Breakdowns but No TakeDowns Down in Bulgaria and Greece

Part One

It’s my parent’s first trip to the Balkans, and I am behind the wheel, with both my wife and mother in the backseat barking driving instructions at me as we twist and turn our way towards Bulgaria’s capital. Slow down! Watch this guy, he’s not stopping for you! What does that sign say!

Yet as we thundered down a rare straightaway only miles after crossing from Macedonia into Bulgaria, the backseat drivers, bless them, were strangely quiet. Out of nowhere I saw a huge mound of dirt and rocks laying smack across the entire width of the two-lane road and tried to slam on the brakes, to no avail. The car went flying, literally soaring, Dukes of Hazards Style across the mound. We slammed down hard front first, after being momentarily airborne and everyone’s eyeglasses were jarred off of their heads. All that was missing from the scene was Cooter’s narration. Now I don’t know what them folks got themselves into this time, do you?
The road, as it turns out, had come to an end with no warning. Mind you, this was not some secondary road we were on, but the main road linking two major world capitals, Skopje and Sofia. Ok, so two capitals, at least. We were OK, but the car was making odd noises, and both my mom and wife could not resist taking jabs at my navigational and driving skills. Weren’t you paying attention?
Frightening noises made more frightening by my utter lack of automotive knowledge groaned louder and louder as we puttered in the opposite direction in search of a through road. After several minutes we coasted into a gas station, which was oddly staffed entirely with cute teenage girls as pump attendants. They seemed to think it hilarious that oil was leaking profusely from what I later learned was the transmission fluid pan. Or was it the fact that we were driving a battered ’94 Altima with bald tires and diplomatic plates issued in Macedonia that amused them? Or was it my rudimentary Macedonian language skills? The girls, in their smart one-piece gas station jump suit attendant outfits, pointed us towards another garage up the street, and as we pulled away, two of them had to bury their faces in their hands so as not to keel over from all the laughing and revelry.
By this time, the car had lost too much fluid and refused to allow me to steer it. Luckily the road was straight and we coasted into what seemed to be a deserted mechanic’s garage. A few young people sat huddled around a space heater in a freezing cold café attached to the quiet garage. The café was empty and the group seemed to view our entrance into their lives as a momentary interruption into their quiet, gray day. Lacking any Bulgarian language skills I pointed to the car, which was perched at their entrance and said, PROBLEM. They summoned a young man with blackened mechanics hands from the back.
The young man looked at the car and began asking us questions in Bulgarian, as we stood around looking concerned and cold. Ah, a great moment in the annals of Bulgarian holidaymaking! I tried telling the young man that we didn’t understand him in Macedonian, which Bulgarians claim is essentially a bastardized version of Bulgarian, but Macedonians claim is completely different. He was unfazed though and continued querying me in his native tongue. I had been working at the American Embassy in Skopje, and had been trained in Albanian for six months prior to arriving at my post. My father, who never quite grasped the fact that I’d learned the minority language in Macedonia which is not at all similar to the Cyrillic tongue that Slav Macedonians speak, said to me, only half kidding, “you can’t speak his language? Ah shit, you’re no good!”
After a lengthy game of pointing, gesturing and mutual incomprehension the young man seemed to be saying that the entrance of the garage was around back. Once we had pushed the car around back, another short swarthy man came around and starting poking at the undersides of our leaking car. He looked like the young man’s boss.
“PRO- BLEM”, he said.
To which, I wittily retorted, “GOLEM (Big) PRO BLEM?” Hoping against hope he’d say it wasn’t.
He shook his head yes, but said no, in that funny and counterintuitive way Bulgarians are famous for. We repaired to the icy cold café and my father, whose hearing leaves something to be desired, shouted at the lackadaisical youths huddling around the space heater.
“COFFFFEEEEE???”
He scared the hell out of them, but one of the youths managed to pry himself off of the space heater and got busy.
“This is the best 25 cent cup of coffee in Bulgaria!” my dad claimed excitedly.
As we sat in the empty café looking out onto a tableau of heavy gray skies I silently assessed our situation. We are stuck in a small town, the name of which I do not know, in the Bulgarian countryside. Our car has some unknown malady. None of us know a thing about cars. None of us can speak a word of Bulgarian. We are Americans. Our car has diplomatic plates. We appear to be rich, though we are driving an old battered vehicle. The temperature is below freezing, yet we are all dressed in spring windbreakers since the weather in Macedonia had been considerably balmier. My dad is shouting questions in english at the monolingual staff in his friendly, gregarious way trying to befriend them, but quite possibly also making them angry. Our coffee tastes like gravely mud. We are on vacation. It’s Saturday morning. These men, with their dirty hands and jumpsuits are going to rape us. I can’t afford this. Will they demand my first-born child? My wife? Quarts of my blood?


We ascertained, our more accurately, they ascertained that the pan which holds the transmission fluid had been sliced open in the accident. The swarthy man and his apprentice were welding and pounding it back together with a hammer. In the States, most mechanics would have told you that they had to order the part, which would take 4 weeks, and would gladly charge you $83 for that hour of “labor”. But this plucky crew was actually fixing the damn thing. But would we make it to Sofia?
After a little more than two hours of merciless hammering and welding the man in jumpsuits proclaimed the car done. I followed them to front desk to pay them, butterflies in my stomach. Here it comes, I thought. The elder statesman punched the figure 67 onto a calculator and turned it around for my dad and I to see. He looked at us, as if to determine if we found the figure acceptable. 67, 67 what? Gold bouillon coins? Heads of cattle? Virgins to be sacrificed at the Temple of Bulgarian Mechanics?
This prince of a man broke the suspense by saying “LEVA.” Leva is the Bulgarian currency, which we did not possess nor really know the exact exchange rate of. As if reading my mind, he then did some calculation and came up with the price of 30 euros. This low price was made doubly incredible by the fact that we had seen them put in 4 or 5 containers of transmission fluid, which cost about 3 euros each, by themselves.
My father leaped across the counter and embraced the man, completely ignoring social and cultural etiquette and the fact that the man was wearing a filthy jumpsuit.
“You must be the most honest mechanic in Bulgaria,” he bellowed at the stunned man.
I moved to quickly pay him and escape before he changed his mind.
As we hopped into our car, which started and seemed to work just fine, we were all giddy with excitement as though we’d all dodged some kind of bullet.
“Boy if I were him I would have charged you enough to retire on!” my dad commented.
And he was right. Here we were a bunch of rubes who knew nothing about cars, couldn’t speak the language. You would think a mechanic in a small town in Bulgaria would really try to feast on an American diplomat, who had the misfortune to break down in the vicinity. These men worked hard in a freezing cold garage. Came home at night, stinking and dirty, with probably not too many leva’s to show for their toil. I probably would have shafted me too, if I had been them.



We barely used the car after arriving in Sofia and the weekend passed without further vehicular incident. On Monday morning I went out to dust snow off the car, and prepare it for the trip back home to Skopje, via the Rila Monastery. Much to my dismay, we had two flat tires.
An extraordinarily nice young man from the hotel we were staying in, named Goce, immediately went out into the freezing cold and began putting our spare on one of the flats, despite the fact that we weren’t even parked in the hotel parking lot. We had all gone out to a flea market and bought hats and gloves for a buck apiece, but I was still freezing cold in my windbreaker. The hats and gloves were a godsend, but they made us all look a bit odd. My dad looked like an escaped mental patient with his huge maroon knockoff Addidas ski hat that was two sizes too big for his head. We had been given wide births on the streets and casinos of Sofia. But I was still COLD!
In less than an hour, Goce had the spare on one flat, and the other jacked up. He, my dad and I piled into a tiny, battered old taxi with the two flat tires hanging out of the absurdly inadequate little trunk. There was something wrong with the drivers seat and it literally hung down onto the back seat and in my dad’s lap. My dad tried pushing the driver up off his lap to no avail. The spectacle of my dad trying to push the man back into the front seat allowed me to see the hilarity of our situation: we were out on this crazy Monday morning errand on the snowy streets of Sofia-heading off to another Bulgarian garage on our weekend getaway. HA!
The driver- who did all of the lifting of the tires in and out of his taxi-wanted about a buck for the ride to the garage, and also insisted on sticking around until the tires were fixed. The little garage was busy, but the mechanics dropped everything to deal with our bum tires. As they dipped the first one into a huge vat of awful, sludgy, icy cold water, my dad remarked, presciently, “Godammit, I’m glad I don’t have to dip my hand in that cold, dirty water!”
As we waited for the mechanic’s verdict, we sat in a tiny little makeshift café attached to the garage, watching people with dull, blank expressions drink ebony black coffee from small white plastic cups. I felt certain that the man would tell us we needed new tires. I was wrong. They patched them up, charged us 7 Euros, and we were back in the battered taxi, with the driver on lap this time, heading back to the Hotel Meg.
“Bulgaria is alright!” my dad proclaimed, and I laughed.
“No seriously,” he continued, “you can get things fixed here, this place is wonderful!”
But it wasn’t just the cheap car repairs, coffee, and counterfeit sportswear that made us feel good about Bulgaria, it was also the fact that we had traveled back in time and lived in a place where things weren’t disposable, and spent a weekend in one of the few remaining parts of Europe where fleecing the tourist had not yet reached the level of an art form.
Part Two
Two weekends after our multiple breakdown weekend in Bulgaria, my wife and I were cruising around the beautiful interior of the Greek Cyclades island of Naxos on a rented moped. It was our second day on the rented bike, and my initial apprehension to the idea had given way to comfort and enjoyment behind the wheel. However the stars were not aligned properly as we came around one sharp turn, and slid across some water, tumbling off the bikes and down onto the road. Thankfully, I wasn’t driving fast, so we weren’t seriously hurt. The fall did, however, manage to put holes right through my sweater and thick jacket, and also rendered the bike inoperable.
We were a few kilometers outside a small village, so we just coasted back there, feeling a strange sense of deja vous. My wife, Jen and I squabbled a bit about who would call the rent a moped guy back in Naxos town. I lost the “discussion” and grudgingly trudged up to use the phone at the village’s only taverna. Another accident, and another man in a jumpsuit on the other end of the line. This time, one who spoke English. A Greek one, who was probably more accustomed to soaking tourists than his Bulgarian counterparts.
“If I come to pick you up, it will cost 2 euros per kilometer, just for the transportation fee,” he told me. I felt as though the bullets we’d dodged in Bulgaria were coming back, via some JFK-esque magic bullet theory.
Being the cheapskate I am, I relayed the news to my wife, and suggested that we might save money, and try to just coast all the way back to town, some 15 kilometers.
“Are you crazy! Tell him to bring his damn truck!” my wife barked.
“Fine,” you talk to him, I whined, handing the phone over to her, unable to speak any verbal assent to this creep’s insidious plan to charge us through the nose.
This Terrible Man ™ told Jen he’d be there in an hour or two, which I took to mean 2 or 3. I assessed the damage to the bike, while we waited. My professional analysis was that the mirror was cracked and that otherwise the thing was just plain broken. The contract we’d signed, and given our credit card to back up, stated that we were responsible for any damage done to the bike. We pondered aloud, over a beer in the taverna, how much our little Italian little piece of junk could be worth. A moment for the annals of Greek holidaymaking.
As we waited for the TM to arrive, I tried to clean up and dress wounds on my knee and elbow. I was not too badly hurt, but was walking with a very noticeable limp, which I did not want the moped guy to see, as I was trying to play down the seriousness of the accident at all costs.

The Terrible Man ™ arrived sooner than we had bargained for, and I was in fact, wandering around the pretty stone village taking photos when he arrived. Jen was not so amused when I returned, even though I had caused the two only a momentary delay. But this might be a good time to mention that my wonderful, loving wife had the good sense not to blame me for the accident. If there was one thing we could agree on, it was that the bike that was at fault, not me. Whew.
As soon as we got inside the TM’s old jalopy, he asked not of our physical or mental well being, but instead only commented that, “you are a very bad driver, I was surprised when you brought back the moped yesterday that you had not gotten into an accident.”
I diplomatically resisted the urge to throttle the little creep. After all, we still had the matter of the repairs to haggle over. For the rest of the ride back to his office, an unpleasant silence hung over the car as we zigged and zagged around the island’s beautiful circumference.
Back at Command Central, I was happy to see that there were some customers waiting to rent bikes. I felt as though, in a pinch, if all else went wrong, I could cause a scene, that would, if nothing else, cause the rest of the customers to probably go ahead and rent from the TM anyways. For a few minutes the TM and I held court on some of the great issues of the day, namely, who was to pay for the repairs to the bike, the owner, or the renter. The TM instructed us to come back later in the day, after he had time to assess the damage to the bike, and gauge exactly how much he’d need to charge us in order to retire in comfort.
Jen and I foolishly, shrugged off our wounds and took a long hike outside of town. Partly because we wanted the exercise, but mostly, because, having already spent money to rent a moped for the day, we could not stomach the idea of paying for other modes of transport. By day’s end, my knee was throbbing, and I was hobbling around Naxos town’s mercilessly steep, hilly streets like an old, wounded combat veteran of some old war, kids know nothing about these days. I could not bear the thought of allowing the TM to see me hobble into his little shop, only to be assessed with some astronomical and quite arbitrary repair bill.
I thought about dispatching my chief emissary, and Special Liaison to Greek Moped Rental Guys (SLGMRG), Jen, to tangle with the TM, but thought better of it, figuring that the sexist creep would probably see that as a sign of weakness and/or acquiescence. I was dismayed to see no one else in his petty little shop, which at this time was now filled with what I considered to be his defective mopeds. If things got ugly, there was no one to make a scene in front of. And I was ready; I had mentally prepared myself to battle with this TM, and his dreadful Spartan mentality.
Blessedly though, this clash did not materialize as the TM, proved himself to be not so terrible, charging us only 30 euros, 15 for the broken mirror and 15 for the tow into town. Still, I did not act too grateful for fear that he would have the pleasure of thinking he had done me some kind of favor. I just limped out of the shop, wallet and pride still marginally intact.