Tags
Architecture, Bucharest, Bulgaria, Romania, Ruse, Train Journeys, Varna
The Home Stretch
I’m not as joyful about travel as I was to begin with. A lot of the mini triumphs have become commonplace and a lot of the fun to be had when things don’t quite go according to plan has ceased to be so entertaining. The excitement at seeing new things has waned. A church. Another church. A different church in a new country. A ruined fort in Bulgaria looks much the same as one in Wales these days.
The end is in sight. The end to living out of a rucksack, which, for the most part, I have quite enjoyed. It’s oddly liberating, not having a wardrobe full of clothes and shelves of possessions.
The end to waking up in a new town every three or four days, which will be more than a little strange.
The end to not having any responsibilities other than to myself. The end of “Oh, I don’t much like it here, let’s go somewhere else,” or “Wow, this is cool, maybe I’ll stay an extra night.”
I can’t get into my flat until September, when my tenants’ contract runs out. I’m going to have to find a job.
It sounds awful.
Yet home is still calling. I’ve decided to answer. I’ll be on a plane in about a week.
Irritants of Bureaucracy, Inefficiency and Things that Don’t Work
I’m in Varna, on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. I haven’t written about Varna, mainly because there hasn’t been an awful lot to write about. It’s a slightly run-down port city with a pretty park overlooking the sea. There’s a nice cathedral. The beach is quite nice. There are some nice bars.
I haven’t really taken any pictures of Varna either, because there is nothing new grabbing my eye. In the manner of many communist era cities and towns, it resembles Stevenage. It’s Stevenage on Sea.
I have spent far more time working out how to get out of Varna than enjoying being in it. Not because I hate Varna so much, but because the information I found online about buses to my next destination does not seem to add up with reality.
I pretty much always make sure of my next journey before settling down to enjoy the place I’m in because I like to know I’m not about to get stuck with any nasty surprises, transport-wise, when it’s too late to fix it.
I walk to the bus station to enquire about a bus that, according to a Romanian bus website, runs several times daily from here to Vama Veche, a tiny coastal town in southern Romania, a town just across the border from Bulgaria.
I get directed to the information kiosk by the slightly confused lady in the ticket office. The information kiosk lady directs me to a bus company office across the way. The bus company office is shut. I go back to the lady in the kiosk. I think she’s saying it will be shut all day. She writes something down on a scrap of paper for me with a hopeless but helpful air. It’s in Bulgarian. I run it through Google Translate back at the hostel – seems the bus to Vama Veche only goes twice a week and not on the day I need it to run.
Arse.
Then I realise that the closed bus company office is a different company to the one mentioned on the Romanian website. I check the internet. Yep. I dig a little more. Aha. This bus departs from the cathedral, not the bus station. I walk to the cathedral. There are about a million bus stops, each unsigned. There is no office – ticket, information or otherwise. The nearby tourist office is shut.
I have spent an entire morning and part of an afternoon trying to solve this. I give up for the day and sit on the beach.
The next day, the tourist office is open but they haven’t a clue about the bus I’m talking about. They say, “If it says so on the internet, I’m sure it will be here.” They say, “Probably that stop at the front of the cathedral.” They shrug a bit and try to look encouraging.
I am unconvinced. I decide to check the time of the train to Bucharest as a plan B. It departs before my bus.
Arse.
I decide that if the bus doesn’t materialise, I will stay an extra night in Varna and depart for Bucharest the next day.
So as not to bore you by telling you about me sitting on a bench for two hours with all my luggage, a sandwich and a book, keeping an eye out for a non-existent bus, I will just say that plan B is what occurred.
With very numb buttocks, after checking in to a hotel as a treat, I wend my way to the nearby train station. “Can I have a ticket to Bucharest tomorrow morning, please?” She eyes me over her glasses. Her colleague nudges closer. “Bucharest? Tomorrow?” “Da, molya.” She turns to her colleague, who is better at English. “Do you know the timetable?” The English speaker asks me.
Eh?
Are you the one who works here, sitting with the computer behind a glass window, or am I getting mixed up here?
Of course I have the timetable. I don’t go near a train station or a bus station without having first looked things up on the internet. That’s hardly the point, though.
I fight hard to stop myself from giving her the Barrett Stare with Raised Eyebrow. Actually, I think that might be the Wilson Stare, from my mother’s side of the family. My aunt is awesome at it. Then again, my dad can do a killer glance that can very nearly stun a person.
Perhaps both sides do it, in which case there was never really much hope of me not possessing the Death Stare. It’s a useful talent at times, but it don’t half put people off approaching you when you do it by accident.
A common comment I still receive and have been receiving since I was a student is, “Well, I wouldn’t fuck with you…” (someone said that to me in Nice, actually, when we were having a laugh and playing cards and sharing a bottle of wine). Another one is, “When I first met you, you scared the crap out of me.” Even my best friend said that. Still does, when she thinks I won’t hit her.
Anyway. Back to the point.
I slide my notebook through the window for The English Speaker to look at. She manages to read my rough writing. “Varna 9.20, change at Ruse for 14.30?” she asks.
How funny you should guess.
I have travel apathy, there’s no doubt about it. The first leg of this journey is the first trip that I’ve not been excited about. I’m not bothered by what’s passing by the window. The apathy continues on the second leg , after I change trains at the border. Then, suddenly, I register what it is I’m looking at. It’s a big river. A very big river. I sit up a little. That’s the Danube, surely. The Blue Danube.
Can I be bothered to dig my camera out, that’s the issue. Not really. I sit and stare at the river, feeling a little itchy and not because of flea bites. I’m itchy for my camera. Now we are half way across. If I get the camera now, I’ll be too busy pulling it out of my bag to be looking at the river that I really want to look at. Can I really be bothered? By the time I’ve found it, the river will have gone. Can I really be really bothered?
YES.
Obviously.
Suddenly I’ve ripped my small backpack open and am excavating for my camera, standing up and sticking my head out of the open window, the camera strapped around my neck, the wind whipping my hair around my ears and cheeks.
After that, it’s like I’ve turned into a happy dog in a car with the window wound down. I wouldn’t pull my head back in if you paid me.
Romania is huge. If the part of Bulgaria I’ve just come from resembles the countryside in Devon, Yorkshire, Cumbria… this part of Romania is the Fens. It is the savannah. It is the wide open prairie. It just goes and goes, on and on, as far as the eye can see. Wide and flat and wide and flat and forever.
Bucharest
As soon as I exit Gara de Nord, I kinda love Bucharest. For no reason. It’s just brilliant. Maybe it’s because it feels more familiar than the other places I’ve been of late; it feels a bit more like home than Bulgaria or Albania, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve heard it described as the Paris of Eastern Europe. I don’t know if I’d go that far, although you have to admit that the train station has a very Parisian name. Maybe that’s why? Or maybe the bloke who told me that was insane. It’s possible – he was a random I met on a train.
There already exists a Paris in the world; we don’t need another. Bucharest will do me fine just being Bucharest.
On the tram to the centre of town, we pass a sex shop (which are de rigueur in Eastern Europe. They are on high streets, side streets and, in the case of Vratsa in Bulgaria, under the apartment I stayed in and next to a kid’s play centre. They’re just normal. Everywhere. A bit like H&M with a few noticeable differences – S instead of H for a kick off). Sex Play, the shop is called. It says on it, in big letters, “ACUM in stock”.
Just the one?
Okay, okay, I’ll get myself out of the gutter. Sorry.
*snigger*
After I check into the hotel, it starts to rain. Really rain. I discovered this morning that I left my waterproof coat on the train yesterday. I put my battered brolly up, deciding to find a new coat before I do anything else.
I look around. Gucci shop. Souvenir shop. Big elegant buildings. The national bank. Something selling very sparkly jewellery. A posh shoe shop. I keep walking. I consult my guide book. It doesn’t mention normal shops. Perhaps there are none.
I walk some more, my umbrella spending as much time inside out as the right way round, vulnerable to every light gust of wind. I pull my map out. The wind almost whips it out of my hand. Every time I get control of it, it snaps in the gusts that fly up the boulevard, at one point ripping where it had gained a soaking. My umbrella nearly takes off.
“Now look, you bastard contraption,” I tell the umbrella sternly, “keep that up and you’re going in the bin. I can’t get much wetter anyway.”
I’m shouting at my umbrella.
Bad.
I head towards an awning to try to control the map, to try to see where might be all the shops. My umbrella turns inside out and then snaps the right way again, smattering me in the face with all the rain it had collected.
“Right, you bloody bastard…” I dump it in the bin, fully aware that I sound like Basil Fawlty hitting his car with a tree branch. It doesn’t cheer me up in the slightest.
I’m only wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a cardigan. I’m drenched in seconds.
I cut through a small alley and find a souvenir shop. I can’t see anything vaguely water repelling. “Do you have any umbrellas?” I ask, dripping on the floor. “Yes,” she says, “but only like this… although they come in different colours.” I would have bought most things at this point… but not a pink Hannah Montana brolly with white polka dots.
No.
“I’m not that desperate,” I say, with a wry grin. She laughs.
I round a corner and spot a DM – these are a bit like Superdrug; they’re all over Germany and Eastern Europe; probably other places as well. They sell umbrellas. I almost run for the door.
Where are they? Where?
I ask a sales assistant. “We only have children’s ones,” she says. “Never mind,” I say through tight teeth. “Thank you.” I stalk off, unamused, my hair in rat’s tails, my cardigan sticking to me. In a city where it apparently rains this much, surely there should be umbrella stalls on every corner, like there is in London? Surely. What’s wrong with you people?
There, in the distance, looms a mall. I hate malls. I love this one, though. In the back of my mind, I am quite impressed that Bucharest seems to keep all its chain shops in one place so its streets keep some semblance of identity. I promise myself that I will think back to that thought when I’m dry and I will smile.
One brolly and coat later, I emerge outside to discover the rain has stopped.
I am in a massive square, filled with what would be massive pools and fountains if they had water in them (well, other than rain puddles). The grandeur is almost audacious. The square is sided by monstrous, austere but somehow wondrous buildings – apartment blocks above shops for the most part, topped with adverts. They were apparently designed to hide the city’s churches, but they don’t wholly succeed. I stand and stare, almost turning circles on the spot.
My guide book advises tourists to walk round town in search of parts of Bucharest that escaped Ceauşescu’s redesign of the city.
Perhaps I would if I could scrape my jaw off the pavement. Say what you like about the man – despotic dictator, megalomaniac, corrupt, evil and far, far, far worse. Whoever he found to design his architecture, though, was a total genius. It’s grand, gigantic, audacious, sweeping, all-consuming, majestic, powerful, humbling. I feel tiny walking down the boulevards. The Palace of Parliament, Ceauşescu’s most infamous creation apparently, is… is…
This:
The guide book says it’s the second-largest building in the world, after the Pentagon. I can’t find the words for what it is (monstrous? Stupendous? Awe inspiring? Indecent? All of the above?) so that rather bland sentence from the guide book will have to do. It’s big.
My tip for Bucharest if you’re only here a short time – don’t bother with the museums. Walk around it, get lost in it, trip over your jaw as you stare up at the colossal buildings. There are pockets that escaped Ceauşescu, pockets that look a bit Austro-Hungarian. Bits of French Baroque. You can see that in Austria. In Hungary. In France. In Germany. In Bosnia. In Britain.
Walk the wide boulevards, stare upwards and across the street and let your head get a little dizzy.
For photos of the train journey and Bucharest, Click here.