I woke up late this morning--11:30am to be exact so after almost exactly 12 hours of sleeping I figured that I had better drag myself out of bed.  It's pretty incredible actually because I think that the pillow that came with my furnished apartment might actually be made out of rocks.  After the first night, I thought (and kind of still do) that my bed is going to make me become a back-sleeper whether I want to be or not.  This morning I woke up determined that I was going to buy a new pillow and amazed that I could sleep so long.

The problem is the only people I know in the city right now are my landlord and his family and the Fulbright coordinator.  I didn't want to ask my landlord or his wife where to buy a pillow because they have been very helpful and accommodating and I didn't want them to think that I wasn't grateful--sometimes you just need a softer pillow.  So I emailed the Fulbright coordinator about my search for a pillow.  I had to.  I had no idea where to buy one.

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I've walked around the city center where I am living a fair amount over the last couple of days. There's a lot to see and tons of storefronts but the mainstays down here are: restaurants, coffee shops, little grocery stores (magazine in Bulgarian ), pharmacies (apteka in Bulgarian but a word that should also be familiar to my German speaking friends), cellphone shops (the strange thing is that every corner seems to have one or more and there are only three cellphone companies which means that I have no idea how the city center can support so many), clothing stores and lots of American fast food.  But i had never seen a store that looked like it might sell pillows.  My Fulbright coordinator emailed me back and told me that she thought there were two on a street not far from me.  There were.  I walked into the first one but they seemed to only sell bathrobes, comforter sets and towels.

Luckily one of the girls in the shop spoke English and I told her I was looking for a pillow.  She said 80x80? I am not great with the metric system but I knew that was going to be too big.  She told me that they also carry the smaller Italian size (which for the record is still larger than the standard American size). But the pillows are all stored in the back room.  So even though the store was small I never would have looked in and thought oh, here's a store that sells pillows.  I ended up with one of the Italian sized pillows filled with down.  It was only 10 lev more than the other pillow and much, much nicer.  In hindsight, I am pretty sure that I paid too much for it but it is a really nice pillow and the pillowcase I picked out is a nice shade of pink.

Don't worry, I was able to rationalize the purchase on the way home with my "less than a dollar a day theory."  The theory works this way: if you like something but are worried that it might be too expensive, you have to justify the expense.  The way to justify buying the item is to see if you can you can divide the price by the number of uses it takes for the item to be less than a dollar a day.  So for example, if you want to buy a $100 pair of jeans and you think you will wear them two times a week you can justify the purchase.  But it's much harder to say justify the cost of a $200 dress for a wedding if you don't have other events to wear it to.

So you'll be happy to know that I am now rationalizing my purchases in Levs as well.  For the pillow, it takes only a little more than a month for the pillow to dip below the 1 lev a day mark.  But just for the record, even after justifying this purchase with "Carolyn-Math" the thought that I might have paid too much was also reinforced in the store.  This happened after completing my purchase when the salesgirl gave me a brochure for their <a title="My new pillow is from here." href="http://homestudio.bg/" target="_blank">website</a>.   Yes, their website.  The store isn't any bigger than a small-Starbucks and they've got a website. Oh well it's a great pillow and "quality" as I was told more than once in the shop this afternoon.

I walked straight home with my extra-large pillow and then made a list of the other things on my to-do list.  This included taking my garbage out, buying toothpaste, sitting in the park for a little bit, washing some dishes and making sure that I am still on for lunch tomorrow with my landlord and his family.  It's a hard life, I know.

Maybe harder than you think. After buying my awesome pillow, I walked out of my house with a small bag of garbage and looked up and down the street.  I couldn't see a dumpster on my block anywhere.  I then remembered my landlord almost hitting one when he parked near the apartment when he picked me up at the airport.  So I walked that way and up and down two blocks without finding a dumpster.  And the more and more I walked around with this garbage, the more I am beginning to feel like the crazy garbage lady.  I tell myself one more block and if you don't find it you'll take the garbage back up to your apartment.  You'll go to the park and on your way home you'll identify a dumpster, go in and get your garbage and then take it to the dumpster.

There was great people watching at the park but, of course, I couldn't get the garbage thing out of my head.  On my way to the park, I stopped for a bottle of water and when I came out of the shop there was a woman climbing out of a large dumpster--an off-kilter reminder that I couldn't find my own dumpster. Then at the part there was a man with one arm and a bag and he was going through the garbage cans in the part looking for glass bottles.  As a Peace Corps friend explained last night, there is a deposit on beer bottles.  After an hour of sitting in the park eating a large cup of fresh red-raspberries (<em>note: what follows is a huge sidetrack or rambling which I fully recognize and am now going to indulge in...</em>I ate the raspberries without washing them.  Oups but for the record, all of the other little kids were eating  them without washing them...so I hope that I'm okay.  Don't worry they were a great deal for only a lev and I haven't experienced any ill side effects yet. ) I decided that it was time to walk home.  And that's when I saw it! A dumpster only a block and half away from my house.  Yes, yes, yes!!

I went straight up to my first floor apartment (which is as all good Euro-philes know actually the second floor if we are counting American-style) and took my garbage out.  All of this really hard work, required that I take a nap which I took.  Now I've just made dinner and am writing up this post.  It's been a good day in Sofia and shortly, I am going to do my dishes and go to bed.  I've got a new pillow to break in!

<em>Do Skoro! </em>