27

I turned 27 on a bus approaching the border control between Bulgaria and Turkey. By the time the 17 hour day ended I was celebrating 4000 feet in the air over China having a beer and watching the Hangover. Since started this blog there have been a lot of things that tied themselves together in the meaning of the name of this blog. Before I start, let me excuse myself for any mistakes or lack of editing of this post. This is the morning after celebrating my teams' first win/game for my new team in Perth, Australia. I guess writing while hungover is becoming a common occurrence but if it was good enough it was for Hemingway and Bukowski its good enough for me.

After wearing 17 in high school, 27 was always the number that I chose for my baseball jersey. It is also the number of outs in a baseball game; recorded consecutively, they make a perfect game. At 27 years old I chased a game for 26 years. A game that, for me and many others, defines their childhood, connects them to their home, their family, and their friends.  Just yesterday I got a whiff of the familiar sharp smell of pine tar I said, "this reminds me of the best days of my life." It reminded me of the time of my life where I was first getting a taste of freedom and but still getting spend care free time playing a game with my friends. At seventeen my love for the game became my life. For the next ten years, like any love, I completely committed myself to it, I made any sacrifice that it demanded that I make, and I gave my life to it and got back some of the worst pain and the greatest glory. Everything in my life was framed by the game and I have been far beyond lucky to have friends and family, teachers and coaches who have allowed me to live in this frame.  The game has led me on a great journey that has introduced me to the best human beings that I know over miles of north American road and eventually to Holland.

I thought Holland might be the end of this wild road after some odd ups and downs in the last few years. I guess it seems appropriate but then again nobody ever recorded the 27th out.  Just like the conversation that got me to Holland, I first that was a joke but a few days past and a serious commitment was made to play in Australia. Less than a week later I was leaving a little village in Bulgaria where I woke up to sounds of roosters crowing to hearing Magpies cry in new home here in Perth. 27 is going to be another great year of  baseball and I'm praying for extra innings.

My computer is broken so I will skip a couple of posts about Bulgaria that are on the hard drive for now.

Dirty, Smelly, Happy Hippies

Last Friday

The ringing of the cow bells and the rooster crowing is the only thing I can hear above the smell of my armpits. It’s a quaint place called the Happy Hippy Hostel. This last week I have been helping a South African/British couple realize their dream of creating an eco hostel in rural Bulgaria.  With no running water and the closest thing to a shower being a dip in the river, I feel a little bit ridiculous even allowing my lap top out of my bag, but it is about time that I catch up on my blog. 

The hostel is being created out of what used to the villages school house. It is two stories and has four main class rooms and four other smaller rooms.  The classrooms have been converted into two dorms, a bar/meeting area and a dining room. It amazing to see how this place has progressed in since it’s the present South African “hippy” bought it for $17,000 (US) four years ago. 

This last week we have spent our days lugging cement one bucket at a time to the roof of this school house to build a brick wall around when will soon be a terrace complete with a brick bbq and brick planter boxes for grapes. Its hard work but its freeing. I don’t have to wear shoes or a shirt, I’ve got a great tan and at the end of the day the food is out of this world.

before

The South African creator left home at 17 and has been a traveler, a squatter, a raver and luckily for me, a chef over the next 17 years. He calls himself a hippy but it is interesting to see how his version of hippy is different from the eccentric Bay area hippies of Berkeley and Sebastopol that I am familiar with. First off, he is the most ambitious hippy I could ever imagine.  His motivation for this project is on par with that of Bill Gates. Second, we sit on the roof laying bricks listening or rather feeling trance music pump through my body. Finally, around 10 o’clock every day everything stops for a proper English tea time. Although we all smell like hippies and leaving our clothes on the shore of the river feels more like a hippy it just goes to prove a person is his place before he is his identity. A Dutch baseball player is Dutch before he is a baseball player , a South African Hippy is South African hippy is South African before he is a hippy and the girl who recently showed up is an American before she is a dental hygienist.

She is the girl who traded her steady nine to five for a ticket to Sophia and dove right into her soul search in this basic style of life. There are a few good things about her arrival. The first is that I have to floss every night. I haven’t showered in a week but I’ll be damned if I didn’t floss the last three nights in a row. The second is the two hours I got to spend unloading the four months of things that I could only relate to another American and finally the shiny new mirror that she provides to me.

a gypsy "gift"

Each time I run into another American it’s a reflection. Sometimes it’s like seeing myself in a dust window or pewter bowl and sometimes it’s a still water or freshly polished silver. The two 19 year old college guys that I spoke with in Amsterdam, the two Alabaman nurses in Prague, the Canadian (that counts in this case) college hockey player on the beach in Valencia, or in this case the freshly polished silver of a dental hygienist from New Hampshire. With each conversation I run across things I have taken for granted, things I have left behind and things I have a new appreciation for. The bricks and sun have stole my energy for the details here but sometimes these reflections are laughable; the changes being more evident than the remainder. It’s a cop-out but I will leave this to another post that I will promise and never write. Off to enjoy some silence and sunset.

More words. None are mine.

I ran around Bulgaria some more. I've been staying in a hostel that is a little more quaint. I have been busy and tired at the end of the day. Something really cool happened here yesterday. After working with just the two proprietors of the hostel for two days,  an American girls/princess who showed up here directly from Boston. Initially I unloaded an earful on her that I could not have expressed to anyone here. She too has been keeping up a blog. Her entry for today is priceless and captures the beauty and innocence of the culture/way of life/solitude shock. This is her third day in Bulgaria and first full day putting in work at the hostel. From http://workin-for-the-weekend.blogspot.com/ Enjoy: 

Dirty Splinters in my Dirty Hands

Lord have mercy...  I no longer have bank teller hands, but I now have construction-worker hands.  Re-cap of my day:
1. Woke up, and had a wicked good breakfast.
2. Spent several hours sanding a wooden rail... I can't remember the last time I had splinters in my hands.
3. Had English tea (which I think all people should adopt in to their culture).
4. Got more splinters.
5. Had lunch (I felt like I was living in the Shire with other hobbits, having first and second lunchies (lunch and tea time within a 90 min time span)
6. Picked crab apples
7. Began to pare crab apples (which they are so small, every time I tried to pare one, I ended up removing the core stem, and most of the skin on my pointer finger)
8. Switched to dish washing... which was a scam, because it was over an hour worth of dish washing...maybe like three hours worth -no lie?  And let's just put it this way, I fo'show use way more water just brushing my teeth than I did washing, lunch, tea, canning, and distilling dishes.  The sink is broken, and get this, I was wiping oil out of a pan, worried about oil clogging their septic system, and it hit me... I am in rural Bulgaria -they have no septic system.  Turns out, the 'septic pipe' drains onto their lawn.
9. Bonfire
10. Dinner
11. No shower. Hairy legs. Dirty skin about to be n my nice sheets.

Also, Bulgaria fun-fact, the reason why some of the cops drive Porsche cars is because whenever they bust anyone (drug dealers and all); if the car (which is usually stolen) isn't claimed, the police get to keep it after 5 months.

People in Holland, I am still alive. I appreciate all the care that you have extended my way.
I will put a post up this weekend. Na zdravi!