to Bulgaria
I’ve been trying to decide if I wanted to write about this.
I mean, of course I want to, but the question is, should I?
Well, obviously I’ve decided to write, so I guess we’ll find out.
There have been some issues regarding my legal status here in Turkey. Not only mine, but 7 other exchange students as well. Paper work wasn’t filed on time, miscommunication occurred, and frankly, the exchange students were just along for the frustrating ride. We sat by helplessly waiting for our residency permits, forced to be dependent on Rotary. This would have been fine, it should have been fine, but with what seemed to be no progress due to the lack of communication and still months without legal status, we had to assume there were issues. Either that, or no one was doing anything to fix the problem.
The second seemed more likely to us.
This has been going on for a while, but thankfully I can finally say that we will be getting our permits on Friday.
After pushing and pushing from the exchange students, our host parents, and even our sponsor clubs in other countries, Rotary came up with a plan. We would go to Bulgaria, obtain a new Turkish visa (one that’s not expired), come back and reapply for our residency permits. It was the solution we had been talking about for months.
On Tuesday afternoon, eight of us received a text. We were to meet at Dolmabahçe Palace at 1:30 am that night to leave for Bulgaria. I was at school when I received the text and as soon as I got out, I called my host mom and we scrambled to figure out which bus I should get on. I wasn’t about to take an 18 hour bus ride in my school uniform. Some people didn’t even get a chance to go home. This is a big city and some of us live pretty far out. If we had known sooner, maybe we could have packed clothes with us and stayed in the city. I, however, went home and took the bus to where my host family was on the European side. Laura and I stayed at my host grandmother’s house until it was time to go to the meeting point. The taksi we took smelled heavily of wine and smoke. The smoke was normal but we weren’t so sure about the wine. Regardless, we made it there safely and spoke plenty of Turkish along the way.
That’s what’s great about taking taksis. Sometimes, the drivers are just so pumped to talk to you and you get to see how long you can go before they realize you’re not a Turk. My favorite was the night I took a taksi from Ulus to the metrobus when I was going to meet up with Alara. I got in the cab and said, good evening, per usual. The driver knew I wasn’t Turkish because my host mom had called the taksi for me and she informed him of my lack of Turkish language. Just lookin’ out for me. :) He proceeded to ask so many questions and laughed and joked and smiled all the way there. How do you like Turkey? Man, I really want to go to America! English is pretty hard. What do you think of Turkish? Whoa! There’s a lot of traffic over here. I will go fast! Hahaha. He was so enthusiastic about it all. And it was a very fun ride for me. I wish I had the numbers of specific drivers and I could just call them every time I needed a cab. A lot of people are afraid of taksis, and I understand why. It’s important to be careful regardless of what city you’re in. There are countless horror stories and I’ve been told several as a means of encouraging me to be cautious. But sometimes, I just have really good cab experiences. And it just completely contradicts Istanbul’s sometimes sketchy reputation. Which makes me smile. :)
Anyway, Laura and I arrived at Dolmabahçe, got on the bus, and we were off. We all seemed to fall asleep pretty quickly after that. It was fairly late after all. I remember waking up around 4:30 due to the rumbling of the bus on a rocky road. A rocky dirt road? I wondered where we were. The bus stopped. I looked out the front windshield and out the darkness and the bushes sprung several soldiers carrying very large guns and running toward the bus on a mission. One might ask, “where were yall?” but I still don’t have a definite answer to that question. We weren’t really told much of anything. There was a lot of softly spoken Turkish throughout our trip. Sometimes we tried to make out what they were saying but it was easier to just trust them. I can assume that we were at a border. Most likely, the border to Greece. Our sole Rotarian accompanying us was told he could enter Bulgaria through Greece with his passport but not through Turkey. So, we tried to enter Greece, except… he couldn’t get in to that country either. We turned around after about 30 minutes of sitting in the freezing cold bus (the guards had us turn it off as they were doing their search). I tried to go back to sleep, but the bus was so cold and the road was not exactly smooth. We stopped at a gas station and the driver and our Rotarian asked for directions. Apparently, we were lost. But most of us were too sleepy to care that much. We joked about making a fire on the bus to replace the cruddy heating system. (It really wasn’t bad, it just took a while for it to get going). The Brazilian would serve as firewood because of the flare in her personality and culture. In the end, we decided that would cause more of an explosion or fireworks and that’d just be too dangerous for our confined space, so it didn’t happen. We laughed, and went back to sleep.
We woke up around 9:00 am that morning. The bus was stopped. It was light outside. We looked around. It was clear by the Turkish flag that we were still in Turkey, but Bulgaria was now in sight.
As it turns out, we had been stopped at the border of Turkey and Bulgaria since 6 am. Something was wrong. The driver was told he had to pay a fine, but he didn’t have any money. This is what we gathered since no one was really talking to us. We had our passports stamped and as predicted, our Rotarian was not permitted entrance in to Bulgaria. After waiting a few hours, changing our money to the Bulgarian lev, and being told Matt would not be able to enter either, there was nothing else to do but continue on to Sofia, Bulgaria.
So we crossed the border in to Bulgaria without a Rotarian. We were down to 7 exchange students and the bus driver.
The next part of our trip was cool. We stopped at a gas station and found things not found in Turkey. Peanut M&Ms, 5 gum, real ham sandwiches, and Dr. Pepper. It was like we stepped back in America for 15 minutes. Except for the fact that no one spoke English. Or Turkish for that matter. However, that did not stop us from buy all those goodies and enjoying them for the remainder of our trip.
Before we got to Sofia, we drove through what, to me, was a sort of winter wonderland. There wasn’t a ton of snow on the ground, but the trees around us were white with snow. I had never seen white trees before. Not unless they had been spray-painted in Hobby Lobby or something.
We called it Narnia. We had to pass through Narnia to get to Sofia.
When we arrived in Sofia, we had to find the Turkish consulate. The search was on as we kept our eyes peeled for the Turkish flag. When we finally found it, we were pretty late for our appointment. We parked the bus and ran over to the security guy in front of the seemingly closed consulate. We asked in Turkish if he knew Turkish, we asked in English if he knew English… neither. Hmph. Now we had to figure out how to tell him we have an appointment and we have to get inside. Thankfully, right before we panicked, a man opened the consulate doors and waved us inside. We scurried inside and out of the cold. Did I mention it was 35 degrees Fahrenheit outside?
We sat down on old brown couches in the empty consulate. They had stayed open only because they knew we were coming. They handed us forms for our new visas and we began to fill them out. Amanda helped Leo translate the English to Brazilian Portuguese and we helped Chiami. We soon realized that we didn’t even know the answers to most of these questions… These were things Rotary was supposed to take care of. And we had no idea. We left the ones we didn’t know blank. The man working at the consulate came to see if we were finished. We told him we didn’t know the answers to certain questions and he said to just leave them. Then, he brought out the amount of money we owed for the visas. Umm, we didn’t have money? Nobody told us to bring money. Especially not money for visas Rotary was supposed to be paying for. We called our long lost Rotarian. It seemed we had two choices: pay the money or stay in Bulgaria. Three of us drained our accounts withdrawing 200 plus leva. We got our visas. And then, we treated our tired and frustrated selves to a nice Bulgarian dinner.
The bus driver was able to sleep a little, too.
A little nervous by the bus driver’s lack of sleep, we got back on the bus and made our way back to the border. It was dark. Most of us fell asleep before we got there. Crossing back over to Turkey was much easier than coming to Bulgaria. We talked to the guards who stamped our passports for the last time and jumped back in the bus and continued on our way. We stopped shortly after crossing the border to pick up another driver. Our current driver hadn’t slept in nearly two days, so it was very important that another come take his place. And we continued.
We all fell asleep.
Around 2 am, however, we received a phone call. It was one of the Rotarians. He told us to call our host parents cause they would need to take us home. Either that, or we take a taksi.
A taksi at 4 am? (which is when we’d get home)
Isn’t that a little dangerous//expensive? Again, we did not bring money cause we weren’t told anything.
And we were supposed to call our families at 2 am on a school night? They wouldn’t even be awake. How could they be expected to drive all over town to come get us? No, Rotary was going to take us home like they originally promised. I called my Rotary counselor. We got rides home, from Rotary. Ya, that’s what I thought.
I ended up getting home around 5 am. Obviously, I didn’t go to school the next day. I stayed home, skyped my mom, and told her the whole story. It freaked her out a little. Especially since she had called me while I was on my way to Bulgaria after watching a documentary on the sex slave trade in Turkey. I told her she shouldn’t watch that stuff.
I’m not going to fully express my feelings on this event. It’s over now. And tomorrow is the day I will finally obtain my permit. (hopefully).
What an experience. :)
