For no apparent reason whatsoever, I've decided to start publishing bits and pieces of a travelogue I wrote during an overland trip from Istanbul to Prague in September 2001. It's wordy and there's not much point, so don't feel compelled to read the whole thing unless you're bored. I'll try to edit out the more boring bits. I last posted a bit of it here, a few graphs of which I'm going to repeat for continuity's sake. Back to the train from Istanbul to Plovdiv, Bulgaria...

I am convinced that one day somebody should write a horror story that involves Eastern European train stations. Like about some guy that wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn't know where he is, the train is stopped at some abandoned border junction, the entire wagon is deserted and all the passport controllers are phantoms or zombies who say things you don’t understand in a threatening or ominous way, and everything's written in Cyrillic.

I shared the ride with a shy Japanese guy who barely spoke English, but made a good effort. He was nice. I never learned his name. It seems wherever you go, there’s always that sole Japanese male traveler.

The train was loud and rocked back and forth pretty hard, and we left the window cracked open in case some bandits tried to pump poison gas into the cabin, which is what you always hear about. At some point (in Bulgaria or Turkey, I'm not sure) a horrendous industrial-strength smell came into the cabin. I wondered if it was the sleeping gas. I would have closed the window but I wanted to air out the cabin -- still, the smell kept getting worse and worse. It was almost unbearable, yet there was no escaping it. It was smelled like a cross between industrial sulfur, rotting food, and something that had been dead for two weeks. The stench was truly horrendous.

At the Bulgarian border, they made us all get out to have our passports stamped, instead of coming around. I thought, My god this is it -- this is what they tell you about. I'm going to come back to the cabin and all my stuff's going to be gone, or I'm not going to be able to figure out which cabin is mind, or the whole train's going to be gone or something horrible and I'll be stuck there at the Turkish-Bulgarian border in the middle of the night, not even wearing socks. That didn't happen. Everything was fine.

The train seemed like it was stopped for hours and hours at the border, and I seem to remember at least four sets of passport officials coming round, which I found strange for a single border crossing. But everything was fine.

I arrived at Plovdiv about 11am.... I found an office upstairs at the train station and tried to get some money on my credit card but the woman just nodded her head. I realized it must be true what they say -- this means "no" in Bulgaria whereas shaking the head side to side means yes. Very disconcerting. They didn't have a credit card machine so I had to change Deutsche marks....

I spent about three hours walking around Plovdiv. My impression was very much like that of Odessa, and not just because it's a medium-sized city where everything's in Cyrillic. In fact it's quite leafy, like Odessa. And there are quite a few historical sites that seem pretty ignored by the locals, and everything's a bit dusty. In the along the main boulevard there are some Roman ruins, including part of a small amphitheater that was apparently uncovered in the 1970s by a freak landslide... There didn't seem to be any banks or bank machines, but at least there were the ruins, and an awful lot of nice antique shops as you climbed up the hill toward the really historic part of the city. Alas, I didn't have room in my bags for any souvenirs. Up the hill at the end of town opposite the train station were some ruins of the ancient city with a view of the town, and some Bulgarian teenagers hanging out.

On the way back down I saw a building with Arabic script on the side. Intrigued, I walked around to try and figure out what it was, and I found a big beer garden filled with young people on a hillside above of a fantastic Roman Theatre with huge columns overlooking the town.

I had a pleasant “chat,” if you could call it that, with a three locals on the train to Sophia (only two hours from Plovdiv). I used a combination of my phrase-book and my Czech (Czech and Bulgarian are both Slavic languages and have about one word in ten in common). I opened my Romania-Bulgaria map, and they pointed out where they were from. Two were from a town near the Turkish border, and the other was from a northwestern town called, no kidding, Montana. I immediately thought of Sam Neill: "I would like to have seen Montana!" When they found out I was American they all wanted to know about Sept. 11. This was indicated repeatedly in sign language. One of the guys made a building in the air, and then he stuck his hands out like an airplane and flew into the building. It was clearly formed as a question but I didn’t know what they were asking, so I didn’t know what to say. They may have been expressing sympathy, or perhaps they just wanted to know if it was really true, or if I had any first-hand news about it. I tried to say yes, it’s true, and said "tragedy" which is the same in Bulgarian as it is in Czech.

Sophia is a city of amazing contrasts. I didn't go into any museums or anything but there are lots of historic things to see, and it seems pretty big, especially considering it's only slightly bigger than Prague, population-wise. There's this incredible Stalinist neo-classical plaza, below which are the ruins of the old city walls from the original Roman outpost, and right next to that, a Turkish mosque. I found the following items on sale in the open-air flea market: daggers, scimitars, forks with fold-out switchblades inside, Nazi items such as a watch and a canteen flask with swastikas, busts of Marx, Lenin, Laurel and Hardy, typical Russian hats, chessboards, painted wooden eggs, icons, medals and pendants, old gramophone records, an antique microscope, lighters, watches, cameras, piles of old Yugoslav dinar, a plastic camera that said on the side "Return to Wal-Mart for quality film developing," huge antique wall clocks that my parents would have liked, two saxophones, a clarinet, and four violins...

Finally my regular email address (tulipcafe.cz) is working again. My test drive of Gmail gave it a thumbs up, but I see little reason to keep using it unless I begin some serious globetrotting.

So I had a bad day, and I came home depressed. Then I had some dinner and listened, once again, to Tony Pierce's cover of the Smiths' "Ask Me." And I cried and cried. I mean in the good way.

In Libya: "Western consumer goods are freely available but not most American brands. Instead, stores sell counterfeits such as Crust toothpaste, a knockoff of Procter & Gamble Co.'s Crest. "

Huh huh. Crust!

I'm now convinced Tripoli's the next Tallinn.

Do you have get the feeling that Lawrence of Arabia was just as bonkers in real life as Peter O'Toole made him out to be in the movie? I do.

"When I wish to say ill of one outside our number, I do it: though there is less of this than was in my diary, since the passage of time seems to have bleached out men's stains. When I wish to praise outsiders, I do it: but our family affairs are our own. We did what we sat out to do, and have satisfaction of that knowledge. The others have liberty some day to put on record their story, one parallel to mine but not mentioning more of me than I of them, for each of us did his job by himself and as he pleased, hardly seeing his friends."

And so on. This passage from the introductory chapter to Seven Pillars of Wisdom doesn't quite capture the essential nuttiness of Lawrence's prose, but unfortunately no one passage does. Taken as a whole, it somehow smacks of utter insanity.

Sometimes I wish I had a regular 9-to-5 job so I could figure out what to do on days like today. It would be easier just to roll out of bed, jump in the shower, and go to the office. At the very least you'd have accomplished something (getting to work, that is) before noon. Today I just can't figure out what to do or where to start.

When I saw this, I yelled out, "Alex, come here!" She came running, but was a little PO'd when she saw what I had to show her. "So???"

Look, it's definitely the most interesting thing that's happened to me so far today. Here am I on a Sunday afternoon, reclining on my sofa, listening to Belle & Sebastian's "If You're Feeling Sinister," drinking tea, and perusing* the introductory chapter to a paperback copy of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. (The intro said the title signifies nothing, although I happen to know it's from the Book of Proverbs.)

I paused to see what Kevin Drum is up to, the guy who writes the Washington Monthly blog. And what should I find but this color-coded map of the United States, charting county-by-county what word is commonly used to describe sweet fizzy liquid in a can: "Pop," "soda," or "coke."

A few things pop out at me:

1. Lake of the Woods, Minnesota: the northernmost point in the contiguous 48 states and that bright green spot up at the top center. From the look of things, people up there have their special word for the stuff that's neither "pop" nor "soda" nor or "coke." But check it out. How many people did they talk to in that county? Precisely three, in fact. Data points, my friend, it's all about data points.

2. More concerning: In eastern Missouri and southwest Illinois, in the counties surrounding the greater St. Louis metropolitain area, there's a solid island of "soda" users wedged firmly betwixt hard-core "coke" country (the former Confederacy) and the great wide Land o' Pop. Why?

3. I can only second what this person said about Alaska: "What a hodge podge. How does anyone communicate up there if they can't agree standard words for everyday items?"

4. Green Bay, Milwaukee and environs. Again, an island of soda. In several counties it's over 80% soda. This is not an urban/rural issue, because Chicago itself is solid pop. Anybody?

5. "Tonic." When I was growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I swear to god I had some friends who said "tonic." Of course they were Irish Catholics (or as my bigoted great-grandmother would have said, "Romans"). This commenter notes: "Tonic is only used by the elderly in New England now, and in some 'hahdcohr' accented regions like East Boston. Cream soda would be tonic too, but no one I know would drink the foul stuff. A real New Englander would knock down a Moxie or a Mad River." Alas, I haven't the foggiest what he/she is talking about, but maybe my dad does.

A large number of this blog's readers -- or more accurately, a large percentage of the readers (data points, my friend...) -- are American expatriates like me, which gives us a unique vantage point from which to analyze this phenom. Moreover, I have two local blogging friends who, owing to their respective backgrounds, are surely poised to shed some light on #2 and #4. I beg you.

* The word "peruse" has always confused me. "To read over in an attentive or leisurely manner." Well, which is it? Attentive, or leisurely? Oddly enough, that pretty much describes exactly what I was doing before I got sidetracked by the map.

Now I'm going to get my loafing ass over to Tulip's Sunday BBQ.