Where am I this month? Good question because now that I'm on month 5 of the Race I'm having a hard time remembering where I'm located. But after checking with my team to make sure, I'm in Bulgaria!
Last week the squad and I left Albania at about 8:30pm. After a round of goodbyes to George, our ministry contact from that month, we headed out. Soon after hitting the road some of us tried to sleep because it was going to be an all night bus ride to our new destination. I was one of the few lucky ones that had a their own seat so I was able to sleep in no time. However I didn't sleep thought the night because every time we came to a boarder we had to get our passport checked leaving a country, drive a few feet, then get them checked again to enter a new one. A few times I would wake up and find myself staring into the face of a boarder crossing police officer…It made waking up a bit more interesting. By the time the sun rose we had traveled from Albania through Kosovo and Macedonia to get to Bulgaria. Our squad spent a few days on Sofia, Bulgaria (the capital) before heading on to our ministry site in Sevlievo (the English way of spelling it) -also known as- Sevlijevo (the Bulgarian way of spelling it).
To get to our new ministry we took the train! We caught our first train at about 7:45am on the 3rd. Now trying to figure out where we had to get off in a language that we don't understand with letters that are not Latin based, without anyone announcing what station we are at, made life a bit interesting. Praise the Lord there was another passenger who spoke English and knew what time we had to get off (also thankful that European trains are very punctual). We were told that our stop was in about 4 hours…but our contact had said that the trip should have been only 2.5 hours. After calling our contact we discovered that our trip would have taken 2.5 hours had we taken the bus rather than the train…so now our trip was going to be almost 12 hours.
We were not upset about that in the least because we were all excited to ride the train, see the view – which is gorgeous, make movie references to our experiences from Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and a few others, and we got to sleep. So our first train we rode with two other teams. When we got off the train we arrived at the smallest train station I had ever seen but 10 minutes later we were on another train…the smallest one I had ever seen, only 2 cars. Then after a few hours we got off at a college city station where we had lunch by the station at an outdoor restaurant (felt like a picnic) where we chilled for about 3 hours. Our third and final train was only a 30 ride. And our contact Marty met us at the station.
So where does the Sea come in? Well, while we were on our last train we saw cliffs at the top of some of the mountains. On our way to the village Marty was telling us that the area we are now living and working in was at one point a sea. Apparently ancient ship ties can still be found on the top of the cliffs! So cool to think that we are living in an area that was once a sea. As to what we will be doing you'll have to keep reading my blogs to see 🙂
