Woke around half six; a reasonably good night with only mildly peculiar dreams, but as we’d been up past eleven the previous evening experiencing a Plovdiv jazz club and then walking back over the river to the flat we’re renting, still feeling rather tired. A. hasn’t slept at all well, so is immediately disturbed when I reach for my glass of water, and puts on Radio 4 via the iPad. Time difference means a lot of World Service for an hour, a rather banal science-y programme but with some amiable-sounding contributors, followed by the shipping forecast and the news. Summary of the headlines in the papers suggests that the entire UK is thinking of nothing but the health of the King.
This, combined with the appalling behaviour of a bunch of middle-aged Brits (possibly the Billericay Gavin & Stacey Re-enactment Society) in the club yesterday, does nothing to lift the feeling of slight despondency that the holiday is coming to an end. But we have missed the cats (and can now start planning in earnest for the need to mollify them for being abandoned in time to start mollifying them for a possible addition to the family). And we do have a day and a half in Sofia to look forward to – now crossing our fingers that the quota of pasty Essex stereotypes enjoying cheap Bulgarian booze on a Ryanair weekend break has been filled. Yes, that’s a very Deplorables sort of comment, but if you want to get pissed and laugh uproariously at your own jokes, YOU DON’T DO IT IN A FUCKING JAZZ CLUB.
Even if it’s a synthesiser-drums duo playing something like a cross between late-period Esbjörn Svensson Trio and early Tangerine Dream. And especially when my Bulgarian is inadequate either to apologise for my compatriots or to explain that I will willingly return to testify in the keyboard player’s defence if he snaps and starts punching them.
Breakfast (trying to finish as much as possible of the nice food that it makes no sense to take with us, especially the cheese), packing, tidying flat and trying to write the most legible note I can manage to explain that I bought the wrong sort of pods for the coffee machine – silly me, going with a brand name – and I hope they can find someone who can use them. We go down the stairs, not trusting the lift (the contrast between the gloriously modernised appartment and a central stairwell that is apparently being preserved as a set for a gritty ‘life under socialism’ film is remarkable) and walk to the bus stop just in time to miss both the buses we could have taken to the station. The next ones aren’t for another half an hour, plenty of time to catch our train but potentially boring, so as it’s a lovely morning we decide to walk; pretty view as we cross the Maritsa river, then Russian Boulevard, a very long, straight road lined with trees that are unfortunately suffering from serious dieback. A good view of the statue of the Known Soldier – a depiction of a heroic Russian liberator, generously donated by the Russian liberators, and apparently still standing – having at various times had to be protected from would-be topplers – simply because no one can agree what to replace it with, plus it offers good shade.
The stately boulevard ends in a building site with no clear route to the station on the other side. Once we find our way across through trial and error and buy our tickets, we find a similar theme with the station; signs to Platform 8 bring one to Platform 10 (but this is evident only if you find one of the two small A4 sheets announcing this) and to the gradual realisation that the flimsy-looking metal gangway on the other side of the tracks is Platform 8. They could actually sell this experience to Brits – ‘Passengers MUST cross the lines’. We time our move carefully, minimising exposure to blazing sunshine over on the gangway but early enough that we can make our way to the anticipated location of our reserved seats rather than getting stuck in the scrum that develops at the end by the designated crossing (younger and more enterprising locals simply jump down from Platform 10 and walk straight across), which gets much worse when the train arrives and other people want to disembark.
First class was sold out – but since second class passengers also get reserved seats in a compartment, it would seem that the only real difference is that first-class passengers get heating, and since it’s a glorious sunny day this is not a problem. The compartment for seats 71-76 is fully occupied – indeed, the husband of the woman opposite, who has a Jane Austen-themed handbag, has been sold a reservation for Seat 77, which either doesn’t exist (the next compartment is 81-6, the one before 61-6) or entitles him to stand in the corridor. This occasions general hilarity and much gesticulation, some of which gets translated for our benefit as it turns out that they had lived in east London for over a decade. It’s striking – okay, this is me being very English – how often everyone in the compartment starts chatting, though when that couple get out an hour or so into the journey, it’s entirely in Bulgarian and we just have to enjoy the sounds.
They’re replaced by a teenage couple; he slightly pudgy with ginger-brown curls, she dark-haired and made up to the nines, including an elaborate job around the mouth that is either enhancing lip filler or creating the illusion of it. I blame some Kardashian or other, and will now find a cloud to yell at. Superficially, she is several magnitudes out of his league, but that’s not what the body language suggests – yes, a bit of social observation helps fill the bits of the remaining two hours that don’t offer either scenic wooded hills or striking examples of post-industrial decay.
We trundle along, with very occasional bursts of acceleration accompanied by noises suggesting that the engines really canna take it, cap’n. This is the express service; it’s quite difficult to imagine how the slower trains manage to take even longer. There are some signs of work to develop a second line, or possibly a rest station for the donkeys, but it doesn’t look as if it will be operational any time soon.
Things start to get entertaining when we reach Sofia: a small group of Levski Sofia fans had been on the train from before Plovdiv, and were generally quiet and well behaved – from the sound of her occasional interventions in other compartments, no one would want to cross the formidable ticket collector – but when they’re met at the station by a group of very good-humoured police with a dog, they clearly feel need to start chanting a bit. Even more so on the Metro, with added pogoing, which we had to enjoy for two stops before they changed for the stadium. We carried on to our hotel, and from our room – we’re staying this time on the top floor with two balconies and a glorious view of Mount Vitosha’s snow-covered peak over the rooftops – we can hear cheering from the stadium as the match starts.
It turns out – the Internet tells me – to be a derby between Levski Sofia and CSKA Sofia, as part of the championship round in which the top six in the league at the end of the main season play another mini-league amongst themselves. The history of Bulgarian football looks rather interesting; a number of clubs founded early in the 20th century (with a penchant for naming themselves after national heroes – Levski Sofia, Botev Plovdiv) and then assorted post-WWII teams with familiar Warsaw Pact names: Lokomotiv, CSKA (the army team). (One wonders whether the championship round was once, in the communist era, a cunning means of ensuring that the ‘correct’ team won – it surely would have been in the DDR…).
We relax for a couple of hours over a cup of tea – walking tour of the city planned for tomorrow morning, so need to conserve energy – then head out to find some food, since various restaurants have all ignored our attempts at booking a table by online form or email. The first place we try has all its tables reserved, but we book for the following night; the second likewise, but in fact they’re happy to accommodate us if we promise to eat up in an hour and a half. Superb food, yet again – we’ve had only one disappointing meal over the entire holiday. Bulgarian cuisine seems to be equally prepared for summer and winter; on the one hand the emphasis on fresh salads (with cheese) and lightly grilled vegetables (with cheese), on the other hand cabbage leaves stuffed with spiced mince and rice reminiscent of Poland or Hungary (A.’s choice) and kapama, layers of pickled cabbage, chicken, pork and sausage baked under a thin pastry crust that might as well be the final output of a working group tasked with devising a dish to appeal to me specifically.
We waddle onwards to explore a couple of Sofia’s craft beer bars/shops. One is entirely full of young men and playing hard rock, the other is called Nosferatu and explicitly advertises itself as a heavy metal bar; both actually feel perfectly friendly, but I can completely understand why A. doesn’t feel entirely comfortable, and so I grab a couple of imperial stouts from each and we head back to the hotel. I do worry slightly about how much 10-12% ABV beer I’m now going to have to drink to get my suitcase under the weight limit, but they looked so appealing (okay, apart from the one called Beef Juice that A. insisted I must buy). I’m most struck by the fact that one Bulgarian brewery has started selling imperial stouts in 250ml cans, which is a brilliant idea for really strong beers and I now can’t imagine why more breweries don’t do this.
Back at the hotel we enjoy some leisurely drinks and conversation – mostly about food and beer, but a minor excursion into the possible reception history of Thucydides in Bulgaria that I’m sure A. found fascinating. This is interspersed with a bit of bat detecting; not as good as Thessaloniki, where we were above a busy street full of traffic but still got a wide range of exotic species – but a couple of very energetic pipistrelles, one fairly unusual in the UK and one not found at all, plus a European Free-Tailed Bat. Then off to bed, relatively early after the previous night. Read a few more chapters of Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, picked up on a whim for the holiday (a friend mentioned it on social media) simply because it’s Bulgarian, and now elevated to the status of one of my twenty favourite books before I’ve even finished it. I suppose that status could be withdrawn if the ending is a car-crash, but the first 85% is the literary equivalent of kapama, insofar as it could have been written to push my buttons – playful, ironic, profound, reflecting on personal and national histories and identities and the influence of the past on the present. Perec, Durrell, Erpenbeck, Calvino – you have a new friend; please play nice. Off to sleep thinking of how I’m going to write more about this at some point.
Thankyou Neville: I love these diary entries, and now I have a new book recommendation too.