Shuffle in Sofia06.05.2006
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Alexander Nevski Slept Here
| New country on the list! Now I know why my friends here always recommend the bus. I tell them the train offers the chance to stand up, and goes through parts of countries not served by highways. I was thinking about this as the train from Nis dawdled along and I watched the buses pass it on the nearby highway...and how standing up in the hallway is a necessity when you are surrounded by five lager louts who have planted themselves on the train without a ticket and whose friendly, albeit drunken, demanour alters to consternation when they offer me a cigarette and I politely motion that they should be smoking in the hallway. I thought I was on pretty firm ground with that one; that's how it works in Romania and Hungary...not southern Serbia, evidently. So I gently disengaged myself from the blue fog in the cabin, and from a conversation big on details ("we...have...twenty litres...beer...before") and short on verbs and niggling things like prepositions or comprehensibility, and trek into the next car in search of a better journey fit. There's a cabin with a little old lady with two enormous bags, and she is most eager to have a nice young (!?) man keeping her company...as it turns out, she wants me to lift those bags off the train when she departs. Smart, these little old ladies. However, I'm happy to do so and escape the louts, even though lager lout number tracks me down in the hallway as I look out at glorious green mountains rolling by, to practise his drunken bar English. We talk football (soccer) and Serbian girls, and afterwards he drops by the cabin, deeply offending L.O.L., and asking me for five dollars so the boys can stay on the train. I politely decline the offer to be the too-polite Canadian. L.O.L. departs, helped by any number of stout Serbian lads, and for a precious moment, the cabin is mine. Then a buzzing hive of five teenaged girls descends on me. Now, anyone who knows me would observe that this does not sound like hell on earth. And certainly the girls had their charms - one fetchingly sneezed in my direction incessantly throughout the ride into Bulgaria, for instance. The others smoked without even asking if I minded, establishing a level of insouciance well below that of the lager louts. Howls of laughter as they tried out MTV English phrases, followed by about two hours of bleak silent despair. I mean, how can you not love Slavic people? Finally Sofia hove into view, and the real adventure began. I had a small Lonely Planet map to get me into the downtown, my hosts having given me absolutely no help at all either with hotels, pick ups, or anything else for the moment...Sofia got better and better as the train station receded. It even has a Dunkin Donuts, so it must be OK. I located my hotel after walking right past it - don't laugh until you are in a city with nearly 100% Cyrillic signage - and experienced that spooky "Lonely Planet is right again" feeling I occasionally get from the guide book. The people I've met so far start out crusty and get progressively friendlier. Much like the city itself. Or my family in the morning. I'm near the Radisson, or "the Rad" as I call it, which is notable only because I know it's a place I can always go for a Herald Tribune. There is a lot of Soviet era architecture left here - the Bulgarians, amongst the Balkan nations, were never in a hurry to destroy communism - but also a lot of heroic 19th century stuff, and statuary everywhere; the giant statue of Saint Sofia has this weird gold face that makes her look like she wandered out of a James Bond movie that went straight to DVD. The streets are narrow and winding, and covered in gold-covered bricks ("you not in Kansas anymo' Dorothy!") so you can trundle down a street and pow! a sudden visual surprise awaits you around an unseen corner. Amongst the non-surprises: one is NEVER safe from cars - one of them tracked me down a sidewalk on a major street for about fifty metres before giving up, kind of like Herbie in that Lindsay Lohan movie but more vicious. Few of the bank machines recognise my card. Or, more accurately, they recognise it and don't like it. Except for the one I call Banka Jack, which is what the Cyrillic looks like. There's one on General Gurko street, which makes me giggle and think of Team America: World Police. I call it General Gurka Durka. There's a helpful grocery store near the hotel, which is large and airy. I say airy because there's is mostly nothing but air. No cheese, no drinks in the cabinets, few canned goods. It's a virtual grocery, I guess. Across the street there's a window that opens at foot level on the sidewalk, where a guy can sell you a whole lot more. I just have to look down more. The hotel room is basic socialist functional, with one of those toilets with a high ridge inside, so that the olfactory implications of late night snacks become unavoidably apparent. It's a class joint; they put plastic on the glass in the bathroom, although they forgot to tuck it in. Or wash the glass. For breakfast you go down to the main floor and then back up to the mezzanine. They will not tell you why. I no longer ask. I am, after all, a temporary Bulgarian. |
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