[caption id="attachment_792" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="My shoes on the street!"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-792" title="My Feet " src="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/dsc05889.jpg?w=225" alt="My shoes on the street!" width="225" height="300" />[/caption]

I've seen a lot of funny things recently.  Apparently when the weather is crazy the people are just as awesome.  So this post is a quick look at the funny, unexpected, strange and wonderful things that I've seen when I've been out and about--when I've been hitting the streets.

Here in Bulgaria, people say the March is a woman's month.  This is because women are moody, fickle and change their minds easily and March is apparently the same.  (Um, this doesn't just describe women or the month of March but that's another story.  Feminists haven't really taken a foothold here in Bulgaria.)

March has however been full of surprises.  It's snowed a number of different times.  Only it doesn't stick.  It just snows enough to be annoying.  Like this morning when I woke up to snow flurries.  What? It's March 25th and it's snowing?! Well, it turns out that the snow just stuck to the cars and in turn made a wet mushy mess on the sidewalks.  We seem to be stuck in some limbo between winter and spring.  (Is this was Narnia was like?!)<!--more-->

So, yesterday on my way to school, I was crossing a street with tram lines--Graf Ignatif--and there is a tram coming.  Normally, I'd cross in front of it but there were trams coming in both directions.  I waited on the curb.  As the tram comes towards me it's slowing down.  This is weird because there's no stop on the corner I was standing on.  The tram comes to a stop a few feet away from me. And, the lady tram driver hops out of the tram to use the ATM.

Apparently there are no other ATMs on either end of her route.  She's got to use this one.  What was the most interesting is that everyone on the tram just sat there and watched her.  I wished I'd had my camera with me.  No such luck. Too bad.

Then today, walking home from a meeting I see this guy with a baseball hat on.  This caught my eye because I don't see a lot of baseball caps here in Sofia.  (Believe it or not, most Bulgarians think that baseball is pretty boring. ) I am walking behind this guy and the closer I get to him it looks like he has something back on the back of his head.  I catch up to him at the corner and realize that he's completely bald and centered perfectly in the back of the baseball cap where there's the semi-circle gap he has a tattoo.  A barcode tattoo.

He turns and I walk straight.  For the next five or so blocks, I can't stop wondering: how do you choose which barcode to get tattooed on your head?  Maybe it's the barcode off your favorite box of cereal, a favorite cd, a product you created and made millions on, or maybe it's a code for your health record.  Then I spent a little bit of time wondering if it actually scans at the grocery store.  That would be pretty cool.  Here's to you, barcode-guy! Thanks for keeping me occupied for most of my walk home.

The final thing is kind of funny and kind of sad.  I think that my neighborhood is engaged in a street-dog turf war.  Garbage pick up has been only so-so recently.  Sometimes it gets picked up and sometimes it doesn't.  I am told there's a fight going on about the garbage--the city's breaking up a monopoly or something.  What this means in practice is that the garbage is overflowing the bins and at least once a week, when I take my garbage out, I have to put it next to the bin because there's no room in the bin.  As a result, the street-dogs are very happy to nose through the garbage on the street.

In fact, the dogs in my neighborhood it seems are well fed.  Lucky dogs.  But then about a week ago, I noticed that there were more dogs than there used to be, that some of the dogs were missing chunks of fur or bloody and at night I was hearing lots more barking and fighting than normal.  Poor dogs.  They seem to be fighting over their territory and the garbage. I don't really even like animals and I feel bad for these dogs.  It's no way to live--fighting over garbage and living on the streets.

I can only hope that next week when the month of March comes to a close that all of the the craziness will have been worked out.