Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Arabian chicken

If I lived a slow life, closer to myself and my environment, would I then be blogging? I think no. Blogging is a here-today-gone-tomorrow-activity that celebrates the short minded society we live in. The media is the message, and the message of this media is to read, react and forget. 50 years from now, schoolkids will still be reading about the great writers of teh 19th century, not about the great blogers of th 21th..Anyway...

I have had the privilege to spend almost a week in one of the less exploited Bulgarian seaside resorts. It has been a slow life. Nothing else to do than to visit one of the three possible beaches, and ponder where to consume your lunch and dinner. That's not a rythm of life that triggers you to blog.

Anyway... the lunch today did truly deserve a blog post. We spent the morning on a beach, slowly descending into a meditative existance where your body turns into wind, salt and sea. I guess we would never have left the beach, if it wasn't for the thunderstorm. It came. We ran.

Right before the rain started faling on us, we entered a place that looked more or less open for guests.

-Is it open? My fiancee asked.

The face of the man we met int he stairs told us that he made up the answer right there and then.

-Yeah, sure. Welcome up on the terace.

We sat down on a terace with  view of the sea, with a roof but no walls. That proved crucial five minutes later when the rain was at its most intensive. We were handed menues, and skillfully picked the cheapest dishes (always go for chicken, and traditional salads).

Not that the menu was much of an advice. When the women in charge came up to us, it appeared that only a handful of the dishes in the meny were actually available. One of them was the "Arabian chicken", a kind of crepe with chicken, ham, cucumbers and mushrooms. I immediately fell for the offer and ordered an arabian chicken, whereas my grlfirend stayed with a traditional sirene po shopski.

The woman went down the stairs and we took a look at the menu. Damn! Of course the Arabian chicken costed three times as much as the chicken dish I had planned to order. For a moment we contemplated to go down to the kitchen and change the order, but what the heck... you only live once, and who wat s to die without haveing tasted the Arabian chicken.

This is when Harry showed up. Harry was a she, a 46 days old boxer puppy who came to us to look for a warm place and someone to cuddle him in the cold unfriendly weather. At this time the thunder was right above us. After saying hello, he decide to take a nap, using my feet as his cushion. Sweet...

The food came. It was tasty, and the people in the restaurant did their best to become our friends, so we were prepared to forgive them the 7 EUR Arabian Chicken. Nice place, we thought, and prepared ourselves to go.

That's when the owner shows up and tells us that because we are the first clients of the season, they had decided to give us a special dish of grilled captain's fish, and half a litre of wine!

We enjoyed the fish and the wine, and Harry enjoyed our company. Pretty soon she found a place to sleep in my fiancees's knee. So there we sat  getting drunk on wine that we never had ordered, with the restaurant owner's dog sleeping in our knee. What can you do but to laugh. We agreed - this would never happen in Sweden, and that is a pity.

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I am not sure. Maybe this could happen in Sweden, under very specific circumstances. The thing about Bulgaria is that here it happens stuff like this all the time. Yesterday at dinner there was no dog, but well three cats hanging around in the restaurant,making the visit into something else than pure eating.

One obvious reason is that people here are not so neurotic about animals. At the dinner yesterday on cat had parked itself on a restaurant table. The bulgarian customers did not freak out, as Swedes would do, but in stead started to cuddle with it. After all, a cat has never killed anyone. Neither has a puppy.

But it is not only about anumals. The thing is that something happens once you have said hello to the restaurant owner's dog, cat, child or whatever - the professional distance between you and the restaurant owner dissapears, and you start interacting on a human level. My impression is that Bulgarians always wait for this to happen. They wait for something else to come up so that they can start behaving like friends and not customers. Not only the customers - the restaurant owners want it as well.

And as always - when all people involved in a situation want something to happen, it happens. We were treated as friends, and when we were happy to have experienced something out of the normal holiday routine. Somewhere along the line the price of the Arabian Chicken fell to about a quarter of the menu price. Sometimes it pays off to order something unexpected.

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