Two of the showers in my house are not actually showers, but are bathtubs under steeply sloped ceilings that prevent you from standing. However, they do have shower heads. Therefore, you sit while you shower. Well, my first and possibly only sit down shower ended in excruciating pain.
I mostly just wanted to quickly wash the dirt off my feet since I had been walking around outside barefoot, as usual. I came in, sat in the shower and successfully washed off my feet and legs and then I went to stand up. Now, anyone who knows me even marginally well knows I am extremely clumsy and I have the scars to prove it. As I stood up I clipped my hip on the faucet so hard that I almost cried. I had to lay down in the tub and recover for about a minute before carefully trying to stand again. I now have a lovely bruise that sets right under any bag I try to carry over my shoulders.
In that same bathroom is a toilet (shocking, I know) that was continuously running. My roommate attempted to fix it with a rubber band, but it turns out that the inside of a Bulgarian toilet is not very similar to its American counterpart. I looked inside and immediately asked about the whereabouts of the flapper. So, with the leak stopped by good old fashioned American ingenuity and MacGyver like rubber band skills, I submitted a work order to have the toilet fixed. It didn’t leak, but it also didn’t flush.
A brief couple of hours later, the doorbell rang and the maintence men entered Pink house and headed up to assess the damage. I reliably know about 5 words in Bulgarian, one of them being “Bulgarian,” and none of those words were used by those men. From the downstairs I could hear them discussing the situation, and while I didn’t understand a single word that was said, I’m pretty sure at least one comment was made on the rubber band that either started or ended with “women.”
Soon they were coming downstairs and apparently needed to communicate some information to me. They came in and started speaking Bulgarian and when they were met with my puzzled expression, rolled their eyes and laughed a little and tried to go for one word: Utro. Also, not one of my five. So, they laughed and turned to my roommate, added some hand jestures and again said, “utro.” My roommate responded with, "Water?" More laughing and they gave up and left. We went upstairs and noticed the toilet was still not operational.
We joked that utro was probably some sort of flirty pick-up line. Maintainence guys: Utro (roughly translated by us: Hey baby, what are you doing later?). Roommate response: Water????
At the new teacher meeting the next day, I asked one of the new Bulgarian teachers what Utro meant. Apparently it means morning, which makes sense, since they came back in the morning and finished our toilet. And now, my word count has gone up to six.
