So the story goes…
Tuesday…what a day. I’m finally ready to delve into the craziness that was Tuesday.
I guess, to be fair, the silliness started Monday night.
I stayed at the Funky Chicken hostel in Bucharest, where I met a bunch of fun people. Because they had a kitchen I decided to cook. Everyone chipped in and I got to work in the kitchen. Dinner came off pretty well, good enough to please 4 French guys…but this was just the start of the night…
Everyone who sat down to dinner that night was leaving the next day, so we all decided to go out for drinks. High atop the National Theatre is an enormous roof terrace bar, our destination. At the bar Houman, from France, noticed they seved Absinthe…and that’s where the silliness began. He proclaimed we should all have a shot, and we were ordering the sparkly green liquid within seconds. A toast and it was gone warming our bellies, and throats, with it’s emerald glow.
As the night progressed there were a few more trips to the bar and a few more fairy juices. Thankfully it wasn’t the evil, eastern european rubbing alochol type…this was only 70%. We didn’t really get drunk, but we sure did giggle. (Somehow a impression of a lechorous French man executed by a French man is one of the funniest dialogues I’ve ever heard…really…it’s not just the Absinthe talking!)
Back at the hostel we stayed up late waiting for Houman, Francoise and Neil to leave for the bus station for their 4am bus…to France. (Talk about a long ride). In bed I quickly fell asleep, unaware of what awaited me on Tuesday.
It started out okay…Mike, an Englishman who lives in Romania, and I walked to the train station. He was soon on a train and I was waiting, with a cafe latte, for mine. I was sitting in a cafe not far from my train platform, so I have no idea how I missed the hubbub that had to have taken place….
10 minutes before departure I headed to platform 6 to board. I noticed a lot of the train doors were blocked…but found one where some other people were getting on. I stood waiting, not moving, until a girl with a blue backpack in front me turned around and shrugged. She seemed to have some trouble putting one foot in front of the other. I’d soon find out why…
I mounted the first step to the train and again came to a standstill. There was certainly a lot of activity going on onboard….? I finally got onto the train, but with no where to go. There wasn’t an inch of room to move around. Finally the girl in front of me hurdled over a huge bag that was blocking the corridor to the seats. There were sneakers everywhere!
I too had to hurdle the bag of sneakers…only to come face to face with a stack of boxes. These were moved into a compartment and I barely squeezed by several men in the corridor. I finally found the compartment with my seat….it was full to the ceiling with boxes and carpets! (As were all those I had passed.) Several guys came to my assistance at this point. They shoved boxes and moved carpets and finally cleared a seat for me, one tiny corner of a passenger compartment come moving van. They grabbed my bag and swung it on top of the pile, well over my head.
Another Turk, and the carpets
It was stiffling hot on the train, unable to open the windows in the cars…unable to see them even! I took a collapsable fan from my bag, which has come in handy quite a lot, and fanned away the humidity and sat reading a book.
It wasn’t long before the guys wanted to talk. These Turkish guys who lived in Bulgaria, who were moving carpets on international passenger trains…who didn’t speak any english. It was certainly interesting! The guys were actually really nice, offering me water and food, cigarettes and so forth. They even took my fan from me and fanned me jokingly, apologizing for the cargo and asking about NYC…though we shared no common language. It was a strange journey, but not entirely unpleasant…and we soon reached the Romanian/Bulgarian border. Then the show began.
Exiting Romania was a slow process…the border guard was none to happy about all that cargo, but after stomping back and forth in the corridor and raising his voice he finally accepted some money to be quiet. We crossed out of Romania and everyone smiled.
Ruse is the border town in Bulgaria, and before the train had even stopped here some of the Turks were out of the train, on the platform, below the windows. Boxes of soccer balls, bags of sneakers and carpets alike were pushed out the window into waiting hands, stacked on the platform only to picked up and hauled off by an army of Turkish guys. Within 10 minutes the men were sweaty, the train was empty, and everyone seemed to be enjoying an ice cream.
Each of the guys came back to say ciao, ask if I wanted any ice cream and shake my hand goodbye, briefly holding it to their foreheads and then dissapearing. And then the train was utterly empty. No boxes, no carpets, no people!
We sat there for awhile, and I checked with the ticket taker that I was on the right train, and then the backpackers resurfaced. Davina from England and Sarah and Cameron from Australia. Cameron saw me alone in a compartment and asked if they could sit with me. We decied to try and crash the nicer seats becuase there was no one on the train, and it was actually raining in our compartment, a fierce storm having appeared at the Bulgarian border.
Turned out the nicer seats were sleeper compartments, so we were shooed out, but not before asking again if I was on the right train. (The Turks had insisted I would need to change trains.) Assurred the train was correct we found a second class compartment without rain and settled in.
Soon the ticket collector came. He took one look at my tickets and slapped his forehead…not exactly the reaction I was looking for…I was on the wrong train! Davina too had the same ticket and he repeated the process. Cameron and Sarah were okay to reach Istanbul, but this train would not be stopping in Veliko Tanovo.
The ticket collector, along with one of the signal men, spent 30 minutes going over train schedules with us, instructing us in Bulgarian (and Cyrillic writing!) how we could get to out intended destination. They were laughing and smiling and generally good hearted…and then we got to money.
Davina and I technically didn’t have a ticket for the train we were on. We were asked for Bulgarian lev, but I hadn’t even set foot in Bulgaria yet, just the train. Euro? US Dollars? No…we had none of these. Finally they conceeded that they would accept Romanian lei…but I had little of these either, it being my policy to spend all of a currency before leaving the country. (A policy I will now change!) Davina had some lei, and Cameron chipped in some more for us, but to reach the 400K we needed, about 12Euro, we had to dig into the coins. Seeing this the collectors laughed, handed us back the coins and about half the money and motioned that we should buy his a beer at the next station. The 250K lei that were kept were pocketed and no ticket issued…but the collector did scrawl on the back of our existing tickets, allowing us to take the correct train later. Oh, and he brought us sandwiches too…nice little ticket collector man!
Well…to get where we wanted to go was going to take us till 6am…and Cameron and Sarah really wanted to go to Varna before Istanbul. We all agreed we could stop in a town called Shuman and deal with the train the next day. Our guide books mentioned Shuman had a zoo, a brewery and a fortress and it seemed like a weird little place to visit…so why not?
We got off the train and within second the storm caught up with us. It was raining buckets and the streets were flooding. We jumped in a taxi and hit a Bulgarian ATM. We were going to go straight to the hotel but Cameron really, REALLY wanted Chinese food, again mentioned in the guide book, so that’s we headed. We walked into the restaurant soaked, with our backpacks, and speaking English…much to the shock of the patrons crowding the tables. They stared at us as though it would have been no stranger if we’d appeared from thin air. I caught one woman’s eye and shrugged. She broke into a smile and I knew we were just a curiosity not an incovienience.
We sat down and ordered beers first thing. All the strangeness of the journey so far: the laughing with the ticket collectors, the carpet bearing Turks, the wrong train…well, I just knew we were going to have some good Chiese food right then…only because it would make little sense in the middle of Bulgaria, and nothing else all day had made sense…simple logic. And I was right! The food was delicious and the portions huge, we happily shared all around, laughing at our day. Dinner came to less then 14Euro for 4 people, including beer…amazing!
We stepped outside and easily hailed a cab. There seemed to be more cabs then people in Shuman. Our friendly driver pointed things out to the left and the right as he drove us to our little hotel in the woods above the town.
We got rooms and passed out in short order…as I was falling asleep I kept thinking this was certainly the weirdest day of my trip so far. Simply knowing the road ahead can’t be as difficult as the road behind is invigorating. I slept well and looked forward to Wednesday…
Truly large Communiast Monument
Tags: Bulgaria
LizG