"Hello, my name is Yordan," said the man, and shook my hand. I was in no mood to make friends. The station looked nothing like the Bulgarian Switzerland my guidebook had promised. A young female assistant of a local politician was supposed to pick me up, and Yordan was neither young nor female.

Veliko Tarnovo overlooks a mountain gorge.

But helpful he was.

"Come, I take you to town," he said. "I know a family, and you can stay with them. Very nice family." Having no better offer, I followed him onto a desperately old bus, which took us to the outskirts of a town that looked more like Swaziland than Switzerland. Every building wanted to fall apart, and there were craters on the road that were large enough to swallow a Land Rover.

Will the European Union change all this once Bulgaria joins as planned in 2007? "I don't know," Yordan shrugged. "I don't trust E.U. They will come here and buy everything, and we will be no job."

"Here," Yordan said, "this is house." He summoned me into the home of a quiet Gypsy lady, who sat on a leather sofa watching a Brazilian soap opera in Bulgarian. She stood up and took my passport. "She will give it back to you when you pay her," Yordan said, pocketing the euro I gave him, and walked away.

PR chief Ivan Krastev works to teach the townsfolk about the European Union.

Veliko Tarnovo is not huge, and my room was apparently not far from the town center. I went to the municipal building and found Ivan Krastev, the town's public relations chief, who apologized and said he had sent his assistant to another railway station, thinking international trains don't stop here.

Many people still idealize the European Union, he said. Yordan must be an exception, because two-thirds of the country want to join the alliance and are convinced that everything will get better once they start to get their paychecks in euros.

"That's actually what's difficult," he explained. "We have three years to prepare them that the E.U. will mean obligations as well as opportunity, and it won't be a hen that lays golden eggs."

There are some 90,000 pages of E.U. rules that Bulgaria will have to play by. But membership does promise locals very tangible benefits, such as the Union's generous agricultural subsidy system and the regional development funds, each of which can potentially inject billions of euros per year into the Bulgarian economy.

Free Bulgarian Medics in Libya! Nearly every waiter in town wore the T-shirt.

Krastev, tired and sweating in the midday heat, showed me a local restaurant where he said they made the best shopska, the famous Bulgarian salad of vegetables and white cheese. It was a nice terrace, with traditional carved wood decorations and red tablecloths. But what really struck me was the server's T-shirt.

"Free the Bulgarian Medics in Libya," it said. Almost every server in town, I would learn, wore that slogan. And it wasn't only on servers' T-shirts -- it was everywhere, from bills posted on lampposts to giant posters affixed to walls. The five medics were being held hostage on the bizarre charge that they intentionally infected people with AIDS -- an obvious lie, people said here, to cover up failures in Libya's own health care system.

The 800-year-old Tsarevets Castle bathes in the nightly light show, a new tourist attraction.

Bulgaria, a fresh member of NATO, was also learning fast that being allied with the West is not always a happy experience. Bulgarian soldiers were getting killed in Iraq, six since December 2003.

That evening, wandering around Veliko Tarnovo, I understood the comparison with Switzerland. A large royal fortress from the 13th century sat on a nearby hilltop, and the streets that covered the steep slopes and descended into the gorges exuded the air of an Alpine community, though one that hasn't been painted in a few decades.

"Maybe things will be better," said Yordan, who appeared at the station the next day. He was waiting for the Istanbul-Bucharest train, apparently a lucrative source of tourists to lure into unregistered guesthouses. "If we have to suffer a little bit, that's OK. Europe will come here and give us money, but we have to work hard first. And the Americans -- they are our new friends now, and if they want help, we have to help them, no?"

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printable version of "EUROPE: The Re-Orient Express"