The Belly of the Whale: A Long, Hard Journey into Greece - Part 1

In Joseph Campbell's Monomyth (more widely known as "The Hero's Journey") there is a point where the hero is hurtled into the dangerous unknown; where he must face his fears in order to further his quest. This point is known as "The Belly of the Whale."

Jay and I reached our whale belly on June 4, 2015. It started at the Pavlikeni train station, in Bulgaria. It ended (as things do) over two glasses of red wine on a Santorini beach. In between there were fleas and pseudo-muggings, delayed trains and delayed planes, lost items and missed meals... and there were also some bona fide gaurdian angels. But I'm getting ahead of myself here....

Let's start with the fleas.

Out of respect for our well-meaning hosts, I must acknowledge how tidy they were. They swept their kitchen after dinner every night. They didn't hoard unnecessary items. They did laundry often.

It didn't change the fact that there were fleas living in the basement of their rental house. And those fleas found me. And in the course of two weeks, they bit me 41 times.

Three days into our stay I noticed a constellation of tiny red dots around my ankle, which hadn't been there during our train ride from Bucharest. There was another, smaller collection on my other ankle. The next morning my lower back started to itch, and I found seven more identical bites there. By this time I'd spotted what looked like a flea jumping around on the bed, so we decided to shake out  the sheets and let them fry in the hot sunlight outside. Jay also took a vacuum to every surface of our room.

This was more of a treatment than a remedy. Over the next week, I woke up to flea bites on my shoulders, ankles, forearms, hands, upper chest, BELLY BUTTON, and (to my great horror) in a neat little arch across my left breast. These were delivered in spite of my new pajama situation, which included full-length leggings tucked into tall socks, a sleep bra under a camisole under a long-sleeved shirt (which was itself tucked into the leggings and safety-pinned across the v-neck), and a satchel of lavendar stuffed down my cleavage. It was 85-degrees here during the day; I don't need to tell you how many of those layers were unnecessary under a sheet and comforter, not to mention how geeky I looked.

As the bites persisted, my sanity waned. Specks of dirt on the bed seemed to jump to life in the corner of my eye. Crawling sensations on my upper body had me turning on the light to inspect myself. I swore I could hear them planning their next attack. By the end of our stay, I thought I might ask to sleep on the floor of the kitchen.

On our last night in Bulgaria, I took to the pantry to defend myself. I found a clove of garlic and ate the whole thing raw. I cut the top off a lemon and rubbed the juice all over my arms, torso, and face. I came to bed smelling like a dinner salad, but (spoiler alert) I didn't endure a single bite that night.

That same evening, as I was on my way to the kitchen, I noticed small furry shape in the darkness jet across my path and into a crevice in the stone staircase beside me. I didn't think anything of it until I woke up at 2:00am to the sound of something skittering across the plastic casing of the couch beside our bed.

"Jay..." I whispered through the darkness, "Do you hear that?"

Jay sat up in reluctant confirmation and grabbed our lamp off the nightstand. In the shadows, the couch continued to rustle. Jay gave it a prod with the light. Nothing. He shifted the couch. Nothing. At last we realized the skittering noise was coming from the stone just behind our head. Yep, there were mice running through the walls.

We rolled over and went back to sleep, willing tomorrow to gallop apace.

I woke up at 5:30am and hopped out of bed instantly. About 4 hours later, Jay and I were seated at the Pavlikeni train station, having breakfasted and bid goodbye to our hosts and the fleas, dreaming of the black sand beaches that lay only hours ahead.

The day was busy, but simple enough: We'd catch a train to Sofia, where we'd have a 40 minute layover to find a quick dinner and purchase tickets for the daily train into Thessaloniki. There, we'd spend the night with our first-ever Couchsurfing hosts and fly into Santorini the next afternoon.

For a beautiful 15 minutes on a train station bench, this plan appeared fool-proof.

We had attempted to purchase a reservation ticket with the Bulgarian-speaking ticket mistress upon arrival at the station, but she assured us our Eurail passes would serve the same purpose. The train wasn't due for another hour, so we'd settled on a bench to pass the time.

About 20 minutes into this hour, Ticket Mistress was back with an espresso mug in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She continued to speak Bulgarian to us with admirable faith in our comprehension (which in reality was nonexistent.) I heard something about a delay, Jay heard something about a ticket, and eventually we cobbled together we would in fact need to purchase the reservation to Sofia. So I pulled out my Visa...

"No visa. No card. Cash only."

Of course it was cash only. We were in the middle of no-man's-land Eastern Europe. As our meals and lodging had been provided by our Work Away hosts, we hadn't bothered to take out any Bulgarian lev. Jay held up a Hungarian bill and a euro note, at a loss. I glanced around for an ATM.

Jay went back in to the office with our guidebook dictionary. I didn't know it at the time, but he was on the phone with Ticket Mistress' daughter, who was hurriedly translating English directions to the nearest bank. As it happened, the bank was about a mile away.

Jay yelled something of this to me as he raced out of the station with the euro in hand. In our pile of luggage, I began to panic. I considered standing up and shouting about our predicament to the passengers around us. Maybe one of them was Hungarian and would exchange with us? I had an adjustable diamond-looking ring on my finger... could I fib a honeymoon sob story? Or maybe we could do a clown routine... or Shakespearean monologues? Something told me that even Jay's best Macbeth wouldn't earn us 15 lev in 30 minutes.

Fifteen minutes later, and about five minutes before our train was due, Jay came sweating and panting back onto the platform. He'd sprinted the mile and back, and was clutching a fistful of Bulgarian cash -- quite literally our ticket out. I made a big show of kissing him for this, and felt the urge to cry and thank a God I never knew I had. We got the tickets. We looked on for the train.

To be continued....