Issue 41-42

"My hair!" Miss USA shrieks.

Miss USA and her coaches do not have enough time to get new extensions that match. Her roommate, Miss Germany, offers to cut her own locks. She's such a martyr, even though she's the perfect Aryan specimen, with a golden lion's mane and sleeping pill-blue eyes. Maybe she feels guilty. Miss Israel reminds Miss USA that it's not the end of the world.

"How would you know?" asks Miss Palestine, who can't officially compete but hopes to tapdance in the opening number.

"Really, is not so bad," says Miss Afghanistan. "Is only little hair."

Angels and junk: it takes an unusual mind to bridge the gap. But Magdalena Miteva certainly has that. She is involved in many projects: she puts on puppet theatre for adults, a somewhat neglected art in Bulgaria, makes lamps and decorates clubs and cafeÅLs with her ideas.

When I travel in a bus, I avoid reading, because it makes me ill. Only I don't feel sick when I peep over at the magazine of my neighbour sitting diagonally across the aisle or at the exceptionally stupid newspaper of the passenger next to me. If the newspaper were mine – not that I would have bought it, never ever! – but if it were mine, I wouldn't have read any of its articles. And anyway, furtively, I don't manage to read even one, and I'll never find out what happens to the woman who has married one and the same man for the fourth time, or even whether Marek FC will qualify for….

All had gone well on the outward leg of the journey. On our return we made our way via taxi to the bus station in Sofia at approximately 7:15 pm, just in time to miss the 7 pm coach. Then there was a three-and-a-half-hour wait for the next departure at 10:30. Now at 10:30 there are three coaches that all leave at the same time, all to the same destination, all stopping at the same places and each a third full. What great planning, whoever arranges timetables must have a strange sense of humour.