Bulgaria (apparently)

Flag (yep, low on ideas again)

Lost Country

I expect that we have all heard the myth, but we all dismiss it. “An undiscovered country? Impossible. That land is just a myth.” Well, I wanted to find proof for or against so that we could finally discover the truth to the question: ‘Does Bulgaria really exist?’ We have been subjected to weirdy-beardy scientists who go on about counting peas and collecting urine for samples and they often believe that there is a land in east Europe that is inhabited by humans and is called Bulgaria. In this ‘mystical’ land, people are said to live just like you and me. I cannot deny that I was cynical, but I tried to stay open minded as I looked at a map of Eastern Europe where theorists claim Bulgaria to be. I saw that there was no sign of Bulgaria on the map and sought to prove it once and for all. I gathered a team of explorers from a nearby explorers shop, shoved them in the back of my jeep, told the fattest ones to go home as they didn’t fit and we were off. I was in the front with the leader of the explorers team Alan. As there was already someone called Alan in the group, he changed his name to that of his uncle’s, his uncle Alan. This seemed to resolve any misunderstandings in the group. Alan was to be my guide for the journey as he had also heard the ‘Bulgaria’ theory. He, however, was more open minded than I was saying ‘well…stranger things have happened, look at my face’ I looked at his face only to realise that he didn’t have one but had cuttings from various road maps stuck to the front of his head. When I asked what road map he used for his facial collage he swore loudly. I realised he had used the road map to Bulgaria on his face. Despite the setback we continued on our journey against the will of many explorers in the back of the jeep who all said ‘If Alan thinks he can make a road map of Eastern Europe from a glue stick and a sausage he is mistaken’. They were perfectly correct and Alan soon gave up after gluing the sausage to the back of his head. We could sense we were in the heart of Europe by the strong odour of garlic. Lost in the heart of Europe without a map we could easily have panicked or spoken to an odd looking foreigner, but Alan kept a cool head and calmly told the rest of the situation as some had not been listening because they has been playing a game they had invented called ‘The Penguins are all orange, but don’t tell Hitler’. This was a fun game where the object was to paint model penguins orange. For each penguin you get one point. If you see a real penguin and paint it orange you get ten points. The players are eliminated from the game when Hitler finds out but, as he died over fifty years ago, the game does have a tendency to go on for a rather long time. Alan told the group that he had covered his face with the only road map so we could no longer continue on the road. However, to make the best of a bad situation, he left the jeep and walked instead, hopping on every third step. His balance was poor (to say nothing for his sense of direction), so I could easily keep up by walking after him, but this was a strange land of strange people so I did once break into a triple jump so as not to look too conspicuous. We walked, walked, hopped for a number of days, always staying by the roadside, which made me wonder why we had left the jeep. After a week we were all tired and Alan’s left shoe had worn away and his right shoe didn’t look great either. After two weeks we started to get downhearted. We had not eaten for sixteen days and our leader had turned into a small baboon. Things were looking bleak. I told Alan this and he said ‘oo-oo ah-ah’ in such a tone as to agree (or at least, that’s what I thought.). One of the other members of the exploration started making oo-oo ah-ah noises and I turned to look at him saying ‘don’t even think about becoming a baboon, Steve’ he looked at me and, with a pained expression on his face, said ‘I’m not, I’ve trodden on something hot’. I looked down at the ground below us and discovered that we had been walking on the Sahara desert. ‘Oh nuts’, I said ‘we must have taken a wrong turning at Slovenia.’ We were all dispirited so I hailed two taxis, which were just passing, and we all journeyed back to Slovenia. We walked north from there for a few days and, found Yugoslavia. Thinking it was Bulgaria, my party returned home and I was left in a land of rather suspicious-looking Yugoslavians. I was surprised to find that I had no legs, but the customs officer said it was merely a precaution and I would get them back as soon as I left the country. I instantly thought what a good plan this was (whoever heard of a terrorist with no legs) but I was soon reminded of the drawback of this plan, having no legs made it very difficult to leave. When I told the customs officer of my situation he said ‘I’m going Bulgaria next week, I’ll take you.’ I thanked him and, after a difficult week looking round Yugoslavia, we drove north and eventually found Bulgaria under a coffee table in Minsk, thus proving it’s existence.