The sky is a washed out blue, a warm buzzing hovers over the acacia bushes, and the cafes are plentiful. Each tiny cafe is the natural territory of a handful of friends, who can be spotted at their chosen establishment a good part of the day, more so in the evening, and well into the starry night. These men and woman charge the air around them with whorls of cigarette smoke and the smell of homemade brandy. There must be a never-ending supply of everything they need, including shampoo, right in the café, though I doubt they purchase much. Here are people who understand the meaning of social capital.
An arm's reach across the table from behind Danila's glasses, steadiness radiates out of twin black holes into pools of yellow-green-blue-grey. Is it actually possible to float like this, through the length of the summer, our first together, our first out of college, through three Balkan nations heeding only our hearts and the hints carried in the breeze?
Every eight seconds the geyser along the main road spits a steamy stream twenty meters high against blue-green mountain hills, even reaching into the bit of empty sky above them. Nearby is a playground, because as Danila put it "Why shouldn't there be?" What a sight it must be when children are there, swinging, chasing and jumping all around the geyser spewing and spewing as if a giant whale heaved beneath the grass.
The sea of minerals undulating beneath the ground here is the reason we are in Sapareva Banya, this small town in the foothills of the Rila Mountains. An escapade in high altitudes left Danila and I rattled and sick, so that back in the margins of civilization nearby the famous Rila Monastery we set to the aimless traveler's task of choosing whereto next.
Over a coffee and a map we spot Sapareva Banya and get to thinking that a town named after its banya- meaning bathhouse- will be the perfect place to rest overly ambitious spirits. Reading with resistance our guidebook's description of the banya itself as an "uninspiring cement structure from Soviet days" perches the small dot upon a column of certainty, and we catch the next bus there.
And so our first evening in Sapareva Banya Danila and I drag our stiff limbs half-a-mile from our eight-Lev, or cappuccino-and-a-half, apartment, down the road and away from the boastful geyser to the banya.
The denizens of the nearby café watch our passage without missing a word of the conversation that seems to swirl about their heads like intelligent fireflies. Songbirds home in treetops are similar to these brandied Bulgarian in their gratuitous indifference to visitors exhibiting curious behavior.
