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.