Sofia at 9am, the year Bulgaria became #88

🇧🇬 Anton orders the plum brandy for both of us at nine in the morning and tells me, before I have removed my coat, that the Eurovision voting bloc is a Cold War artifact and that the soup needs more vinegar.

Both opinions are correct.

Anton is a retired physics teacher in Sofia who now runs a Saturday-morning conversation circle at Cafe Pesho's, two streets behind the Saint Sofia statue. He is 73, wears the kind of cardigan you cannot buy in airports, and has a Bulgarian shepherd named Pepi who watches the room from a folded blanket near the radiator. Pepi has opinions too. Pepi keeps them to himself.

I am here because Bulgaria was the eighty-eighth country, and because Jay has gone to find the parking, and because a woman at the next table is laughing at her phone in a way that suggests the joke is not safe for work.

The plum brandy is called rakia. It arrives in glasses too small for ceremony and too full for politeness. Anton lifts his. We say наздраве. He is satisfied. He returns to the topic of the soup.

The soup, when it arrives, is tarator. Cucumber, yogurt, walnut, dill, garlic, the ice cubes that make every American visitor look up from their phone. Anton was right about the vinegar.

The spreadsheet ticks over. It does not celebrate. It logs.

Outside, a tram passes, and the radio in the cafe shifts from a 1960s Bulgarian folk song to Erasure's A Little Respect, and Pepi opens one eye. The Eurovision conversation, Anton notes, was always going somewhere.

By the time we leave Pesho's, the brandy has been replaced by Bulgarian coffee that is, I am not exaggerating, the same density as motor oil and twice as personal. Jay reappears. He has paid for parking and found a bakery. He has the look of a man who has been allowed to remain in a country.

I add Bulgaria to the spreadsheet on the train back to Sofia Airport. 88 countries. 7 continents. 464 cities. 36.97 percent of the world. The spreadsheet ticks over. It does not celebrate. It logs.

The window passes a sunflower field, then a billboard for a pop singer named Azis, then a building that has been repainted, then unrepainted, then mostly repainted, in the time since 1989. Pepi, somewhere in the cafe behind us, is still asleep.