Bulgaria’s second biggest city sprawls across the center of the glacial valley up which we had biked for the past four days.\u00a0 We arrived in the rain.\u00a0 We ate lunch under an overpass next to cigarette butts and a car detailing service.\u00a0 The skies cleared as we emptied the bags that had held lunch, so we continued on the damp streets to the center of town.\u00a0 My intrepid guiding skills led us successfully back to the walking street and posh shopping district.\u00a0 The young members of FBR found a closed store front against which to lean the bikes.\u00a0\u00a0 Netzy, who had been hotel and shower free for several days, sought the solace of a hostel that might let her pay for a shower.\u00a0 The rest of FBR endeavored to convince shoppers we were good enough to pay.<\/p>\n
With the erhu case in front of us and classic FBR hits like “The Tea Song” and “Zombie” reverberating through the commercial streets, people soon began dropping in coins. \u00a0 I had to avoid laughing at them.\u00a0 Don’t they know we’re not professionals?<\/em> I thought to myself.\u00a0 Professional or not, we kept getting money.\u00a0 Then the cops came.\u00a0 “This,” said one, gesturing at the erhu case, “no money” he concluded simply enough. \u00a0 We took away the erhu case, but continued playing.\u00a0 We were a bit disappointed, perhaps, but we play mostly for pleasure.\u00a0 If there’s money to be made, then so be it, but with no money we’ll happily play just about anywhere.<\/p>\n We had been playing for a couple of hours when our show suddenly involved a large amount of audience participation.\u00a0 A young women with slightly crooked teeth approached me in the middle of one of the songs.\u00a0 She explained she could play guitar.\u00a0 We handed her a guitar, and she strummed out an English song none of us had ever heard before.<\/p>\n Before we knew it, a spry man with silver hair had procured Drew’s guitar.\u00a0 He started singing Sinatra in a deep, gravelly voice that could have been Fats Domino’s.\u00a0 Wearing the guitar on its strap, he two-stepped in the street.\u00a0 We accompanied him as best we could.\u00a0 Soon we had a huge crowd.<\/p>\n Street kids showed up.\u00a0 Nakia paged through pictures of our journey Pete had put into an album with the street kids.\u00a0 The silver-haired fellow continued his solo performance.\u00a0 He caught the eye of passersby and sang directly to them.\u00a0 One of the street kids, his facial muscles clenched in a grimace for effort, did a tripod on the street.<\/p>\n We found ourselves talking to a Plovdivian with perfect English, also a musician.\u00a0 Our nearly-octogenarian crooner had moved on to Louis Armstrong.\u00a0 The homeless kids chatted loudly, but were hushed by a toothless, apparently homeless woman who danced to the songs sung by the old fellow.\u00a0 She gestured to the harmonica Drew held in his hands.\u00a0 “I can play that!” she indicated.\u00a0 Drew handed it over.\u00a0 She tooted out a few notes and demonstrated her harmonica efficacy, but the key didn’t match the Louis Armstrong song.\u00a0 She handed it back to Drew.<\/p>\n In the meantime, a man with a classy hat and a huge beer gut had picked up the drum at the insistence of his wife.\u00a0 “He plays the drum wonderfully!” she had gestured to us.\u00a0 He accompanied the older musician for a while, but soon moved on.<\/p>\n Storm clouds had come back to obscure the sky. \u00a0 With the help of the English speaker, we got the old man to give back the guitar.\u00a0 “He’s been a performer for 60 years,” translated our translator.\u00a0 One of the street kids asked for money.\u00a0 One of the other street kids told him to knock it off.\u00a0 We said good-bye to everyone and packed everything up, just in time to seek shelter from the rain under an awning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bulgaria’s second biggest city sprawls across the center of the glacial valley up which we had biked for the past four days.\u00a0 We arrived in the rain.\u00a0 We ate lunch under an overpass next to cigarette butts and a car detailing service.\u00a0 The skies cleared as we emptied the bags that had held lunch, so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-here-you-will-find-the-posts-that-jim-wrote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}