Zitch Eastern Europe

After four months of traveling with one person you begin to play games to avoid the repetition of stories you’ve already heard a thousand times, or just to pass the time until you meet a new group. Our personal favorite is “Zitch Dog.” From the ever so popular How I Met Your Mother, you say “Zitch Dog” whenever you see a dog. We have been playing so long we have stopped keeping score. Sometimes, for jokes, we will say “Zitch Snow” or “Zitch Cat” and now, after about three months of traipsing around Europe, “Zitch Eastern Europe.”

We have been traveling around the war-ridden east side of the continent for a little over a month now and we have yet to feel unsafe. But, the further east we move, the closer we get to the true definition and stereotypical Eastern Europe. 

Stepping onto the train at 10:00 p.m. in Belgrade, Serbia with a very portly conductor either sweating or drenched from the rain (my money is on the former) smoking inside the train should have alerted us for the coming few days. He spoke five words of English: ticket, no, passport, keep and delay. 

With his free hand – the other reserved for his cigarette – he took our $1,300 EuroRail pass and kept it. If you have never had a EuroRail pass this is the most terrifying thing that could happen. The non-refundable, irreplaceable, delicate piece of paper is your life and more important that your passport. So naturally, terror runs through your body when he says: “I keep” and then closes his cabin door. 

In the cabin next to us was a couple—I think—a man with a long beard and a leather vest looking like a biker from Texas, the lady with a backpacking backpack, a cigarette, and a dog (Zitch Dog). The cabins have fold down beds three high on each side, but if you don’t sit on them they fold right back up so be careful not to float to the inside or you may find yourself in a train bed taco. 

One thing we have learned traveling through Eastern Europe is that since the fall of Yugoslavia, each country wanted to be independent, including their train systems, so the best way to travel is by car, or by bus. However, we have this EuroRail pass and we need to use it. Needless to say, the trains are never on time. They may leave the starting location right on the dot but you are hoping for a miracle if it gets to any other destination on time. 

Around 6:30 in the morning, about the time we are to cross the border from Serbia into Bulgaria and get our passports stamped, we look at the clock, and the station we are sitting in. We are four hours behind schedule. 

Apparently it is a tradition over here to take the most valuable possessions a traveler has and just walk away with them because the border police took our passports and just wandered off with them. You have to laugh. After all, there is nothing you can do and now you are left without the only two things that matter in your life right now. This happened twice, exiting Serbia and entering Bulgaria. Don’t worry; I’m not writing this from the 18 hour-long line for a new passport in the U.S. Embassy of Sofia, they gave the passports back.

Just a mere 3 hours and 42 minutes late we pulled into the Sofia train station. Now, you never judge a city by its train station. Stations are often on the outskirts of town and they don’t give the best first impression. The Ljubljana station is surrounded by a McDonalds, a sketchy looking version of Stone Hinge and a bus station when, in reality, its one of the most gorgeous cities. This being said, we try to get to cities before the sun goes down, or comes up. 

We made it to Sofia by lunchtime and walked through a construction zone into the beaming Bulgarian sun, bombarded by taxis, gypsies, and guys selling some sort of “information”—never trust any of this, just keep walking, it happens everywhere. 

Traveling, especially as fast as we move, can be exhausting so breaks are important. We booked four nights in a hotel here in the lovely city of Sofia. We figured we would barely leave for the first day, however, around dinner it was time we searched for something to eat. The hotel sent us down the road to a pizza place where the server, when asked if she spoke English, looked at us and said: “this isn’t going to work,” and walked away…

On the continued quest for dinner a man walked in front of a car that had the right of way. The car slammed on his break and after a load of curse words, a kicked car door, and a fist fight through the car window about 20 yards from where we were standing, I marched my little blonde ass right back to the Ramada Sofia and ordered myself some spaghetti Bolognese from room service. 

I’m a pretty tough traveler, I’ve woken up with a strange man in our train cabin petting my friends head, I’ve had to get conductors to remove said creepy man from the cabin. I have wandered around cities at night and during the day alone, always aware of what is going on around me. I have taken self-defense classes and never ever not know where I am and how to get home, but that got me good. Practically sprinting back to the hotel I almost never left again. But my love of free walking tours dragged me out the door (in the daylight) to show me the true beauty of the city of Sofia. 

Well, we found the stereotypical Eastern European city. I have to say that with all of the crap that Eastern Europe has gone through and the bad rep evidenced by the incident I witnessed on the Lion’s Bridge, it is filled with its own unique charm. The beautiful churches opposite abandoned communist buildings or ruins left over from the past wars add to a part of the world that people are afraid to go. 

On the scoreboard of “Zitch Dogs” it is hard to tell who is winning, but I think that I hit the jackpot in Sofia. No telling what we will find the further east we move, but we’ll start with here and 1-0 of “Zitch Eastern Europe.”