We ride back over to the group of people that Neda was just talking to. They were motioning us into a barn. Neda exchanges a few words with them and notifies me, "We can park our bikes in here".
This barn is owned by the AirBnB's owner's neighbour
The locals that Neda found were so helpful. They not only located the AirBnB owner, but when they saw that we were on motorcycles, a neighbour told us we could leave our bikes in his barn. It was like the whole village was helping us. Very cool!
Turns out our place is on the river, not on the main road. We had to hike down a little bit to get to it.
Our Bulgarian hostess prepares dinner for us
It was so very homey and so Eastern-European! The Bulgarian language is very similar to Serbo-Croatian. Neda says even more so than Polish and Czech, but not exactly. Our host had to call her daughter on the phone to translate some of the finer points in English. In fact, our online contact was the daughter. This is a very common practice with AirBnB in foreign countries. The older folks may own the property, but it's their kids (or grandkids) that are more technically savvy and can speak English. They're the ones who advertise and communicate with the tourists.
Although I've taken the lead in planning our route through Eastern Europe, I'm still glad that I'm traveling with the human Universal Translator when the tires hit the pavement.
Our first home-cooked Bulgarian meal. This fish was caught in the river beside the house! Delicious!
So that evening, I'm on Facebook scrolling through my newsfeed. Turns out that a couple of my traveling friends with UK passports also had stories of EU border guards jokingly asking them for their "visas".
Seems like in light of the Brexit vote, there was an internal memo circulating amongst all the border guards in the EU titled, "Hey, wanna f*** with the British tourists?"
Bastards.
