Our translator/driver/case worker picked us up from our apartment in Sofia and we drove four hours across Bulgaria to Burgas. It was a nice drive. It's very beautiful here. It's green and very mountainous in some areas and very flat with farmland in others. We noticed that livestock are never on their own, they always have a shepard or two with them. They also have a lot of livestock that pull carts.
We noticed they have the most beautiful weeds (we're guessing) in the roadside. The ditches are filled with red, yellow and purple flowers. A very pretty sight.
On the way out of town the translator stopped at a gas station and helped me order coffee. It's very good...much stronger than in the U.S. and the cup is much smaller...maybe 8 oz. In Bulgaria, if you order coffee, you get espresso. If you want coffee more like what we have in the U.S. you order a latte or a capachino. It's still stronger, but it has milk added to it. It's very good.
When we got to Bulgaria we drove right to the orphanage. We were so nervous. The whole experience is full of awkwardness. Being in a new country, meeting the director and communicating through a translator, asking a ton of questions and then meeting your daughter for the first time...all awkward. We got there after Anche had already gone to bed but they woke her up to bring her to see us.
They took us to a little room next to the front door that was filled with toys and there we asked the director our questions.
I thought my heart was going to stop when there was a knock on the door and a nurse brough in our sweet Anche. She somehow looked a little older than the photos we had of her from just the month before. The nurse put her down and she started crying. I got down on my knee and touched her hand, but she wouldn't have anything to do with me. The nurse wisked her away pretty quickly, telling us we should come back after naptime at 4pm.
Our translator took us to one of her favorite resturants and we walked downtown in a pedestrian area that was as wide as a street, but only for walking and each side was lined with shops. She told us which places she recommends for eating, dessert and for shopping.
When 4pm came around we traveled back to the orphanage where we were met in the hallway by the nurse and Anche. She saw us and immediately started crying. The nurse told our translator in Bulgarian that I should just take her...so I did. We took her outside to the park and she was very upset. She spent a good majority of the time crying, but we would get her to quiet down for about 5 minutes at a time before she would start crying again. It was awful. She was basically inconsolable.
The poor thing had a tough day, understandably. She was thrown into the deep end of a situation that she didn't have control over. We look different, smell different and talk different. We are different in every way that she is familiar with.
At one point, we opened the gerber puffs and gave her a puff. Everyone told us that children in orphanages always like two things...snacks and toys that make noise. I put a puff in her mouth thinking that she would taste it, stop crying and like us. That is the exact thought that was going through my head. I was so wrong. What really happened was she freaked out that she had something in her mouth, it stuck to the roof of her mouth, she freaked out some more, she gagged on the puff, kept crying, gagged some more and then threw up on me.
Seriously, it was a rough day, but this is the reality of this awkward situation. We left pretty defeated, but convinced that day 2 would go better.
That night we walked down along the waters of the Black Sea. There is a gorgeous park that has dozens of resturantes and double that in the number of gelato carts. For dinner, Rob asked the waitress what she recommended for fish (after all, a person should have fish when they're so close to the ocean) and she pointed at one and said she liked it because it was fresh. What he got were a bunch of tiny fish, whole, piled on his plate. The look on his face was priceless. After he was done he used motions and gestures to find out how he was suppoed to eat it. Good thing he was right... you don't eat the head. Until tomorrow...
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