A Saturday Picnic

Ding, ding, dong. Ding, ding, dong. Ding, ding, dong. Ding, ding, dong. It’s 6:30 and the church bell on the corner is ringing as I write. I’ve just come back from a Saturday picnic as the guest of Shirley’s host family. This picnic was a dramatic pageant so I suppose I should take a moment and write down the order of the play.

As in any good drama I should introduce the characters. Shirley’s host mother and grandmother (baba) live near the center of our new town Sapareva Banya. They have a delightful older home surrounded by flowers, a full vegetable garden, and several fruit trees. There is also a dog and a goat at the house but they don’t figure into this story.

The husband and son of the host mother have returned today for the father’s birthday. Normally this father and son live in another Bulgarian town where they work and they come home when they can.

The married daughter is also here now with her husband and daughters age five. Most of the year they live in Italy but they return to Sapareva Banya for one or two months each summer. Due to the local economy, it is common for parts of families to live outside Bulgaria wherever they can find jobs. Almost everyone we meet has a family member in the U.S. or a European country.

There is also a nephew living here during the week and returning home to Sophia on the weekend. He is volunteering his time and labor for three months to help build a monastery up on a hill several miles from town. There are many monasteries in Bulgaria; this district alone has twenty-two. All here belong to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which is very similar to the Greek Orthodox Church. The nephew is currently part of the household but he has left for a day trip to Greece, three hours away, so he doesn’t play a part in our play.

So far we have mother, grandmother, father, son, married daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter and a nephew and, of course, there is Shirley who is now a member of the household and part of our cast. We can take out the grandmother who stays home with the dog and goat and the nephew who is off to Greece for the day. But now add me in as the husband of a household member and thus I am now part of this extended family. And of course we’ve added Leslie, another Peace Corps trainee, who is staying with a host family a block away. For good measure throw in a nine-year-old girl, a neighbor, who has had a year of English in school and who might be useful. Now the cast is up to ten and the small family car can’t hold us all. So let’s add a friend who owns a van and a female friend. So now we have our main cast of characters.

Act One begins with preparations. A trip to the market finds fresh tomatoes, chili peppers and watermelon, as well as cheese. The home garden contributes cucumbers picked this morning. Grandmother butchered a pig last winter so there is pork. The female friend brings fresh brown eggs, laid by her chickens just today. Lastly there is a big bottle of beer and an equally large rakia, homemade brandy made from grapes from one of the local gardens.

Act Two arrives with the van and we all pile in. There is only a front seat so everyone else in the back has a short stool or kindergarten-sized chairs. Three in the front and nine in the back we bounce up the dirt road which quickly becomes mountain steep. A sudden lurch when the driver of the antique van changes to a lower gear sends my little chair rocking backwards and I go flying into the lap of the married daughter. The van is bouncing uphill so steeply that, for seconds that seem like minutes, I cannot get enough balance to extricate myself from a lap where I don’t belong. Everyone is laughing joyously and I cannot get up. Another twenty minutes of bouncing, lurching, and exceedingly tight turns on the one lane mountain road brings us to a small Orthodox monastery high in the forest overlooking Sapareva Banya. Fifteen cars are already here. This is a favorite, cool picnic site for families on a warm August Saturday.

Act Three is eating and talking, always the longest act in a play on Bulgarian life. Shopska salad is a traditional dish, primarily tomatoes, cucumbers, and oil is served on several small plates around the large table. Other plates hold fresh yellow cheese and little slices of salami. This will hold us for an hour or more. We don’t use individual plates; rather everyone uses their own fork to take a slice of tomato or cheese whenever we want one. Of course, the rakia and the beer come out and there are frequent rounds of “nazdrave” (cheers). There is coke and Fanta for the children. And of course we talk. With a family this size there is always talk. For Shirley and me, our Bulgarian is limited yet but we still enter in to practice what we know. Shirley has brought some copies of Arizona Highways for show and tell and they make great conversation starters. People are amazed to see cactus 15’ high. When the collective limited Bulgarian and English fail, the married daughter throws in some Italian, which I can sometimes pick up with my limited Spanish. We’re multi-lingual and having a good time.

In a pause in the continual eating, drinking and talking, the nine year old takes us on a tour of the monastery chapel. At the doorway we purchase thin candles to light for twenty stotinki (cents). Upon entering the chapel she crosses herself in the Orthodox manner, up, down, right left. The right and left are reversed from the Catholic version. She then goes to the first two icons and bends over and kisses them on the glass. The chapel has icons of Jesus and Mary but also many saints. Prominently displayed is an icon of Saint Stefan, after whom this monastery is named.

Then Act Three continues with more eating of salad, cheese, and salami and the drinking of more beer and rakia. After an hour of salad, the meat arrives hot off the grill. Grandmother’s butchered pig is now ground pork patties, pork steaks, and strips of grilled pork fat, like pork cracklin’s but not quite as crisp. It tastes like the fat part of excellent thick-sliced bacon. I love the taste and eat more than I probably should while my arteries harden from the grease. Lots of talking, lots of eating, several rounds of nazdrave follow for the next two hours. Frequently other people come up to the table, friends and neighbors from Sapareva Banya. I’m introduced to more people than I can ever remember. Some of them speak some English. This one lived seven years in Chicago. That one has a daughter in New Jersey. Bulgarian people are well aware of the world. Many have traveled out of the country or know someone who has.

Act Four is music. A priest from the monastery has an operatic voice. He comes around to various picnicking groups and bursts into song. Shirley’s host mother and others sing along. Of course I don’t know the songs but they sound like folk songs to me. The priest sings loudly and wonderfully. Someone else comes along with and accordion and then someone has a guitar. The priest is now a trio and these three troubadours saunter all over the monastery grounds serenading different groups and people enthusiastically join in. When I meet the priest, he looks about fifty, has a short beard, and is dressed in a black shirt and pants. There is no clerical collar or anything else to indicate his station. He tells me, in Bulgarian, that he has a daughter in Florida. I had forgotten that most Orthodox priests can be married.

After almost four hours it’s time to close the curtain on our little pageant. We have eaten, talked, sung, and drunk enough. It’s back to van and the little chairs and stools in the back and we bounce back down the mountain. It has been a perfect Saturday picnic on a beautiful August afternoon.

As a postscript, Shirley and I are trying to learn to eat in the Bulgarian manner. As Americans, we are used to sitting down to dinner and then eating from start to finish. Yes, we can carry on conversations while we eat but basically we keep on eating from one course to the next and the actual meal takes 30 minutes or less unless there is lots of wine. Now if we ate that way (continuously) at a four-hour Bulgarian dinner we would soon be fatter than grandmother’s butchered pig. Our Bulgarian families eat two or three bites of tomato or cucumber and then talk for five minutes or more and then take a few more bites. Even the main course goes this way and dinner lasts for hours. In the end no one has eaten more than one would at an American meal and maybe even less. There are certainly fewer overweight people here than in America. Shirley and I will have to alter our habits.

Picnics are wonderful and life is good.



The world is a book. Those who do not travel read only one page.
Saint Augustine