Bulgaria at last

 Bulgaria

Ah yes, the second part of my Balkans adventure. This time in Bulgaria! The furthest South I’ve ever been, and the furthest East, arguably even on the border of Asia Minor. Now, the lesson to take away from this is that everything that happened, happened for one very good reason: that I am exceptionally cheap. Any and all expense was saved. That’s the moral of this story, in a way: had I been willing to spend more money, then a lot of this lunacy might have been avoided. But I didn’t, and I’m sure it’ll make for a wonderfully enlightening read, for my mother and the roughly two people in the world who find me funny enough to have clicked on this link.

So, Bulgaria. South-Eastern Europe, Orthodox Christians, Cyrillic alphabet, and the people shake their heads to mean “yes”. These were pretty much the things that I knew about Bulgaria before I went there. That’s actually a slight exaggeration, because I’d later read that Bulgaria was the only Eastern Bloc country to have voted in a Socialist government after the fall of Communism, at one point in 1996 had only enough money to cover nine minutes of imports, and had had its former Tsar elected as Prime Minister in the mid-2000s. I had a couple of Bulgarian friends when I was in Poland, and one of them once said to me that “we have the best points of the Southern Europeans, and the best points of the Eastern Europeans”. How could I refuse a little look at such a promising place?  It turns out that, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail. My major failure whilst planning was trying to do everything on a shoestring. This will become painfully apparent.

The first penny-pinching failure was when I decided that mid-March was the time to visit. I presumed that, being a good way South, March would be warmer than in the UK, and I would have a gay old time, frolicking in the Black Sea, and getting a nice tan. My experience in Romania, with its 30cm of snow, suggested otherwise, but by that point, it was too late. My other failing was to visit a seaside resort town out of season. I thought March would be early in the season, but sadly no. it was decidedly not in season.  So, we’re up to two major failures of planning and economising, before I’d even left my living room in the UK. 

Here's the Danube on a nice day. Brexiteers: you'll never see it. Nor will I. I wonder
how you sleep at night.

Anyway, for the third failure, I had hardly looked into travel from Bucharest to Varna. In season (late April to about October), there are plenty of travel opportunities. I was, of course, trying to do this out of season. It turned out that I had exactly one option open to me: Pegasus buses! The bus to Varna left at 4am. I say ‘bus’, but what I actually mean is ‘minibus’. 4 am is a horrendous time to travel: you can’t really stay up for it, and you can’t get enough sleep for it. I had to wake up at 3, with my poor long-suffering Romanian friends, having had about four hours of sleep. We stood in the snow, freezing and sleep-deprived, my toes numb in my canvas trainers, until the minibus puttered into sight. One of my Romanian friends sorted out my ticket, and I paid the driver, who put my bag in the boot. We got in the bus, and he then asked for my passport (‘pisspot’, actually, but there we go). It was, of course, in my bag, which was in the boot. I’m no expert, but I would say that the steady stream of Romanian that the driver came out with as he exited the cab to get my passport was probably cursing. He needed my passport because, it turns out, Bulgaria has passport control, after a fashion, which was a rather unwelcome vision of my future as a non-EU citizen, which I’m actually dreading more than my own death. Thanks, Brexiteers. I hope you all choke on the ‘control’ that you get over your country, because it sure isn’t my country anymore.

Anyway, I fell into a kind of fitful sleep, waking up every so often. By some miracle, I woke up and checked Google Maps just before we crossed the Danube. I honestly couldn’t believe my luck.  I forced my eyes to stay open, and looked out of the window, but didn’t see anything much. I knew it was there, though. Why would the internet lie to me?! And no sooner had I shut my eyes after that excitement, we pulled into what appeared to be a desolate, yet brightly lit, concrete-built petrol station. It turned out to be my first taste of Bulgaria: their passport control! It looked uncannily like the coach station at Frankfurt Hahn airport, actually. There was a man in a uniform sitting in the little booth, who flicked through the handful of passports that the driver gave him, then threw them back into the cab and waved his hand to show that we could pass. I was in Bulgaria! I celebrated by falling asleep again. 

I woke up as we pulled into a shopping mall car park. I stumbled out into the Bulgarian cold, and looked around. I could have been anywhere. The mall looked like every other shopping mall in Europe. I wasn’t completely sure that I was even in Varna, until I asked the driver. I lit a cigarette, consulted Google Maps, and started walking into the centre. On the one hand, all the shop signs were in Cyrillic, so I was definitely in the right country. On the other hand, the footpath seemed to be closed on both sides, with a lot of serious-looking earth-moving machinery trundling around. I had literally no idea how to pass, until I stood and watched the locals wander out into the road, towards the oncoming traffic, to eventually rejoin the footpath where it wasn’t being dug up. I didn’t think that I was in a particularly nice part of town, so I couldn’t believe my luck when I found what appeared to be the bus station! I went in, and it was a bit like a bank crossed with an indoor market. There was a café, a few shops that sold bizarre tat, and a few windows that clearly belonged to separate companies. The woman in the first one didn’t speak English, and the man in the second one told me that his company didn’t cover buses into the centre, and could I please go away now, thank you. Varna is, I reiterate, a seaside resort, that requires tourists for its economy. And I was, to be fair, there at the wrong time. So I decided to walk to the centre, with my phone out in my hand, in a bad neighbourhood in Bulgaria, looking 100% like a tourist, where nobody in the world knew exactly where I was. You can tell that I have a wonderful instinct for self-preservation. 

Here's the picture for the toilets. I knew I
was in Bulgaria

I then happened upon what I suppose must have been a kind of Soviet-era attempt at a shopping centre. There were a huge amount of shops, but all of them in discrete two storey buildings, like a charmless housing estate. There was all the stuff that you’d expect to find in a shopping district: second hand clothing vendors, cafes, kebab establishments, pet shops, even tanning parlours. But because the streets were so narrow and full of people, and the buildings so low, it had the feel of a Brazilian favela. In fact, I thought of it in my mind as the favelski. I probably should have spent longer looking around, but I wanted to get my bearings, and browsing a slightly scary shopping slum wasn’t my main priority, especially not after about 3 hours sleep.  Eventually I turned the corner into the main square, and my goodness, was it worth the walk. 

I was torn between visiting Varna or Sofia, but the cathedral was what swung Varna for me. When I finally saw it in real life, looming over the square like a force of nature, I stopped dead. It honestly took my breath away. It was just so different to anything I’d ever seen before. I just stood there, lit a cigarette, and looked at it. It manages to be both pretty and imposing. It was like finding the Koh-I-Noor on Margate beach: just so utterly incongruous and beautiful. I ended up walking around it two or three times, just trying to take it in. it really is a sight worth seeing. I actually went inside, and, of course, was confronted by a little kiosk selling religious icons and suchlike. I presume that the story of Jesus going nuts at the traders in the Synagogue for being capitalist pigdogs didn’t really make it into the Orthodox Bible.  I crossed myself in the Orthodox way, in case any nuns were watching and could smell Catholicism on me, and opened the second set of doors into the nave. My goodness, but the interior was just as incredible as the outside. For the first time, I felt like I’d left the West and properly gone to the East. I honestly wasn’t prepared to be faced with a sight like that before breakfast.

Here's my picture. There will be better photos

After I’d calmed down and visited a little café for some black coffee, I then decided to try and find my accommodation. I’d chosen an establishment that claimed you would “visit, check, and stay longer than you expected!” That sounded creepy as hell, so I went with it. I tend to book accommodation whilst I’m drunk. I read its name as the Yo-Yo Hostel when I booked it, and thought that was a remarkably good name for a hostel. You go there, you come back, just like a Yo-Yo! It was almost as good a name as Hostel Mostel in Sofia. I got there, and it turned out that I’m illiterate when I’m drunk. It was actually the Yo-Ho Hostel, and had a pronounced pirate theme. I sighed, signed in, paid the man, and was then treated to a 20 minute rundown of the sights and attractions of Varna, complete with a photocopied, hand-drawn map that I later discovered had only the vaguest resemblance to the actual city streets. It was lovely that he cared enough about my stay to make sure that I knew where the aquarium and the best clubs were, but I was swaying with tiredness and hunger, and I honestly just wanted him to stop talking and let me either sleep or eat something. I didn’t take a word in, and, having dropped my meagre possessions off in my room (a 12-person dorm, that only had me in it), set out for breakfast. The best bit of my brief sojourn at my home for the next few days was finally discovering what the receptionist meant by “walker”. It turned out that he was trying to say “locker”. I was actually vaguely disappointed, since I thought he meant I had the use of a complimentary Segway or something. 

The cathedral on a better day.
If you want a huge amount of these images, then you can have them. I dare you.

I left the hostel, and wandered into an Italian restaurant. The weather was warmish, and I was in an exciting new city! I would have had Bulgarian food, but I found the Italian place first, and I was in danger of passing out from hunger. I walked in, and was interrogated by a Bulgarian man for about two minutes. He asked me many questions, but didn’t wait for an answer. Eventually he paused, and I made the internationally accepted gesture for ‘food’, and smiled. “English,” he sighed, with a grimace. He rolled his eyes, shooed me to a table and threw a menu at me. I ordered a pizza that had chilies on, and something that I had never heard of: salintzani or some such. It turned out that that was tiny slices of sausage. I’m vegetarian, but by that point I was so hungry that I didn’t care, and I hadn’t knowingly ordered meat, which absolved me of any dietary sin. I also ordered a beer. It was about 11am, but I had been up for about 8 hours by that point, I was on holiday, and I was also on a drinking holiday. Pick an excuse, any excuse. 

I then decided to make my way down to the beach. I had seen the North Sea, the Irish Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. You’d better believe that I was ready to add the Black Sea to that list! And the town that I walked through was remarkably pleasant. Big wide streets, grand architecture, a nice mix of age demographics, and I could even forgive the palace-sized casino that dominated one of the streets. I eventually made my way into the Sea Garden, which I was promised was a lovely walk. In the pictures, it had palm trees, and I have a real weakness for palm trees. On closer inspection, they were potted palm trees in the pictures that I saw, which are rolled out for summer, and I was, of course, in Varna out of season. But still, it was a pleasant footpath, with its independent restaurants, abundance of trees, and the Black Sea rolling off to the side. The weather wasn’t brilliant, but I could see how the sandy beaches could be considered golden in the right light, and the swell of the sea was gentle, despite the wind. I wandered down for a mile or so, before turning back. I wandered along a little jetty, made friends with some swans (that’s expert-level animal husbandry, by the way. Even I was impressed with that feat), and sat on the beach for a while. I even dipped my toes in the water. It was bloody freezing. 

The Black Sea. Looks more grey to me, but there we go.

I eventually ended up in the harbour, which was remarkably industrial. It was good though, standing up by the lighthouse (where I don’t think I was meant to be), seeing the Black Sea all around me, with the wooded hills looming down over the city. I walked past some Roman ruins (complete with a litter of stray kittens), the Marine Administration, and the Musem of Varna. That was shut, to my disappointment. It reopened in May. Seaside towns out of season, man, they’re killers.

It was time for the pub. I ended up in a place called Saloon. Visiting that bar was the best decision I made whilst out there. You could smoke inside, for one thing, and the barman played Oasis on the stereo. He spoke perfect English, and a man that I thought was the owner came in, put a big block of cured bacon on the bar, cut me a slice, and made me eat it. You don’t argue with a man who has a big knife, especially when there’s a big (free) lump of traditional bar snack on the end of it. The barman gave me some frankly excellent local lager, and swapped one of his cigarettes for one of my Gauloises. Plus, through the window, I got to watch someone meticulously parking a 40 year old Soviet car so that it blocked up most of the pavement and quite a lot of the road. I should have gone back to Saloon, but I couldn’t find it again. In fact, I could hardly find my way back to the centre from there, because the barman looked at the map that the hostel receptionist had given me, laughed very hard, and then gestured vaguely in the direction in which I was supposed to go. 

I then tried to find some dinner. The meat on the pizza hadn’t agreed with me, so I wanted fish or vegetables. Unfortunately, I was to be disappointed. Pretty much everywhere either sold kebabs, meat and potatoes, or soup. I could only guess what was in the soup, but I’m not a fan of soup at all, so I was destined to go hungry. The nice independent restaurants down by the sea? Shut. All of them. I drifted around for a while, and ended up in a funny little bar under the stairs of what appeared to be a housing block. I sat there with a beer, my belly rumbling, and ended up talking to a mad old Finnish man. I attract loons, I can’t help it. He was, as I recall, a meteorologist, who moved to Varna when his wife died, because he loved the place, and liked the ‘mild’ winters. We had a bit of a conversation, which was abruptly terminated when a few of the other barflies started shouting in Bulgarian. He shouted back, but more gently, and this carried on for a while. Eventually he told me that they didn’t like that we were speaking English, but he’d calmed them down, and I was okay to stay. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I went back to Yo-Ho Hostel, had a crap and went to sleep. I only noticed the sign in the bathroom telling me not to flush bog roll after I had flushed my used bog roll (it took six goes, but I got it down eventually). The sign, incidentally, had a cartoon of a pirate aggressively brandishing a toilet brush, which is an image that will haunt me in fever dreams and acid flashbacks for years to come. 

Here's the cathedral at night. It has Canterbury beaten.

The next day, I made sure that I filled up on breakfast, seeing as I wasn’t sure that there was anything much that I could eat in Varna. And the weird thing was, I was at a loss for what to do! A new country, an exciting, thriving city, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to spend my time. I spoke to a couple of German guys who had been to the thermal springs. It turned out that the thermal springs were about 100m away from where I’d been the day before. After grilling the receptionist, I found that I could choose to pay to go to the swimming baths, but they were possibly shut, or go to the free ones. You can guess what I chose. I put my swimming shorts on under my jeans, and set out. The weather was much worse than the previous day, but I figured that hot springs would keep the cold out. Besides, the Vikings used to visit saunas and then run around in the snow, so I was taking a much less extreme path, after all. And when I got there, I was confronted with an incredible sight. The sea was steaming, where the hot springs came up. And all over the beach, there were homeless people. It was like a convention. You couldn’t mistake them. Half of them looked like stereotypical bearded tramps, with some hard-faced gypsy-looking types in ragged clothing dotted around. I stood there, alone in a foreign country, looking at a steaming sea and a horde of Bulgarian homeless people, considered my options, and left. Now, I have given a lot of money to homeless charities, and I say that we, in this country, treat our homeless worse than animals, and that is a human rights crime. Please don’t mistake this for simple prejudice. Did I want to leave my possessions (namely wallet, hostel keys, tobacco, money and phone) alone on a beach with a large amount of homeless and hungry individuals? Not really. Most likely 99% of them would have been brilliant and looked after them for me, but it only takes one man to rob you.  

After that, I drifted around aimlessly for a while. I took in a few sights, like the outside of theatre, but I wasn’t sure what I could actually do. I wasn’t sure about travelling miles out of the city to see things like the Wonderful Rocks, Euxinograd or whatever. The problem was that so much was shut, and the Roman baths were needlessly expensive (£10, apparently, possibly due to my being out of season, or maybe they were free and the woman in the doorway was a particularly accomplished panhandler), and a lot of other things were very far away. So I decided to hit the Retro Museum!

Here' a motorbike

The Retro Museum turned out to be in the very shopping mall in which I first surfaced, bleary eyed and hungover, in Bulgaria. So I had to retrace my steps! I was slightly less terrified of the favelski shopping centre this time. That lasted until I went into a pet shop to look at a nice snake that I saw through the window. The man behind the counter asked me a few questions in Bulgarian, and seemed to misinterpret me pointing at said snake, smiling and putting my thumbs up as a request to buy the bloody thing. I somehow got out without having to buy a serpent that 1) probably wouldn’t have been allowed in Yo Ho hostel, and 2) would doubtlessly have perished in the Bulgarian cold, and 3) would have been a ballache (probably literally) to get onto the plane. 

Anyway, I made it to the big, horrific mall. I followed the signs for the Retro Museum, and ended up in an underground car park. I lit a cigarette, and decided to stop thinking like a stupid tourist, and just go in through the bloody front doors. I went up in the lift, and there it was, the Retro Museum! It was about £5, and fuck me, it was worth it!

I gave my money to the wee cross-eyed bint behind the desk, and stepped through a thick red curtain, like you’d find in a theatre. My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness before a middle aged old bag appeared out of the gloom to tell me, in minimal English, that I could take photos (‘photos is… OK!’) but that I couldn’t cross the velvet ropes (‘no please crossing… red deeevide…’). I followed all these rules to the letter, and it was incredible. Admittedly, I still had a fairly hellish hangover, and would probably have paid the entry money to be in a cool, dark room, but it was well worth it.

What these guys had, on the second floor of this faceless mall, was a huge collection of Soviet cars and motorcycles, as well as a load of old Communist made toys, and cigarette boxes, and all sorts of mad shit. It was incredible. They were piping in this crazy old Communist music, and I was in a huge room, full of old cars. I was in heaven. There were cars that I recognised from Poland, and old Soviet marching banners, and radios, and everything. I walked around for a good two hours, just looking at everything. They hadn’t quite got the information points right, though. There were little computer screens that told me the cars’ years of production, wheelbase, engine size, and general technical details. I would have far preferred some details on their country of origin, relative cost, general use (dignitaries, family saloons, whatever), but I won’t hold this against them. I cannot fault the value for money. I must have walked around twice, and loved it each time.

A big old Soviet bruit car. If you know me, then you'll
know how many I'd like to own (the answer is six)

By the time I left, it was about 3pm, and a bit bleak, meteorologically speaking. Now, as a little aside, I speak some (minimal) Russian. I can, however, read Cyrillic, thanks to a Russian class I took at uni, and KINO. I spent a lot of time in Bulgaria mumbling the street signs to myself, partly because I could, and partly to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten what the letters sounded like. Now, on the way to the Retro Museum, I saw a big gate, set into a wall, that promised (a word that I didn’t recognise) Park. I love urban parks. I love the grandiosity of them, and being amongst green things instead of concrete. So, on the way back to town, I decided to go through those gates. It turned out that they meant ‘cemetery’, rather than ‘park’. Or, maybe that mysterious word was “boneyard” or “death”. I did not spend a happy two hours there. I spent about ten minutes, surrounded by distraught Bulgarian grandmothers, before I braved the traffic and dismantled pavements to hit central Varna again. I got there, and it started to snow.

I went to the pub. Immediately. I did not pass Go. Well, that’s a lie. I argued with Google Maps for a while, and ended up, having tramped around downtown Varna in the snow for about an hour, absolutely sodden with melted snow, angered at Kommandent Google for misdirecting me, in the pub that Google Herself originally suggested, but by a longer route. The bar was called the Black Sheep (I think), and it promised its own beer. I didn’t see evidence of this, so sat down, and drank several of the local beers. It wasn’t until I ordered a different one that I was told by the landlord that they didn’t have that beer: that tap was for their homebrew (much nicer than mine), and they only had that particular beer’s label on there as a placeholder. It turned out that their own beer was about half the price of the other beers. 

It was remarkably easy drinking. I eventually retired, found my way home, and had a nap for dinner. I had been thinking of a vague plan since I had started drinking, and I hoped that a wee sleep would take the idea away. I awoke at 8pm to meet the other inhabitants of the hostel properly. I should have stayed asleep. 

There was a bar in the hostel! Plus one TripAdvisor star for that! The other people in it? No thanks. I met a senile/insane Dutchman first. He spoke almost no recognisable English, and apparently had decided to retire, and spend the rest of his life cruising around hostels until he died, or something. He tapped a few cigarettes off me, but I didn’t mind. After him, we had ‘vaguely aggressive art student from Leeds’ who talked a bit about architecture with me, then went out to get a stinking chicken kebab. We also had a Bulgarian guy, who was in Varna for business, apparently. He refused to say what kind. And then, the star of the show, an obese woman from somewhere in the North of England! I think she was from around Dorchester, but everything she said was such moronic nonsense that I didn’t care enough to retain a word of it. Various horrors involved her dietetics course (apparently, my body should be alkaline, rather than acidic), and her garden wall that was falling down. I sat there in stony eyes silence, quite happy to drink myself to sleep, until she realised that the Bulgarian guy was Bulgarian. It turned out that she was trying to buy property there, but needed a negotiator. I sat there, until she tried six times to pronounce Shkorpilovtsi, but each time only managed “Scorpiosa”. I threw a handful of change on the counter, and told them I was going out. “Where?” they asked. “Strip club!” I said, lighting a cigarette. 

That was my plan. Now, please don’t think of me as a pervert. I am one, but no more than any man is. The last time I went to a strip club in Eastern Europe, we had a great time. I had to try to explain to Polish strippers that I was interested in rock music, history, and literature, in Polish, while a girl got her boobs out for my mate because he bought her a drink that looked more like an acrobatic fruit salad than a beverage. He ended up spending far too much money that night, and I decided that I should learn from his mistakes. That was a mistake in itself.

You don't want a picture for this bit. Here's the cathedral in Spring

I arrived there, and got frisked by an old man that had probably been in some kind of secret police. Before he frisked me, he made me raise my arms, and he scared me so much that I raised them over my head, as if he had a gun. He laughed in my face and told me, in English, that he was making sure that I didn’t “have a knife as well.” As well as what? As well as him? As well as a wallet? A beard? I had no idea. But he let me in, and I was given a beer and an ashtray. I was also given a wonderful view of a fully nude girl, who had fake boobs, but a face a bit like a peasant pretending to be a secretary. She grooved around to some song, went backstage to get dressed, then joined the middle aged English men at the next table, who put some money in her G-string, and got her pretending to find them interesting for about five minutes. Then the next girl came out, and did something similar. I sat there for two or three rounds of girls (and beer) before I decided to pay up, so that I didn’t overdrink, and also to make sure that I had enough funds to fully enjoy myself. 

It turned out that the scary doorman should have told me that there was a 20 Leva entry fee. That was important information, because it turned out that I didn’t have enough money about me to pay my bar tab. Fuck me, that was terrifying. In immediate debt, to a Bulgarian go-go bar? I ended up having to give the barmaid my phone, cross and chain, cigarettes, driving licence and whatever else I could give to make sure that she would let me leave to get enough money to pay my tab. Top tip: don’t bring too much money to a strip club. Also DO NOT BRING TOO LITTLE. I cannot stress this strongly enough. 

I decided to get more than enough money to see me through the rest of the night. Whilst I was doing this, I think my drink got spiked. That’s the only explanation. I won’t go into the details of my efforts to get a private dance from one of the girls, but, top tip: if you’re in a Bulgarian go-go bar, do not try and haggle any prices. The girls don’t like it. They will eventually have a conversation with the bar manager, and you’ll have to leave very quickly before an inevitable, horrifying backlash comes down upon you. I do, however, grudgingly admire my business acumen, haggling over £5 with a woman who had her breasts out.

That snow was wet.

Jesus, the head I had the next day. Holy shit, I don’t remember the last time I had a headache like that. Between about 10 hours of beer, no food, a poor night’s sleep and an early start, I was feeling rather the worse for wear. I forced down a bowl of muesli (breakfast, lunch and dinner, in one handy bowl!) and about four cups of coffee. I checked out, promised to give them a blinding review on TripAdvisor (it’s on my to-do list guys, I promise), and left. I had about ten hours until I had to get my flight, and was again at a loss as to what to do. It was still snowing, but not the deep luxurious snows of Romania: horrible, damp snow that gets into everything. I had a quick farewell look at the Black Sea, and decided to drift around the centre for a while. I wanted to visit an independent record shop, but there was a big dog in the doorway, so I couldn’t go in. After another litre of black coffee in some faceless café, I decided to make my way to the airport. I navigated through favelski unscathed, and then realised that I had much too much time spare. So I decided to fully explore the shopping mall. It was disappointingly samey, really. Absolutely no different to any shopping mall anywhere. Well, what do you expect in the global age?

Anyway, I filled the time by waiting for the bus. It sounds tedious, but it was actually vaguely exciting. I spent about 40 minutes waiting, asking other people in my best Bulgarian if this was the stop for the airport bus, and got absolutely no joy – either they replied in Bulgarian that I couldn’t quite understand - no English, sorry - or they didn’t know. I saw a wide variety of buses pass, but none of them were the 20, or whatever it was I wanted. Was I even speaking Bulgarian? Was I in the right place? Did I look/smell like a derelict?! So, I cut my losses, and went through the underpass, thinking I’d have better luck there. I got to the other side, just in time to see the bus go right past where I was, complete with a big picture of an aeroplane on the front, next to the number. I think it was an hour until the next one. 

But I made it to the airport. I didn’t feel particularly good about the whole place, and then I stepped through the doors, and was confronted by a big fucking German Shephard. I really, truly hate dogs. I’m phobic about them. I see a dog, and if it’s big, or it’s not on a lead, or I’m surprised by it, then I freeze. I can’t help it. I’m slowly getting better, though. When I freeze up, I let my partner lead me by the hand past the dog. It’s extremely humiliating, but she likes dogs. She wasn’t in Varna airport, which was good, because I froze in the doorway. It took about a minute, but I realised that the big dog was on a harness, and was an airport sniffer dog. I managed to get to a bench, and then sat there, trying not to move, for about four hours. Interestingly, the McDonalds on the other side of the gates charges slightly too much for sauce to go on your fries.

Here's how it could have looked.

So, Bulgaria. A nice foil to Germany, because I want to hate Germany, but I quite like it, despite myself. I wanted to love Bulgaria, but I couldn’t. I suppose I visited the wrong city at the wrong time. The architecture and the beach are both incredible. If I could have eaten something, it would have been even better. I saw adverts for Black Sea fish, octopi and other marine comestibles. Aside from a scary bunch of drunks, people were helpful, and generally friendly. The surroundings are brilliant. If I’d had a week there in high summer, I could have had a radically different time. So, as I said, this is my fault. And maybe one day, I’ll go back, at the right time, and it’ll be brilliant. My visit could have been. The weather held me back, as did my time of year. I don’t regret it at all, but I shouldn’t have visited an Eastern European resort out of season. But, if Varna has anything for me, then all the stray cats were beautiful, and it was there that my Mother-In-Law agreed to be my Mother-In-Law (thank you, strip club, for getting me drunk enough to even ask her). 

As a flip side to all this, I regretted leaving Varna as soon as I did. I actively object to flying.  I was next to an old Bulgarian bag who crossed herself at the same time as me, both of us in the Orthodox style (sorry, Pope Francis, but it’s the same God).It only got worse when I landed. I won’t go into the details, but you can spend a night in Luton Airport whenever you want, and tell me how you like it. Thank (Orthodox and Catholic Jesus equally) for Bulgarian duty free booze and smokes to get me through the whole affair. My piles have not recovered. That floor is as cold as a witch’s teat.

erself Hersel reccommendedHeH

A Balkans Jolly

Just when you thought it was safe to access social media again without being subjected to a drunkard’s ramblings about going on holiday: hello! To quote Jack the Ripper, “A double event this time!” Specifically, adventures across the Balkans. No, I can’t promise coherence. This one doesn’t contain the slightest bit about Bulgaria, so if you want that chapter, then you’ll have to wait. (It’s a double event because it was the same trip. Not the same blog post. I’d say I was sorry if I meant it.)

Vlad whom? No, Dracula was around in the 1970s, he was a great actor.

I had wanted to visit Romania since I was about 11, and read Dracula for the first time. Now, I find that Romanian people get a bit upset when you bring up Dracula, and think that you’re viewing their country as mouldering old castles and vampires, rather than the (exceptionally) modern republic that it is now. I didn’t give a massive damn about vampires running around in Whitby, or old men sucking virgins’ blood, or lunatics eating flies. I like all that, don’t get me wrong, but the thing that really interested me was when Jonathan Harker was travelling through the Carpathians, and seeing huge mountains, and valleys, and peasants wandering around in their national dress. He ate traditional food, and drank plum brandy, got dragged into their little superstitions, and it blew my mind. For a fat 11 year old, in a piddley, boring little village in Kent, it was another world, and one that I wanted to visit. 

Anyway, so, as a grown man on a good salary, I checked with my Romanian friends, who both said that I should visit whenever I liked, and I promptly booked my flights out for whenever was cheapest. I pooh-pooh’ed the problem of getting from one end of the country to its diagonal opposite, letting it be a problem for Future Mungalo. I tried to be clever when booking my return, though. I noticed that Bucharest, where I ended up, was quite close to Bulgaria! So I decided to book my flight back from Varna, a port on the Black Sea (and coincidentally where Van Helsing and Mina and their crew landed when they went to destroy Dracula towards the end of the novel). “Oh, what the hell”, I thought, “Why not visit another country? One with a different alphabet? One in which you’ll be alone, in a seaside resort out of season, and where nobody knows exactly where you are? What could possibly go wrong?” Also, it was far cheaper to fly back from there than it was from Bucharest.  

Oradea

So, my flight out to Oradea, in Transylvania, left at 7am. Using public transport, I had the choice of getting to the airport at 12:30am or at 6.30am, which is admittedly not much of a choice. It turns out that Stanstead Airport is one of the least user friendly airports in the country, if not the world. After I’d had a crap and eaten a sandwich, I had completely exhausted the delights of the place. And I had six hours left to kill. I drifted around, and the scene that I saw was more or less like downtown Calcutta, with people, even families, sat on the floor, shivering, and either trying to sleep, or looking at you with hungry eyes. It turns out that a new (new to me, at least) Terry Pratchett book is a great way to both kill time until the gate/pubs open (if you don’t mind giving yourself piles by sitting on the freezing floor), and ignore the strung-out Italian guy trying to ask you for a cigarette, more and more desperately, for a solid ten minutes. 

Anyway, eventually, after a fitful sleep on the plane, I woke up to Oradea airport. The scenery looked good, and I was surrounded by a hubbub of excited Romaneŝte. The sun was out, and I was in a new country! I stepped off the plane and my heart sank. What I was looking at was an ex-military airport. I know former military airports quite well, having spent what felt like a lifetime in Frankfurt (fucking, bastarding, closer to bloody Luxemburg than sodding Frankfurt) Hahn airport. I can smell a former military airport like a stroke victim can smell toast. And it was exactly as I had been expecting. One customs window open, with a sour looking, (possibly dangerous) man who may or may not have spoken English. He saw me after half an hour stood in a queue. I knew that I was allowed to pass because he threw my passport at me, with its cover flung as an afterthought. But it was all okay, because as soon as I stepped into the departure lounge, my friend Cristie was waiting for me!

You can't put lipstick on a pig.
A military airport with an awning is
still a military airport.

Cristie and I were friends in Poland, and we’ve been friends since. It was like we’d never been away. We drove back to his flat, and visited a supermarket. I remembered that I fucking love Eastern Europe. We visited a supermarket, and a lot of it stirred up vague recollections in the lizard part of my brain. The cigarettes were kept in tiny cages over the tills! The checkout women were rude, and didn’t have any change! I was back!

After we’d eaten, and I had a nap, it was time to visit Oradea itself. It turned out that I didn’t need a bus ticket to get there. Like in Poland, tickets are not sold on the bus, so you either need to magic one up from somewhere, or buy one online,  I’m not Romanian, unfortunately (because if I were, I wouldn’t be about to lose my right to live, work, and travel freely, in 27 different countries. Thank you, baby-boomers, racists, and Nigel Farage. I wish you the very worst for your future, because it won’t be as bad as mine). Because I’m not Romanian, I don’t have a Romanian ID number, so if anyone checked, then they wouldn’t be able to give me a fine, because fines are administered by ID number alone, so I would (presumably) either have been arrested, or told to buy a bloody ticket next time, hopefully in a language that I don’t speak. Thankfully, none of this happened, and I was allowed to travel unmolested. It turns out that the centre of Oradea is one of the best places I’ve ever visited! 

Town Hall (I think)

The architecture is a bit special. In the main square, you’ve got the town hall, the Black Eagle palace, the Moon Church, the Greek Catholic church, and a whole load of other incredible sights, all with the Crisul Repede river rushing past 100m away. To put things into perspective, I live in a seaside town that they forgot to close down, and grew up near a seaside town that they forgot to bomb. In short, I’ve always lived in a world of faded Victorian architecture and 1950s housing developments. Seeing baroque and neo-gothic architecture was like a beer after a day working in full sun. Inside the churches was even better. Romania is an Orthodox country, and they do things differently to the Catholics, or that bloody C of E that I was indoctrinated by. The decoration inside the churches that we saw was outstanding, with Jesus and all the saints drawn in the Byzantine style, picked out in gold leaf, and watched over by some scary-looking, real life nuns. The Moon Church was particularly good, as it has an astronomic clock exactly like the (world famous) one in Prague. I liked the one in Oradea better, because it’s higher up, and more workmanlike – it isn’t fancy, it’s utilitarian. The Greek Catholic church, incidentally, arose when the Orthodox community was being persecuted, so, as I understand it, a few people decided to call themselves Greek Catholics, and then didn’t really change much, and ended up avoiding being persecuted. They were also legally allowed to build their churches out of stone, rather than the wood that the Orthodox were obliged to make theirs from.

Then we paid to walk up a fuck-off huge tower. Yes, you read that correctly. In specific, a 50m clock tower, that would let us see the entire city. At first, it seemed great! Nice big wide concrete spiral stairs, handily placed landings and hand-rails. But the higher up we went, the worse it got. The stairways got narrower, and more winding, and then they turned into metal, and the view over the bannister gave you worse and worse vertigo. When you got past the clock’s pendulum, it became honestly terrifying. But it was well worth it when we got to the top. The views were something else. We could see all over the city, with the Carpathian Mountains rising in the distance. But, unlike my country, the air was clear. We could see for miles, unhampered by exhaust fumes, general smog, and pollution. It was incredible. In my country, you’d only be able to see that far in a National Park that had a prevailing wind. But here, it was no big deal. It was outstanding. Just for the record, trying to get down narrow, steep, spiral staircases is far worse than getting up them. 

Beautiful cityscape, Carpathians in background

Then, it was time for the Citadel. The Oradean Citadel has been standing since the 11^th Century, and has obviously been torn down, and built up, and generally edited over the past millennium. I almost didn’t notice it, because its view from the road was blocked by a block of Soviet-era flats and a huge, 21^st Century cathedral. Isn’t that brilliant? You take a building as old as the town, and then block it in with horrible high rises and a brand new cathedral. Anyway, the Citadel is brilliant. The moat used to be full of thermal water, which made the Mongol invaders (who tried to wait until it froze in winter) go home bored, or something. Since then, it’s been assaulted by the Austro-Hungarians, the Ottomans, some peasants, and Napoleon. The citadel is currently a huge, white, pentagonal building, which is well worth the walk. There are no suitable places to urinate anywhere near it, especially for tourists, and it is deeply frowned upon to pee anywhere near it. I didn’t pee there, it’s not true, it is bullshit. I did not pee there, I did not… Oh hai, reader! Don’t even ask. 

On the way back, we saw a tram! It was like seeing an old friend. I loved travelling on them every day in Poland. It was exciting. Will there be a seat? Will I be next to a pissy old tramp, an attractive young student, or a nun of indeterminate yet advanced age? Fuck me, I’d missed trams. We almost ran to catch it, but it turned out that this was not a well tram. It limped along, making metal-on-metal screeching noises, and would then give out a huge amount of sparks from somewhere underneath, jerk away at a reasonable speed for about ten metres, and then go back to making horrifying noises. Not catching that tram is my only regret from Oradea. It looked exciting.  

Anyway, more by accident than design, I had ended up in Oradea on Hungarian National Day! Oradea used to be part of Hungary, and has a huge Hungarian population. Quite a few of them were dancing traditional dances in the city centre. Those that weren’t Hungarian I met when we went out drinking that night. Even those who weren’t of any kind of Hungarian stock were celebrating, probably because they knew a Hungarian, or their aunt by marriage is Hungarian, or they just wanted to celebrate something. I work with a lady from Hungary, so I allowed myself to join in on the celebrations. And it was incredible! I drank a lot of beer, I met some Romanians, I met some Hungarians, I met a few who were pretending to be one or the other. I met a university lecturer in Orthodox Christianity, the curator of a museum, and a whole bunch of wonderful people. And then I fell asleep on a table because I had slept only on the 3 hour flight, and I usually like 9 hours at the bare minimum. One of my last memories was adding water to my whiskey (as is traditional in Scotland, where the beverage came from), and one guy’s eyes nearly popping out of his head. “Your ways are not our ways!” as Dracula himself put it. 

Quite a nice museum

The next day, or the day after, Cristie and I wandered around the city with his brother. (My memories are hazy.) It was at that point that I saw how absurdly well connected Cristie was with everyone. If we weren’t stopping to talk to the Head of Medicine at the university or whatever, then we were going to the theatre to pick up some free tickets for his mum. He was like a Mafia Don or something. It was incredible. I knew that it was something else when he took me to the Vivarium in the new museum, which wasn’t even open to the public. They had the lot! Hedgehogs, axolotls, piranhas, tarantulas, quails, and a snake that only ate insects! Let me tell you this: there is nothing eerier, nor more exciting, than being in a museum of any kind which is not open to the public. The lights are dimmed, but you can do anything, go where you like, whatever! If you’re not supposed to be somewhere, then it’s generally only exciting for that very reason, but I did get to see the hedgehog from a different angle, before any member of the public saw it from the proper angle, which I suppose is always a talking point. Also, I could have put my fingers in the piranha tank, but I figured that both my mum and fiancée would have gone ape if I had. 

Incidentally, in the bit that was open, the museum had an interactive Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. This next bit is even less funny than the rest of this blog, but my god, that man had a mind! If he’d been around during the age of nuclear weapons, we’d either be dead or at complete peace, considering just how brilliant he was. Most of the exhibitions were taken from doodles in his margins, but they were brilliant! What a man. Just google them. Flying machines, weaponry that wouldn’t be invented for half a century, pendulums, mining tools… outstanding.

Train 

After that, I bought two bottles of Romanian wine, and got ready to leave. The rain had set in. I was ready for my 14 hour train journey across Romania! It was no longer Future Mungo’s problem, but Present Mungo’s. Unfortunately, it was in the dark, so I didn’t have a chance to look out of the window (to see all the wonders that Jonathan Harker saw, of course), but Cristie had found me the service with a sleeper carriage. I am eternally grateful that he did, because I was in a warm, snug little room, with a load of beds in the walls, a little window, and a big sign telling me not to smoke anywhere on the train, or I would be shot, or some such unpleasantness. In an unintentional parallel to Dracula, I had a “small flask of the plum brandy of the country” to drink, made by Cristie’s father. It’s called palinka, and I both love it and hate it in equal measure. I’ve drunk palinka on many occasions. The first time was on my very first day at university, when a mad Hungarian got me to drink some of hers. It knocked me dead then, and has always done the same since then. It’s great value: you drink a shot, and you can still taste it the next morning. The more you drink, the easier it gets. The very first day I met Cristie, he got me to drink a shot of it, and roared in triumph when I did.  Cristie’s father’s palinka has always been dangerous, but it is wonderful stuff. My compliments to the chef! You know it’s good when your memory of one night is drinking it, falling down the stairs, and then an utter blank. 

My room! The bit on the left is the other bed.

On the train, I drank the red wine, and a mouthful or two of the palinka when we got to the first stop – I think Timisoara, but I’m not sure. I popped out for a smoke, seeing as you can smoke on Romanian platforms (I would like to put a big FUCK YOU in, especially for the guy in the booth in Woking at 2am, who cussed me out over the tannoy in 2012 for smoking basically on the tracks, in a deserted station. I hope your role has given you a lot of joy over the years, you absolute jobsworth), and then realised that, after halfway through my wine menu for my evening, that I wouldn’t be able to smoke for… a while. There was a smoke alarm in the sleeper car. I know this, because it was staring me out. I paced the train frantically, and then eventually didn’t notice a smoke alarm in the toilet. It was brilliant. It was like a free bar. I drank a bit more palinka, laid in bed with a book, and then fancied a cigarette. Scurrying down to the khazi, I opened the tiny window, hanging my hand (and cigarette) out exactly as I had been told to never do from a moving train, and started smoking, blowing the smoke out into the freezing, damp wind whipping past the window. Halfway through my cigarette, the train started to slow. Panicking, I chucked my fag out, and ran into my bunk to look innocuous, probably holding my book upside down. It turned out that this was another stop – also potentially Timisoara – and I could smoke there! I rolled another, and ended up talking to the guard and a passenger. The passenger was explicit that I should not, under any circumstances, smoke on-board. He laughed as he said that, and added that it would cost me 50 lei to find out from the guard where to smoke. Do you think I paid him? No. This was a holiday on a budget, and why pay for cheat codes when you can find them out manually? 

I went back to bed with the palinka and the new Pratchett that I had carefully purchased from an Aladdin’s cave of books in Brighton, and before I knew it, we were in another town. I was drunk enough to enjoy the unique feeling of being in bed in a train station. I lay there with my book, and looked through the window at the passers-by, with the blankets up to my chin to deflect the steely glares. And then someone joined me.

It would have been nice to be able to see
what was out of the window

He was wonderful. He spoke fluent English, and we discussed many things. I can’t remember most of them, because I was pissed. I do distinctly recall two things: the first is telling him that I was happy to smoke out of the window in the pisser, and his look of fear both when I left and returned. The second is his reaction to me opening the second bottle of wine: “wow! You’re thirsty tonight!” He refused the palinka, saying that he didn’t drink it by choice. He did once shout at me for leaving my baggage unattended though, telling me that it wasn’t safe. Like I say, he was an excellent man to be sharing with, but I had my passport and money with me, and if anyone wanted to rob a stranger’s bag for an EU/UK adaptor, some socks, a t-shirt, and a few books, then I would be happy to just give them to the thief, if he was willing to ask. But seriously, it was a bit of luck that I was with him, because he woke me up ten minutes before we hit Bucharest. He cared, and if you’re reading this: hope you’re okay. Thanks for keeping an eye on me. Good luck with everything you do. 

Bucharest

Halfway down the second bottle of wine of my journey, I had received a message, telling me where to wait for my friend Clau in Bucharest (also a friend from Poland with whom I had stayed in touch). I had not charged my phone, so I woke up with the vague idea that I should meet him under some kind of sign. I also woke up so hungover that I couldn’t speak, or unglue my lips from my teeth. I felt like death. I somehow bought a Fanta from a kiosk, and then walked out of the station, only to be confronted by a big billboard! I was also confronted by an Arctic wind. I stood under that big billboard for 20 minutes, in a freezing, terrifying, alien, capital city, before venturing back into the station to charge my phone and check on my friend. It turned out that I was (and still am) a useless waste of space, because he meant the big billboard by the McDonalds in the station (very hard to miss), and had been waiting for about an hour. 

View from the flat window

We got an Uber to his flat, and it was like being in a timewarp. He and his partner Teo had had a flat together in Poland when we were all living there, and had had me and my flatmates over for a special, home-cooked Easter dinner. At that time, they had been absolutely brilliant hosts. We had turned up with about six bottles of wine (one, incidentally, called Blood of Dracula, and they hadn’t minded a bit). We got hideously drunk, and went home, extremely drunk on wine and full of great food. Arriving there was like a timewarp, because it was like I’d never left that night. They were both still exceptional hosts, and it was like I had never left, and had instead woken up to the hangover from that Easter meal. I may as well have just passed out on the sofa, considering how much things had changed. 

Here's a photo that doesn't do this church justice

And then we hit the first cultural difference of the trip. Having a guest in England is a bit like having a cat asleep in a basket. You generally just ignore it, and uncomfortably make sure it’s okay every so often: feed it because you assume it can’t feed itself, offer it tea occasionally, and more or less coexist in your separate worlds, accommodating them when they make their needs obvious. And then there’s Romanian hospitality. They will cater to your every need, if you’re a guest in their house. In Transylvania, Cristie and his mum had bent over backwards to make sure that I was happy, and it only got better in Bucharest. I turned up, bitterly hungover, and was presented with a cup of coffee and Captain Beefheart on Spotify, because Clau had remembered that I liked Beefheart from the time when we were studying together, four years previously. It was outstanding. I mentioned that I played guitar and Teo brought her guitar - untouched for about ten years out - to make me feel more at home. In my country, that would be a cynical way to ask someone to tune it. Not so there! They tried to feed me anything and everything, giving me about a million choices, making sure I wasn’t hungry, or thirsty, or in need of a smoke. I absolutely loved it, and loved them for it, but the culture shock messed with my mind. The last time I had guests in my house (November), they cleaned the kitchen for me. (Cheers lads, you made such a great job of it that I haven’t so much as dusted it since!) I tried to help with the cooking and cleaning in Transylvania, and I got quite a torrent of Romanian, which I understood as telling me to sit down, and not help, as you’re a guest! (but thank you for trying, we appreciate it.) Where I’m from, you bring a present for the hosts if you’re staying in their home. I tried to give some teabags to Cristie’s mum, and she seemed embarrassed, until I asked Cristie’s brother to explain that it was important to people from my country. Thankfully, my friends in Bucharest had specifically asked me not to bring presents, so I could relax and enjoy their beautiful home, and all the pennies I had saved on another box of teabags.

I woke up some hours later, feeling much better. It was time to see Bucharest! It turned out that I’d brought the weather with me. Oradea had started out sunny, but had eventually got colder and wetter. By the time I woke up, Bucharest was covered in snow. Now, I was prepared for South Eastern Europe. ‘Southern Europe has sun, and it hardly ever snows’, was my logic. I did not think to question why it was that the Romanian national drink wasn’t beer or wine (which they make admirably), but rather a 70% brandy designed to keep you warm. I very quickly found out, that afternoon. It was freezing cold, with a kind of compacted snow and ice combo underfoot, which is absolutely lethal when you’re wearing tennis shoes, as Clau called them. They did nothing to protect my feet from the cold, and had absolutely no purchase on the ground. But man, it was worth walking around, just to see the place. 

It's a remarkable building

The order in which we saw things has kind of blended in together. But rest assured, I did see some incredible stuff. By far and away the best was the Romanian Palace of Parliaments. Oh boy, but that blew my mind. It’s not a particularly beautiful building, although it has a kind of distant, bleak handsomeness about it, like Morrissey, or the Yorkshire Moors. But it’s fucking huge! It’s the biggest administrative building in the world. It has three museums, the Romanian Senate and the House of Deputies, as well as a conference centre. Even so, 70% of it is empty. The heating and lighting bill costs as much every year as that of a fair-sized city. 400 rooms of its 1100 are used. Even looking at it in person, it’s hard to understand the real scale of it. It’s like it’s further away than it is. And that’s just the outside, it’s got a nuclear bunker underneath it, along with seven other subterranean levels. It was constructed by Ceausescu at a time when Romania was bitterly in debt, and stands as a monument to his mad ideas and mismanagement of a great country. He modelled his renovations of Bucharest on Pyongyang, for crying out loud! He demolished a whole neighbourhood to make room for the Palace, and another one for the boulevard that leads up to it, just to emphasise the building’s majesty. We didn’t go inside, but just the outside was something else, it really was. 

Not a miners' strike in sight

The Hall of Records (I wish I’d found a way to sneak in and enter myself as a 1992 birth to Romanian parents so that I could escape the horrific, xenophobic mess that my country has become, but it was a Sunday, and the Hall was shut) is just over the road. So is the Ministry of Intelligence, if I remember correctly. Walking around Bucharest, I found that, amongst the Communist architecture, there are some incredible sights. For one thing, the Romanian National Bank is a wonderful sight, and I’m one of the only non-Romanians that I know that has seen the oldest glass dome in the whole country. It’s on top of a building (that could be a museum, but I’m not 100% sure). One of my favourites was the Athaneum. Constructed in a kind of neo-Classical way, it houses a grand entryway and a big auditorium. It’s also constructed entirely of marble inside. In fact, two kinds of marble. One is Romanian, and the other is Italian. But the best bit is inside the auditorium itself. Around the entire ceiling is a painting showing the proudest moments in Romanian history. It was outstanding, even if you don’t know much about the people who are portrayed in it. We couldn’t do it in the UK. In my country, it would literally be the Battle of Agincourt (probably our proudest moment), syphilitic Henry VIII telling the Pope to get bent so that he could chase pussy without being excommunicated, a bunch of fishermen having to rescue our entire army from Northern France because we fucked up on a frankly alarming scale, Winston Churchill selling out Poland to the Soviets like a gangster, and us winning a war with a far-flung nation for some cold draughty islands that nobody but penguins lives on, so that a mad, evil, despotic old bitch could get a boost in the polls. Bonus points for the Queen’s uncle hanging out with Hitler, and thoroughly enjoying himself. 

Glass dome

Here's the statue on a nicer day

To be fair, that area of Bucharest also has the worst statue I’d ever seen. It’s supposedly called the Memorial of Rebirth. To give you an idea, I Googled “Bucharest potato statue” to find more about it, and Google gave me exactly what I wanted to needed on the very first hit. It looks like a potato on a big spike. If you prefer, it could also look like an olive on a cocktail on a stick, or a testicle on a skewer. It’s supposed to represent those 1500 people who died during the Romanian Revolution in 1990, but you’d have to be told. Everyone hates it, to the extent that it needs guarding round the clock, to protect it from vandalism. Even the Mayor of Bucharest said that he hated it and didn’t understand the symbolism. It was drawn up by someone who designed chairs and lamps, rather than a proper sculptor. But even that statue is so shit that it’s endearing. It’s the sculpture equivalent of The Room or Bob Dylan’s voice. I don’t even think the guards like it much, seeing as it was vandalised in 2012, by someone who somehow threw some red paint on it so that it looked like the potato was bleeding. It hasn’t been cleaned off yet, so presumably, the consensus is that the paint improved it. Also, that potato is very high up its skewer, so I have no idea how the vandals managed to do it without the guards noticing this ladder. I suppose it’s valid for that alone. I thought it was supposed to be bleeding. 

After going to see the Arc of Triumph, we ended up walking through a huge park, still in the snow and ice, a lot of it virginal. It seemed like a park that you couldn’t escape from. It was huge. I can’t begin to describe the scale of it. I wasn’t entirely sure why it was that we were walking through it, and then we got there. Five years previously, on some drunken night in Poland, I had made Teo promise to take me to the Kretzelescu Palace when I finally got round to visiting Bucharest. I must have forgotten by the time I woke up, but she didn’t. She remembered, and took me there. I tell you, all my Romanian friends are incredible. When she showed me the Kretzelescu Palace on her phone, I thought it was one of the most beautiful buildings I had ever seen (so much so that I forgot the entire exchange, and the building’s existence). And it was even better in person, especially in the snow. I remembered why I wanted to see it. There are all sorts of beautiful buildings hidden away in Bucharest. Some of them are Orthodox Churches, some are administrative buildings, some are palaces, but they’re all absolutely beautiful. I have a weakness for Romanian architecture, probably because it’s a Romanian that got me interested in architecture in the first place (thank you Cristie, love you man <3). I tell you, if I could see the Kretzelescu Palace very day, I probably would. 

Not my photo. Watermark may be a a giveaway

Then we went to a little coffee bar that sold beer (they generally do, there). The coffee and beer weren’t anything hugely special, but I saw a poster that I would have thought I had hallucinated if I hadn’t taken a picture of it. It was a poster advertising КИНО! Specifically, a КИНО covers band, which had played there in 2013. If you don’t know who КИНО are, then I will sound like a horrific hipster. КИНО are a Russian band from the mid to late 1980s that I fell absolutely madly in love with when I was about 15. I have never met anyone else who actually liked them. Even the Russian people that I’ve met only say that their dads like КИНО. And then there they were, in a bar in Bucharest, being approximated by a covers band. If the tram was like an old friend, seeing that poster was like seeing an imaginary friend. Here’s a link or two to my favourite КИНО songs, if anyone is still reading.

He died in 1990, so I don't even get
a chance to visit Russia to see him live

On the last night, we walked what felt like miles through the snow to visit a cat café! They’re advertised on Facebook sometimes, and I have always wanted to visit one. A big warm room, full of cats? I’d walk through broken glass to visit one of those, that’s actually my idea of heaven. I wouldn’t suggest that you start at the one that we visited in Bucharest. I won’t even dignify it with a name-drop in here. Now, maybe I’m biased, but I would think that, if you were to open a cat café, you’d be sure to look after the animals properly. Secondarily, you’d want to choose cats with the right personality to enjoy being around a load of strangers all the time. Lastly, as a café, you’d expect the drinks to be good, or at least passable. This one managed none of those things. It did, however, have an overpowering smell of cat piss. Now, I won’t say that the kitty cats were mistreated. I wouldn’t like to think such a thing. But they were all skinny as rakes, seemed nervous, and were extremely unwilling to interact with humans. Also, the beer they served me wasn’t particularly brilliant, and neither was the hot chocolate, by all accounts. 2/10, would not recommend to anyone.

And then I had to leave. I went on to Bulgaria, and this post is already much too long to tell that tale. I left Bucharest at 4am or somesuch with a heavy heart. I was wearing Clau’s sweater that he was kind enough to ‘lend’ me.

Here's a TripAdvisor certificate, hung over the
fire escape plan. It tickled me at the time.

So, Romania. As you can tell, I’ve always had a weakness for the country, and still have a very deep friendship for the Romanian people that I’ve been lucky to call my friends. When I, pissed up on vodka, in Poland, five years ago, kissed the Romanian flag that someone had hanging up on their door, I had no idea that I would love the county as much as I did when I visited it. It’s all slightly twisted, Romania. They speak a Latin language, but it’s Slavic enough that understanding it is a struggle. They love bureaucracy, make you wait for half an hour in a dingy, overheated post office just to buy a stamp. but they also brew beers called Carpathian Blood (or something), sell it to tourists, and make it taste quite good after the second pint. There were gypsies, but they weren’t fighting each other, and they didn’t rob me. Everyone was wonderful and accommodating, almost to a fault. I did not meet one person who was not kind and helpful to me. It’s a fantastic place. The best thing about it was seeing the Romanian flag flying alongside the EU flag absolutely everywhere. I'm proud of my European citizenship, and seeing our flag everywhere, pride of place alongside the national one, honestly made me sad that a handful of small, ignorant, and usually racist baby-boomers should be able to drag my country out of the brotherhood of nations that has brought us all so much peace and prosperity over the past decades. Shame on you.

How will I leave this post? A word of wisdom. If someone’s mum cooks for you, then eat it, if only through politeness. If someone’s mama cooks for you, you’d best make sure that you’re in the front of the queue when the food is coming out. Use your elbows, if you must. If someone is called mama, their food will be outstanding. Even if it’s something that you don’t usually like, if the cook is called mama by anyone, then you’ll be in for a treat.

NB: Big thanks to Cristie, his mum, his brother, his father (for the palinka), Cristian, and everyone else I met in Oradea, for making me feel so welcome. Obviously, a big shout out to Clau and Teo for looking after me, showing me such awesome things, and generally making my stay there a treat. Love you guys <3