Interestingly, I feel more disoriented returning from Germany to Bulgaria than from the States to Bulgaria.  I'm not 100% sure why that is. I have a hunch that it's a language thing.

I went to Stuttgart for the long weekend. Now plenty of people speak English there but I was immersed in German the first second language I learned. Basically, I understood everything that was going on around me and I was able to order food (and beer) in German, I was able to navigate the S-bahn in German (with a good metro map) and I was able to sustain a conversation or two in German. Mind you it wasn't great German but at least I was trying.

Everyone of course looked at me the entire weekend and thought that I was German. The assumption was that if you're tall and blond with blue eyes to boot, you've got to be German. The problem of course is that I am not and more often than not Bulgarian phrases came to my mind more quickly than the German ones I was looking for. This lead to an interesting lag in communication.

One in which in my own head I was saying to myself in English:<em> Hey, you used to know these things. You still do.  Why can't you remember these words? Come on now.</em> Admittedly this is probably not very helpful for actually remembering the word or phrase you're currently stumbling around for.

Oh well.

The moral of the story? Try. It feels good to try. It's wonderful to know that even if your sentence wasn't perfect, you made yourself known.

But there is a sense of disorientation that exists to find yourself between two languages in a country where it looks like you fit in. I felt mixed up but I didn't exactly realize this until I got back to Sofia.

In Sofia, things were different. Everything felt confusing. Everything felt messy.