Workaway in Bulgaria

       I arrived in Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia, with absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. I was about to begin my first workaway job on a small farm in a tiny Bulgarian village about an hour outside the city. For those who don’t know, workaway is a website where travelers can sign up to do work exchanges anywhere in the world—usually working 5-6 hours a day in exchange for free food and lodging. I had never done it before but I had heard good things about it from several other travelers, and without having any source of income I knew I would have to do something like this to continue travelling. Apart from raising ducks in high school I had never done any sort of farm work, and knowing how to grow my own food seemed like a good skill to learn. So I sent out several emails to workaway hosts in interesting places like Bulgaria and accepted the first one to reply, without really bothering to find out any more details about where I’d be, what I’d be doing, or who I’d be with. I figured that like everything else in this trip so far, it would work out and be a good time. And I was right.

                Before I started my workaway, I spent one night in Sofia. The hostel I stayed at was great and served dinner, breakfast, and a beer included in the 6 euro price for a night in a dorm. I didn’t even leave the hostel that night because it was so great; I just hung out in the common room and drank beer with some Australian dudes who were staying there. The next morning I did get a bit of a chance to explore the city though, and walked around for a few hours before getting a bus to Samokov, where I would meet my new workaway family.

                Kevin and Tina picked me up from the bus stop in Samokov. They are an English couple who moved from Kent, England to the tiny village of Alino, Bulgaria, a few years ago in search of a new lifestyle. Getting to know them over the following two weeks was a lot of fun; they are super interesting people with a lot of great knowledge to share, and once I got used to their British humor they were downright hilarious. They went from driving a Ferrari around the fanciest parts of London to providing for themselves by raising animals, selling homegrown produce at farmers markets, and making just enough cash to get by—a lifestyle change that many people would cringe at, but one that gave them a lot of my respect. In their former life they had all the material wealth anyone could ask for, and though our society may view that as the symbol of success, they found themselves constantly stressed and never having the time to enjoy the things that they had earned enough money to buy. So, instead of continuing that live-to-work materialistic lifestyle, they got up and moved to Bulgaria, bought a house with a bit of land to grow their own crops and raise animals, and opted for the work-to-live lifestyle instead. I found their story really inspiring, and their plans to turn the barn into a small craft brewery were quite intriguing—that’s something I could visualize myself doing at some point in life.

                Now Kevin and Tina have goats, pigs, chickens, ducks, rabbits, dogs, and a cat on their little farm. They sell their produce at the Sofia farmer’s market when it’s in season and delicious homemade jam, eggs, and hummus all year round.  When I arrived at the farm I was greeted by 4 newborn baby goats that looked like adorable little awkwardly long-legged puppies. There was also a batch of eggs in the incubator just about to hatch as springtime was beginning. I watched as crack spread further and further across an egg until a little wing popped out with a chick’s tiny beak soon to follow, and I watched until the little ball of baby chicken, still covered in slimy egg goo, took its first steps and fell immediately on its face.

Within my first full day there I had witnessed the amazing miracle of birth but also the unfortunate reality that animals die. Out of the 5 or so chicks that hatched only 1 survived, out of the 4 baby goats only 3 survived, and another goat had stillborn babies a few days later. That’s life though, and if they had been in the wild it would have been a far lower success rate. As humans we instinctually feel really sad when a baby animal dies because humans only have at most a couple of babies throughout their lifetime so it’s a really big deal when one dies. Goats and chickens have far more babies throughout their lifetimes though, so if every baby goat survived to a reproductive age, our world would be overrun by goats and everything would be covered in goat shit. So, though sad, it is a necessary part of life. Since this is a travel blog and not an ecology lesson, you can look up r-selection and k-selection on Wikipedia if you want to feel better about the fact that baby animals die.

To add to the death toll on my first day, we also had to slaughter a pig that somebody had purchased for a big pig roast feast. This wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, because, though gross, I knew that this pig was raised organically with a lot more care and freedom than most pigs, and this is a necessary step in the acquisition of bacon. Most people don’t think about the little piggy that their bacon comes from when they put it on the stove, but I think it’s good to understand the whole food cycle. The pig was killed painlessly and bled out. We then burned the hair off and cleaned the skin and from there it was basically like dissecting things in biology class. We slit the abdominal cavity to remove the organs. The intestines, stomach, and lungs went to the dogs and we took the heart and liver, and later the brain, inside to eat. I hadn’t tried liver since I was scarred for life after eating the most disgusting chopped liver at my grandma’s house when I was about ten years old, and I had never tried heart before, and they were both amazing. The heart was like the most tender and juicy steak, bursting with flavor, and the fresh liver was equally delicious. It was the second time this year that I was absolutely amazed at how delicious organs are (haggis was the first). The brain wasn’t my favorite, but if butter makes you fat then eating brain should make you smarter, right?

Luckily that was the last of the animal deaths and for the rest of my stay I had a pleasant death-free (although shit-filled) farm experience. My job the next day was to clean the pig pen, which had been frozen all winter but was finally thawing. When I say “it” had been frozen, I mean all of the pigs’ shit from the entire winter had been frozen. And if you’ve ever had pigs, you’ll know that they shit quite a lot. After an hour or two of heavy shoveling and plugging my nose, I was ready for a shower. Though shitty (heh heh, get it?), it was a satisfying feeling to look at the pig pen and know that I had given these pigs a nice place to live (and something clean to shit all over). It’s kind of like taking care of your baby, if your baby were to be a pig.

For the next few days I helped out with less smelly tasks like painting some of the rooms in Kevin and Tina’s house. I like painting so that wasn’t bad work at all, and every day I was rewarded with delicious meals of chicken, duck, curry, and bone marrow soup, which, I gotta say, is soup-er. It was great to be served real home cooked meals every day after travelling on a budget without too much kitchen access and eating street food for so long. Then, on Saturday, I had the day off while Kevin and Tina went to the farmers market, so I went out to the main road with my ski goggles on and held out a thumb until some guys in a big van stopped and waved me in. It was about a 30 minute drive to Borovets ski resort and the guys I hitchhiked with were great company. They were 4 Bulgarian ski bums who lived in Sofia and came out to Borovets a few times a week, and they told me great stories of their ski mountaineering adventures which I understood less than half of due to their less-than-mediocre English.

I paid my $35 for a day pass and rental gear (best thing about skiing in Eastern Europe!) and got on the gondola. Borovets is a pretty big resort and the gondola spans it top to bottom, covering about 3000 feet of elevation. The conditions were perfect; it had been snowing all week but cleared up that day and it was sunny with no wind. It was also a work day in Bulgaria since they sometimes work on Saturdays after they took days off during the week for a holiday, which meant I didn’t have to wait in a single lift line all day. People seemed weirdly scared of going off the groomed runs even though the groomers got really bumpy by the end of the day and the off-piste powder stayed soft and smooth, so that combined with the general lack of people meant that I had the powder to myself.

I spent most of the day looping the same run because it was just so perfect. When I got tired I would go up to the highest elevation possible and enjoy the view of paragliders floating around the surrounding Rila Mountains, the highest range in the Balkans. At the end of the day I stopped by one of the lodges on the mountain to have a $2 beer and headed out to the road to hitchhike back to the farm. It was pretty easy to find people willing to pick me up, and 3 rides later I made it home. I rode with a girl who was a student in Sofia, then a guy who was a veterinarian, and lastly with a woman and an old dude who I assume was her dad but they didn’t speak a word of English so I have no idea. Many people of the older generation in Bulgaria speak Russian as a second language, which really didn’t help me at all since the only word I know in Russian is “shit”. I made it back though, just in time for dinner.

For the next few days nothing super out of the ordinary happened. I turned 23 which was a pretty uneventful birthday, at some delicious TFC (Tina’s fried chicken), shoveled a whole lot of goat shit and hay from the barn into the compost pile, and prepared some of the garden plots for planting. On one of my last days, after turning over the soil and laying compost on the garden for several hours, we decided that I should experience the local spa. I went with Kevin to the bathhouse, which is an ancient building that looks like it has been slowly falling apart for quite some years, surrounded by other completely abandoned buildings. We paid 2 leva to get in (1 euro) and went into the changing room on the men’s side (really the stripping room, since you change into your birthday suit), which had several beds/chairs to lounge on and cabinets to put our clothes in. But it was freezing in there so we did not spend any time in the lounge chairs.

We took off all of our clothes and walked into the warmth of the bath room (I mean the room with the bath, not the toilet room). It was nothing like a western spa and was a very Bulgarian experience. It was one large rectangular room, covered by tiles that were crumbling apart and had clearly never been renovated. To the left there was an old guy laying on a tile bench, dick prominently flopping to the side and pouring water on himself (sorry for that image in your head). There were some showers in front of us so first we rinsed off before getting in the hot tub. On one side of the room was a large hot tub, maybe 15 feet long by 10 feet wide. It was the perfect temperature and was filled with water that came directly from the thermal springs underground. It was really pleasant, apart from looking like it might fall apart any second.  We spent the next half hour or so going back and forth between the hot tub and the cold shower. It’s the cleanest I’ve felt in quite some time.

 If the place had a makeover it could be a modern spa—it has the potential, but the tiles are all falling apart, the lighting is terrible, and it really is just a dark musty rectangular room with a bath, showers, and some benches with fountains next to them. I kind of like it how it is though, it has its own charm. They also need to keep it like that to keep the prices down since many people don’t have showers in their homes and come to the bathhouse a couple times a week to bathe.

When we left, we went to the taps just outside the building where the thermal water is piped up and drank some of it. Bulgarians fill up several water bottles at a time with it and believe that it has healing properties. And it may well—people are pretty healthy for a developing country. The water tasted great, I’d be happy to drink that every day.

That pretty much wraps up Bulgaria. As I write this I’m on a bus with my sister through the beautiful Balkan Mountains to Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, so more updates to come soon!