My Bulgarian Babas
For my whole life, I've referred to my dad's mother not as “Grandma,” but as “ Baba ” — a term meaning “grandmother” (or “old woman”) in a handful of Slavic languages. Most of my family is Slovak, so this isn't really all that weird. This summer in Bulgaria, though, I adopted a couple of new Babas. It was early July, and my Intrepid Travel group had already been traveling together for more than two weeks through Eastern Europe. We'd gone wine tasting in Hungary, visited castles and fortresses in Romania, and gorged ourselves on traditional Eastern European food. Now we were in Bulgaria, discovering a beautiful country that I had never anticipated finding. We were in the village of Gorno Draglishte, a tiny town near the base of both the Rila and Pirin mountain ranges. It's one of those villages that you're not quite sure even exists anymore before you get there — where nobody speaks English and agriculture is still the only...