Sofia at #88 (How the 88th Country Got Decided by a Dog, a Child, and a Plum Brandy)

🇧🇬 Sofia, May 9, 2026. Bulgaria, country #88. We are at a long restaurant on Vitosha Boulevard, which is a pedestrian artery the locals defend the way Parisians defend the Marais, with a low-level affection that turns into a fierce protectiveness if you mispronounce the word for it (Витоша, with the accent on the first syllable, do not say Vee-TO-sha).

The restaurant is named Hadjidraganov's Cellars. The waiter is Aleksandar. The dog is Magnus 🐻‍❄️ Waffles, supervising from a sit-stay under the table. The other dog at the table is not at our table but at the neighboring one: a Bulgarian Shepherd named Vasil, slate-grey, ninety kilos, sleeping the way only a 90-kilo shepherd can sleep, which is to say with full faith that the world will not require him.

The plum brandy that arrived without being ordered

The plum brandy is called rakia. Specifically, slivova rakia, from plums, from the village of Troyan, distilled by a man named Petar whose name is on the bottle in Cyrillic and whose family has been distilling at the same address since 1932. We did not order it. Aleksandar brought it. He brought two glasses, which became three when he sat down for the toast.

The toast was Наздраве (nazdrave), to your health, said three times, with eye contact each time. The Carletons have learned to make eye contact in seventeen different ways, but the Bulgarian way is unbroken and not negotiable. You do not look at the glass. You do not look at the table. You look at the person. If you do not look at the person, the toast does not count, and Aleksandar will not say so, but he will know.

The 88th country, briefly

This is country #88. There is a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet does not lie to itself about what counts as a visit. (A six-hour airport layover does not count. A meal and a walk does. A dinner with a stranger and a toast counts twice.)

The spreadsheet does not know about Boryana yet.

Boryana

Boryana is eight. Boryana has braids. Boryana has a snowman keychain with a wonky carrot nose, which she will eventually hand to Magnus 🐻‍❄️ as a goodbye gift, and which is now on his leash. Boryana has been studying our table since we sat down. The study has been clinical. The decision, when she made it, was final: she came over, gave a small bow to the humans, and went under the table to see the dog.

She sat with Magnus 🐻‍❄️ for forty minutes. She spoke to him in Bulgarian. He listened. (He is good at listening. It is his second-best skill, after sitting.) Her grandmother, whose name is Tsvetanka but who Boryana calls Baba, waved her permission across the room and then waved at me, mother to mother, the kind of wave that means he is fine, she is fine, you can keep eating.

The dinner, briefly

What we ate: a shopska salad (tomato, cucumber, raw onion, the white brined sirene cheese grated like snow on top, the sirene a thing the Bulgarians will fight you about, with reason). A kavarma (slow-cooked pork with onions and paprika in a clay pot, the pot the right shape, the pork the right tenderness, the paprika smoked and not sweet). A banitsa to share (filo, white cheese, eggs, butter, served warm). Three glasses of rakia. One more for Aleksandar, on Aleksandar.

Jay had the wine. Specifically, a Mavrud from Plovdiv, which is a grape only Bulgaria grows seriously, dark and a little wild, the sort of wine that pairs with the kind of dinner that lasts three hours.

How a country becomes a country

Country #88 was technically Bulgaria the moment we walked off the Lufthansa flight from Munich at SOF at 14:32 local. That is the bureaucratic answer. The spreadsheet answer is later: when we sat down at the long table on Vitosha, when Aleksandar refilled the rakia, when Boryana decided, when Tsvetanka waved. A country becomes a country when a person inside it sees you, names you, and gives you something you did not ask for.

Bulgaria gave us the toast, the plum brandy, the eight-year-old, the snowman keychain, and a 90-kilo shepherd sleeping like the world owes him nothing.

The Tokyo Major is in 9 months and 22 days. The training is the project. The 88th country is now a place. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ has the keychain. The keychain is on the leash. The leash is going to country #89 next.