble with bell peppers, onion, sausage, and of course eggs.

Food is awesome.