Bulgaria for lunch

I went to Bulgaria for lunch last Saturday, and was back in Istanbul for dinner. I left Istanbul around 8am to meet a fellow couchsurfer, and we headed off to the Istanbul bus station. The bus station itself is a labyrinthine structure, made up of dark passageways that these huge Coach buses somehow make their way through, winding up to the top deck, past garages to fix broken down buses, dry cleaning shops, magazine stands, tiny restaurants and tea houses. It's like a regular city, settled in the bowels of a giant structure, complete with its own mosque and homeless population. Finally, we made it to the top of the building, found the correct bus and were on our way to Bulgaria. Marry, the girl I was traveling with, and I both needed to cross the border to renew our Turkish visas. She's from France and we both are allowed to stay in Turkey for three months before having to renew our visas. For both of us, time was almost up, and after a little research, found that the closest border was the Turkey/Bulgaria border, just north of Istanbul.
It took a little over two hours to reach the border town, then we had to take a taxi the last 15 km to the actual border. We must have been a strange sight, exiting the taxi with just our hand bags, and walking past the cars waiting in line to cross the border. We literally walked from Turkey to Bulgaria, collecting the necessary stamps along the way from the border police. Luckily, between the two of us, we knew enough Turkish to ask what the procedure was, and the process was relatively easy. Once we got our Bulgarian stamps, we promptly turned around and reversed the process, literally staying in Bulgaria for the three minutes it took to walk over the border again.
I was really happy to see a duty free shop on the Turkish side, and was excited to get to buy a couple of bottles of good wine without having to sell a spare body part to afford it (as seems the case in the rest of Turkey). Really, it's about $30 US for a decent bottle of wine in a store (absolutely ridiculous considering that it's equal to more than one day's pay for most people), and you can forget about buying wine in a restaurant. I don't have enough money in my checking account to cover the cost! There's plenty of relatively inexpensive Turkish wine, but I'd rather drink a liter of gasoline than go that route. So, I rarely get to drink anything decent. Needless to say, I was psyched at the thought of getting to bring back 2 bottles of great looking Chilean wine for a mere 6 Euros/bottle. Until Merry had to open her big French mouth at the check out. She just HAD to go and use some of her limited Turkish to explain that we were only over the border for a minute, then were back in Turkey! ARGH!!!! Why!?!?!? In my view, there is never a reason to talk to anyone near the border, especially anyone in any kind of official capacity, lest the figure out that we're straddling the line of legal/illegal by doing a "border run." It turns out that to shop in the duty free shop, one must be out of the country for at least 3 days. Well, I'm sure they were not going to look through all of the stamps in each of our passports to try to figure out when we left and came back, so we would have been in the clear. However, the store clerk called over the manager and he informed us that we couldn't buy anything. I was really angry, but it wouldn't have helped to get mad at her. She's French. She can't help it. I did, however, tell her to keep her big, fat, French mouth shut before we got our final stamps from the Turkish police upon reentering the country. (Not in so many words, mind you. I was a tiny bit nicer in the way I put it). I could deal without the wine, but to have to stay in Bulgaria for any length of time (and potentially miss work because of her) was NOT going to fly well with me. Luckily, we crossed without a problem, took a taxi back to the border town and caught a shuttle to the bus station in time to get an earlier bus than we had planned. We made it back to Istanbul in time for dinner, and I'm happy that I have another 3 months here without having to worry about violating my visa limitations. Just next time, I'll be going ALONE and getting that damn wine!