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.
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| 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, 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| Here' a motorbike |
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
