Tonight I was walking home with a bag of groceries from Hit.  I'd just crossed the street and was finishing of my standard refrain of please don't hit me, please don't hit me, please don't hit me. Don't worry I don't usually say these out loud so maybe it's more of a mantra than a refrain.

Anyhow I looked down and there was a rat crawling into a whole in the sidewalk.

I realized: I've never seen a rat before in Sofia.

This realization was sort of surprising yet at the same time pretty banal. A rat. I saw a rat. Big deal I know.

But it was kind of a big deal. For some reason, I was reminded of life in Washington DC.  In the up and coming neighborhood I lived in three years ago, 14th and U-Street NW rats were standard issue and the closer you got to Adams Morgan the bigger they got. Rats the size of kittens used to regularly scare the daylights out of me jumping out of garbage cans or running across the sidewalk.

Then there was the year we caught not one but two rats in our group house. Now It's a great story to tell about urban living (and my bad-ass roommate S.). At the time, it was a nightmare. <!--more-->

We saw the first rat during one of the baseball world series game. The next day I bought a rat trap. Basically these are giant oversized mouse traps with a spring that's so strong it looks like it could break your finger.

Now I am not a city girl. I've seen mice in traps. I know how they work. But the next morning when there was a big gray rat in the trap and no one around to help me get it out of the trap or clean up the mess, I figured that for $3 I could buy another rat trap. So I threw out the whole thing. Man, rats have long tails.

We called the landlords. He called an extermination company.

They came and looked around the house. Then they insisted in putting down snap traps in the basement but sticky traps in the kitchen. Ug. We weren't very excited about this. The sticky traps just trap the still live (and now screaming) rat in the trap.  The extermination company said sticky traps are safer in living spaces. No broken toes. They say just call and we'll come and get the rat. <em>Really?</em>

We catch a rat that night. It wakes my roommate M. up. Yes the screaming rat stuck in a trap in the kitchen on the first floor wakes her up in her bedroom on the second floor. She wakes me up and we wake one of our male roommates S. up.  2 am. He's groggy and tells us he'll be downstairs in a minute. He shows up a couple of minutes later in pj pants and tennis shoes with work gloves and a hammer in hand. Yes, a hammer.

We can't just throw the rat away because it is still  screaming and trashing around since his tail is sticking out of the  trap.<em> Awesome</em>.

Editorial Note: if you like happy endings of the Disney fairytales persuasion rather than the Grimm Brother variety now's the time to stop reading. It doesn't end well for the rat. This said it ends well for us.

So, S. tells us we can go to bed. We do.  As he tells it upon being woken up at 2am he contemplated trying to run his car over it, trying to suffocate it in a plastic bag and then decided he'd take it outside in a plastic bag and hit it on the head with a hammer to kill it on the front steps of our very urban row house.

This is exactly what he did. It wasn't pleasant but it worked.  And for the record, he got a lot of millage out of that act and the story too.  Shortly there after we discovered that the rats were coming along the gas pipe for the stove after having chewed a bigger hole around the gas. We plugged it up with a piece of steal wool and that was that. No more rats.

Needless to say, after spending the better part of a week being totally obsessed by rats in my house I kind of have a things for rats. I hate them.

But today when I saw the rat, I was just kind of amused.  Especially when I realized this was the first rat I've seen in Bulgaria and I've lived here two and a half years.

Then I wondered: do I have the stray dogs to thank for that?