Yesterday I swung by Vienna, and I’ve spent today in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. The bits of Vienna I saw were nice enough, but I suspect I didn’t see the best the Austrian capital had to offer because I got royally lost. To me, using a map is a last resort only to be used if admitting defeat and I think that’s the most compelling evidence that Colin’s my dad (because the blood groups sure ain’t!)! I left Vienna train station and went in the direction which most people were going in, confident that I’d stumble upon something interesting. On reflection, the issue with following people from a train station on a Wednesday afternoon is they’re probably on their way to work... and so they were. One by one they disappeared into office blocks leaving me in a very non-touristy part of the city so I continued winging it down side streets and then, conceding defeat, stopped on a street corner to check Google maps. I didn’t realise Vienna had a red light district, but it does, and I’d found myself in it... getting very disdainful looks from men who were clearly not prepared to pay for a pasty and bewildered looking backpacker wearing a flowery raincoat.
I put the prostitute incident behind me, and in the early hours of this morning arrived in Sofia. Granted, it was dark when I arrived, but my first thought when going through the city was: “whoa, there’s no colour”! The architecture on the outskirts of the city is Soviet style, and emits a brutal and depressing vibe - I feel qualified to make that statement; I grew up near Milton Keynes and lived in Leicester for 4 years, and am thus well aware of the horrors of concrete buildings! The buildings softened the further into the city centre I got but the atmosphere didn’t: the occasional splashes of colour (mainly words on shop fascias) felt muted because of the rigid shapes of the letters they were contained within, and the roads formed a regimented grid system, with nothing as superfluous as a bend.
In the daylight I went out to explore, but unfortunately it was pissing it down harder than it had been for the previous 2 days. My mission was to find postcards and stamps (another Colin-trait I have), food, and soak up some culture. All that ultimately got soaked up was rainwater through my canvas shoes, there was not a single post office in the 6.7km of the streets of Sofia around which I traipsed, and food was a risk which I couldn’t afford to take because a) I didn’t recognise much and couldn’t be sure it was vegetarian, and b) I had no idea what the Bulgarian word for “peanut” is (“фъстъци”, if you’re curious). I refused to repeat my Vienna fail so I bought myself a banana and sat with my hood up in the park which contains the Palace of Culture and the Temple of Bulgarian Martyrs (which would be a beautiful place to lay with a book on a sunny day) whilst damply working out my strategy, and accepted a fag from a kind woman who must’ve thought I was homeless.
I worked out my best bet was to get the metro to the airport, albeit 5 hours early, because at least there’d be warmth and a properly franchised coffee shop there. The metro system in Sofia is baffling: it only has two lines which are sensibly named ‘line 1’ and ‘line 2’. One line is red on maps, the other is blue. But which line is red or blue changes depending which map you look at and must be a deliberate move to keep tourists out. I eventually made it to the airport despite the best efforts of the Bulgarian authorities, and arrived at terminal 2 where I was again bamboozled. Airports have different terminals, I get that, but in my experience they’re usually a) grouped by destination (EU/non-EU flights) and b) somewhat in the vicinity of each other. A flight to Birmingham left from terminal 2, but I needed terminal 1 for Luton, and it took a 25 minute shuttle bus ride to reach it.
On reading this some might think “bits of that sound quite scary and stressful”, but it’s what I love. When you’re absolutely drenched and you know you need to get food, cash and a way to the airport but neither speak not understand any part of the local language then you worry about the upcoming minutes and hours - future months, years and decades are irrelevant. People often think it’s strange that I love travelling on my own, but to me it completely makes sense. I can be absolutely selfish about what I do and when I do it because it’s just me, and that’s a feeling I need to be able to find comfort in if I’m never going to have a child. I love walking through a city with no idea where I’m going and no idea what the people passing me by are saying, because in those moments I’m focused on translations or spotting signs, I don’t have any mental space to let my mind wander in the way that it does when I’m on autopilot in familiar places, and that’s my chosen coping mechanism for now.
Love Emily x
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