Chapter 13: Nine days in Bucharest and Bulgaria

Manchester note: though I'm obviously publishing this some days after the mass murder in Manchester, the intro to this was written beforehand and I've decided to leave it as is. The few days in Istanbul that I lost to paranoia are, self-evidently, as nothing to the crime committed against young people - mostly women, this was an assault aimed directly at women and girls, as a friend rightly helped me recognise - that stole lives, physical and mental wellbeing - from so many people. I'm keeping the intro out of fidelity to what I'm trying to do with this blog, which is to tell a story for those who are interested, but also for me to look back on in 40 years and think 'yes, I really did this, and this is how I did it, and why I did it that way', and I'm not sure I should be retrospectively re-editing that sort of thing. It's just so profoundly unfair that those kids will never get to write and look back on their own self-indulgent travel blogs. So unfair.

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There's a hole in my bucket list. The plan for this trip always included Istanbul, right from its earliest sketches through to early this year. Along with Athens and Rome, it's one of the cities that founded Europe, that turned a peninsular at one end of the world into a continent - not geographically, perhaps, but certainly culturally. To do this trip and not include it feels incomplete. It wasn't going to be just Istanbul, either: I wanted to go to Ephesus and perhaps Pamukkale, and I'd resolved that a balloon ride over Cappadocia was going to be one of two outrageously expensive special events along the journey. 

I tried to ignore the buzzing sound in my ear - that perhaps I'd missed my window to visit, that discretion is the better part of valour - for a long time. Each time there was a new incident I'd pull out a calculator and rationalise that even if there was an attack every couple of months, on average, that the odds of being in a terrible place at a terrible time were still minuscule. Last year's coup attempt came and went and still I refused to accept that it wasn't going to happen. Discretion as the better part of valour felt a lot like letting fear win. Fear isn't supposed to win.

The first dent in my resistance came when DFAT downgraded Istanbul to 'reconsider your need to travel'. My preferred travel insurer would no longer cover me, but still I reasoned that I could always buy a second policy to cover me if I still decided to go. After yet another incident around New Years, somebody I trust, who's in a position to make informed judgments about these things, told me it was time to call it. Even then I partly demurred, but rearranged the planned timetable: I'd strip back the time I'd allocated for Turkey, surrender Cappadocia and park a few extra days in Sofia, pending any changes in Istanbul. From Bulgaria it would be easy enough to sneak across the border for a couple of days, even if just to see the Hagia Sophia, if the situation seemed calm.

It didn't happen. Partly that's a function of the fatigue that set in back in Florence and hasn't yet fully subsided (and probably won't). Partly it's that I enjoyed Transylvania a lot and ultimately added a couple of days there, shaving some of the hypothetical Istanbul days back from Sofia. And partly it's because I knew I wouldn't enjoy myself if I spent the whole time jumping at shadows. The maths was on my side - it always was - but understanding that the odds are low and acting as if the odds are low are different things. Thankfully the days where I might have been in Istanbul have come and gone without any further horrors there, as they were always likely to. I can only hope the city's luck, such as it is, continues to hold. Maybe the window will open again one day.

If you can't be with the one you love, then, love the one you're with. Admittedly I didn't love either of Bucharest or Sofia, but we got along well enough. They were both relatively small cities, by European standards, until only 150 years ago and their adolescence was scourged by the wars and Communism. They haven't had the charmed run of it that Melbourne has, and it shows.

Bucharest is the most car-heavy city I've encountered since way back in Dubai. It's still walkable, but parts of it are choked with traffic, something that I'm increasingly not used to and that will feel positively alien by the time I'm back home. Strangely, though, drivers here are more respectful of pedestrians than anywhere else I've been in Europe. It took me far too long to understand the first rule of zebra crossings in Europe, which is that there's really no such thing as zebra crossings, and whoever gets there first has right of way. It's a confidence game. Drivers in Romania actually stop to let you cross, unprompted by your daring them to run you over. A pleasant change. It's not all fun and games for pedestrians, though: there's something about finding exposed wires lying on the footpath - twice - that encourages you to watch your step.

The hostel was an improvement on Brasov, insofar as the bathrooms didn't need sandbagging, but at least the one in Brasov was honest. I booked a six bed dorm, but upon arrival found myself in a room with eight beds. Correction: I found myself in an annex to a room with eight beds: one end didn't have a wall, only a curtain between the room and the main hall. Hmm. I questioned the extra beds - six is the maximum I'll book - and was given an improvised explanation that they'd had a big group the previous week and two of the beds were temporary, and not in use. A few hours later, sure enough, all eight beds were occupied. I considered remonstrating but couldn't be bothered: I'd paid my money, so was unlikely to get anywhere, and I didn't have the energy to find somewhere else even if I could. 

My forbearance was at least rewarded by having the entire space to myself on the third night, and before that I got to enjoy the company of a quartet of Romanian guys, in Bucharest for a Deep Purple concert (did anybody know these guys were still around? Turns out they are 80% alive and 60% still touring). They were obviously heavily into music and I asked if they were a band, because they looked the part. This got me into trouble because one of them pointedly asked which of them I thought was the drummer. Luckily only three of the four were in the room, so I said it was clearly the other guy. They seemed happy with that assessment, but then I'm unsure if they told the other guy.

Although I had two and a half days here, there was really only one significant item on the agenda. The Palace of Parliament was the pet white elephant of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in the 1980s. It's the second largest administrative building in the world, coming in behind the Pentagon: I can only assume nobody told Nicolae until too late, because it's hard to imagine his megalomania could accomodate being bested by the US military, of all institutions. 

The building is a grotesque, but admittedly awe-inspiring monument to unbridled hubris. It's a Communist-era Palace of Versailles, built not for an absolute monarch but an absolute dictator. Indeed, Elena saw Versailles on a state visit to France - I bet she didn't have to line up for three hours - and was entranced by the chandeliers. Thanks to that visit the Parliament now has 8200 chandeliers: more than Versailles. Some are so big that maintaining them requires climbing inside from the floor above. The electricity bill is so enormous that less than half of the lights are turned on, and so the interior exists in a permanent state of gloomy twilight. Because of that and the fact I was allowed to take mobile phone pictures for free, but had to pay $12 to use my proper camera, my photos are even worse than usual. But hopefully these give an idea of the sheer absurdity of it all:

There are over 40 major meeting rooms, each decorated in their own sumptuous style. There are curtains that are six stories high and weigh 450kg. There are chambers for the Senate and Council of Deputies, and then there's a near identical replica chamber of the latter that was intended to become a theatre for Communist party grandees. Monumental halls lead only to more monumental halls: at one point four of them converge in a central atrium, and the doors of each can retract away so that, the guide told me, a semi-trailer can be driven through the building. I suspect they might have had tanks, rather than trucks, in mind though.

Building this Potemkin palace must have chewed up an enormous proportion of what was an already small economy in the 1980s, and I couldn't help but think back to the single room shacks in rural Transylvania. It still wasn't finished when the Ceausescus were literally taken out the back and shot during the 1989 Revolution, and the new government was faced with the question of what to do with the damn thing. Some wanted to knock it down as a symbol of dictatorship: wiser heads pointed to the unfortunate truth that too much money had been wasted on it to tear it down unused. 

It now serves as the Parliament, and, though it'll never earn its keep, they raise some extra cash by hosting conferences in what was the theatre for the apparatchiki. I was quite taken by one of the proposals from the 1990s, though: apparently Donald Trump tried to buy it and turn it into a casino. I suggested they give it to him in return for resigning as President and moving to Romania to run it personally. My tour guide just gave me a look.

I'd given myself an extra day in Bucharest so I could watch the Swans play the next morning and WE WON ANOTHER ONE! The Swans have never lost a match while I have been in Romania. If only the visa waiver period was long enough I might well have settled in for the duration, forgoing such cities as Rome, Prague, Moscow, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam and London for the cause. We've now beaten Brisbane and North Melbourne and I can say with confidence that we are at least the 16th best team in the competition. 

Now. You may have noticed that I am starting to fall behind on this blog somewhat. I've always warned that I struggle mightily with writer's block, and after receiving quite too many overly generous comments about the blog my inner perfectionist screams at me to go back, to re-write, to tinker, to second guess. But that's not been the biggest problem so far. No, my problem has been that whenever I set aside time to write I meet people to talk to instead. 

I had a nine hour train journey from Bucharest to Sofia, which had been assigned to finishing off my Transylvania piece and writing the first half of this one. Then I met a fellow Australian named Ash, who was at Melbourne Uni at the same time I was and lived about 50m from my old home (though he left just before I arrived). We hit it off immediately and my nine hours of writing became nine hours of talking. So if there's any hint of staleness in this post - as if I'm writing while looking in a rear view mirror - blame Ash, not me. He's an enabler. Hopefully we'll see each other again when we're both home.

I kept taking it easy in Sofia, a city where I had very few plans and several days in which to plan them. I set out on my first day for a walk, and with little idea of what I wanted to see I grabbed a map from the hostel reception with a suggested sight-seeing route. It lasted about 15 minutes and half a dozen wrong turns before I gave up. I can't explain it - it's not as if the city has a particularly complicated layout - but every time I'd set out in the direction indicated by the map, and a few minutes later I'd cross-reference on Google Maps and find I'd gone in the opposite direction. So I returned to my tried and true method of aimless wandering until I found something interesting.

The first thing you notice is the footpaths - or at least, they'd better be the first thing you notice. Cobblestones have been trying to kill me ever since Lisbon, and have almost succeeded a number of times (forming an alliance with the snow in Madrid was particularly sneaky), but cobblestones have nothing on Sofia's footpaths. Potholes, broken concrete, raised tram tracks, crumbling phone wire pits, rocks and twisted roots: if you can think of it, Sofia is trying to break your ankles with it. Never mind sight-seeing: I was fully pre-occupied just scouting out the ground in front of me. There are so many broken tiles that in the early evening the entire city chimes to the beat of peak hour. It's quite musical.

Eventually I found my way to the main subway station, where I spotted some oddly Russian-flavoured souvenirs, considering Sofia is in Bulgaria, not Russia:

I may have been tempted, if I were not expecting to have my bags searched on the Russian border in a few weeks.

From there I stumbled across the Sofia History Museum, and given how little I know about Sofia I paid eight leva (about $6) to check it out. They wanted another $12 on top of that to take pictures, though, so I politely declined. The museum isn't very good, unfortunately, consisting mainly of old dresses and furniture, and it somehow completely ignores World War II or Communism. They have staff standing guard in every room, which is normal, but here they get up out of their chairs and follow you from exhibit to exhibit, which is not normal. 

Mostly they were just silent, vaguely intimidating presences looming behind me, but one was very eager to show me their new, prized exhibit. It's a tram, and the most exciting part is that you can climb inside and sit in the tram. I told her that where I live we have trams too, and she nodded and told me again that I could sit in the tram. I said it reminded me of home, where I catch trams to go to work each day. She nodded and repeated that I could sit in the tram. I gave up and sat in the tram.

After being washed out the next day, I eventually made it to the most interesting museum in Sofia: the Museum of Socialist Art. I'd been expecting a bunch of Socialist realist paintings, propaganda posters and statues. There were plenty of the latter, at least, and my old mate Vladimir was looking a little hot out there in the sun so I offered him a drink. He didn't seem impressed by the choice:

Inside, though, I found a surprisingly fascinating museum. Rather than endless heroic farmers and foundry workers, the art was quite modern and sneakily subversive. A favourite topic of the regime was the Communists' struggle against the fascist government during World War II, and so there was plenty of scope for artists to depict interrogations, government brutality and executions that ostensibly represented what the regime thought they did, but that could just as easily be read as commentary on what the artists themselves lived through.

I hadn't planned to go to the Sofia Zoo, anticipating that it wouldn't be any good. But I had time after the art gallery, and it was within walking distance so curiosity got the better of me. It is, indeed, no good and, and then when I turned to leave I realised I didn't know any of the bus routes. So I just went to the stop and hoped I'd be able to communicate to the driver that I wanted to get to the centre of town. The driver of the first bus I boarded - the 93 - simply grunted at the words 'city centre', said a loud 'NO' and used his thumb to indicate I should get the hell off his bus. Fair enough.

The next bus - the 65 - arrived mere seconds later. 'Centre?', I asked. 'Town'? The driver grunted, said 'NO', but this time was helpful enough to give me the bus route I needed. '93!'. 

"Oh!", I complained, and pointed at the 93 that was still only 50m up the road. "He said no!" 

65 grunted again, shrugging his shoulders, suggesting there was nothing he could do. But then he looked ahead and seemingly reconsidered our options. Pointing with his thumb at the nearest available seat, he closed the doors and the bus took off, waving away my wallet when I attempted to buy a ticket. I had no idea what was happening. If this was a kidnap attempt it was poorly thought out: I knew the bus number and the time it was at Sofia Zoo, so we could rule that out. But where was he taking me? I didn't know what the plan was, but from the way we stuck on 93's tail, barreling through a couple of stops in the process, my best guess was that he was trying to overtake our quarry and get me one stop ahead so I could catch the 93 after all.

This continued for a good ten minutes, the driver grunting and muttering to himself every time a car got between us and 93. This was all very exciting - if a touch baffling - but I still didn't know whether 93 was the bus I needed to get into town. We could very well reel in 93, only for me to board the bus, shrug my shoulders at the confused driver who'd told me to go away back at the zoo... and then end up somewhere out in the suburbs. So when I spotted a subway station out the window - subway stations have maps of subway networks, and I could find my way home - I started madly gesticulating for my driver to let me out. He was enjoying the chase, I think, and so he was a bit reluctant but he eventually opened the doors.

That was the high point in Bulgaria. I'd been planning to use the next day for a bush walk: there is allegedly a nice waterfall somewhere on the Vitosha mountain, on the outskirts of Sofia. I'd been battling inexplicably low blood sugar all week, though - on one night I had 1.5 litres of soft drink in the space of 12 hours - and I reluctantly concluded that it was a bad idea to go traipsing around the forest in a foreign country with no rescue service and a limit to how much sugar I could carry. So as much as I'd like to say diabetes doesn't stop me from doing anything, it's not strictly true. 

Instead I just bounced around Sofia, hanging out at the hostel until a fellow guest started murdering a ukulele, and then fled to a hipster vegetarian cafe (which are everywhere here, by the way: an unexpected bonus). The power went out just after my meal arrived. If you want a perfect metaphor for an unequal society, look no further than a restaurant where the stoves aren't working, and those who arrived first are happily eating away while everybody else watches on, hungry but literally powerless.

I wasn't able to book my hostel for the last night in Bulgaria - not unless I wanted to shift to an 18 bed dorm - so I decamped to Plovdiv, a small city a couple of hours away. It was billed, quite rightly, as having a lovely old town and an impressive Roman theatre:

There's now a road tunnel directly underneath that theatre, which I'm sure the conservators were just thrilled about. I wandered about the old town for a while, including finding my way to a lookout on a site that is apparently a contender for the oldest settlement in Europe. But frankly my heart wasn't in it. Tired, and with an exceptionally long commute due the next day, I wish I'd just changed hostels in Sofia and kept lazing about there. 

I needed to eat, so I tried the only restaurant near the hostel with vegetarian options. Upon asking for a table I was told there weren't any by the waiter. Then I found one anyway and spent 20 minutes being ignored before I managed to obtain a menu. Then another 30 minutes of being ignored before managing to order. A Bulgarian man on the next table eventually interceded on my behalf when a waiter spoke to him, but also told me my treatment was "normal". I don't subscribe to the offensive notion that the customer is always right, but surely we can agree that the customer is always at least present?

That meal felt like a tone setter. Plovdiv, nice though it was, was the jumping off point for the worst week of the entire trip.