Sofia, Bulgaria

I don't know how many of you have tried doing a full food shop in a foreign country? From long and varied experience, I can tell you it's not easy. Back home in Blighty we're used to having our culinary laziness and incompetence indulged in the form of pre-cooked ready meals, sauces in jars, etc etc. Whereas in most other countries there is a general assumption that everyone knows how to cook properly from scratch, and this puts someone like me at a distinct disadvantage. It was therefore a bit of a godsend to find an British expat shop in Sofia called Little London, where I was able to pick up Oxo cubes and Bisto, albeit at grossly inflated post-Brexit prices. My apartment here only has a microwave and a single hot plate, but with a bit of forward planning I was still able to assemble a respectable chicken dinner. Go me.

Sofia's main street for wining & dining is Vitosha Boulevard, named after the mountain to which it leads and which overlooks the whole city. There's a good mix of venues: you have the generic tourist traps and Irish bars, but you also have smaller, quieter places for grumpy old men like me. It strikes me that Sofia could be viable for a long weekend away with all the other grumpy old men (at my age I really need to renounce the phrase "lads' holiday"). 

On the whole I think I prefer Sofia to Bucharest. It's a bit airier and fresher here, partly due to the altitude, which is 600 metres above sea level. It's nice and compact, very walkable, so much so that I literally didn't use any public transport at all until the metro to the airport for my departing flight. The airport itself gets a two-star review, because check-in didn't open until 90 minutes before departure, and then it took a full hour to get through to the gate. But these are mere quibbles.

Also I should add that all the public transport in Sofia uses an impressive London-style contactless payment system, where you just scan your phone or bank card whenever you get on a bus or tram or metro. Costs are capped at the equivalent of about two quid a day.

I've probably missed out on a lot by restricting my Bulgarian itinerary to just Ruse and Sofia. I'm told that there is great skiing to be had up in the mountains, and by all accounts the east coast is nice too, particularly Varna. But I'm an international jet-setting globetrotter and there's only so much time I can devote to each country. Two new ones ticked off so far on this trip, and a few more to come yet.

National Palace of Culture (1981)

Vitosha Boulevard

Puppies confined in the pet shop window all day long. This is despicably cruel.

Monument to Soviet soldiers.
I can't translate the graffiti, but by now we all know what the blue & yellow stripes mean. 
The council has recently voted to move this monument elsewhere.

Alexander Nevsky cathedral.
There's a cathedral of the same name in Estonia. Been there too.

CSKA Sofia 1 Krumovgrad 0. Bit dull. At least the ticket was cheap.
Attendance roughly on a par with what Gateshead get on a Saturday.
They've been European Cup semi-finalists twice, but those days are now very much in the past.

Sofia apartment. A bit ramshackle, but it serves.

Edd vs Food #116
Turkish kebab from Mezza

Ruse, Bulgaria

My first ever encounter with the river Danube was in Budapest, on a stag party in 2005. The second and third came in Serbia in 2018, where said river flows through both Belgrade and Novi Sad. And here we are for my fourth glimpse: the Danube continues to be neither Beautiful nor Blue, but it does form most of the border between Romania and Bulgaria and so you get your passport checked on either side of the bridge. Ruse is on the south side.

This was at the end of a long and sweaty train journey, all the way from Bucharest in second class. I'd gladly have paid four times the price if it could get me into a first-class carriage, but there wasn't one. The trains have old-fashioned compartments of six seats each, with a narrow corridor along one side. I spent most of the journey standing in the corridor catching a breeze through the window. As you will have seen on the news, there's a bit of a heatwave in southern Europe right now. It's been between 35 and 40 degrees C every day, and these trains don't have air conditioning.

For most travellers Ruse is just a calling point on the journey, but I like to break the mould, and anyway I didn't want to stay on that train any longer than I had to. So I stepped off for a few nights here. I have a childish idea that 'real travelling' begins when your hotel receptionist struggles to speak English: "I see he made reservation, he already paid," stammered the shy young lad behind the counter. In past-tense Bulgarian, the second person conjugation matches that of the third person. So his mistake was logical and therefore forgivable.

Having said that, in my hotel room I was bemused to be confronted, for the first time in all my years, by a mirrored ceiling. Just my luck for it to appear when a) I'm alone and b) it's too hot at night for bedclothes or indeed any other kind of clothes. Because nobody needs to see that. Not even me.

But overall Ruse turns out to be very much my kind of place. I couldn't quite say it's a travel recommendation from me to you all, because it takes a long time to get here, and there isn't much to do. But it has fresh air, leafy shaded parks, tasteful buildings, quiet streets, and almost no litter. Perhaps best of all from my selfish perspective is that you can have a cold beer outside a cafe on the main square and close your eyes and hear nothing but the water splashing in the fountain, and the hum of people talking quietly around you, and children playing in the distance, and birds singing. No idiot DJs and no rubbish piped music. Bliss. A nice way to relax before getting back on the train.

Court house in the city centre

State Opera House.
Quite impressive that they've got one, in a city of only 145,000 people.

Monument of Liberty

Many of Bulgaria's national heroes died tragically from elephantiasis of the moustache.

Gents' toilet in pub. I'm pleased to say that my needs did not necessitate hovering.

Edd vs Food #115
The complimentary hotel breakfast. Ham and cheese melted on fresh bread. Very well executed.
I had steeled myself for soggy toast and week-old cornflakes.
Round here, they don't bother asking if you're vegan or gluten-intolerant.

Hotel bedroom. Note mirrored ceiling and mucky wall pic.
And yes, that's a full-size fridge next to the bed...
...but despite the mirrored ceiling, there was no pink champagne on ice.

Bucharest, Romania

Welcome to the 15th anniversary edition of Edd's Travels. It feels like such a very long time since those first tentative baby steps to New York in 2008. Nowadays I'm closer in age to the retired SKI-ers (Spending the Kids' Inheritance) than I am to the hostel crowd of posh young gap-year types. My ginger stubble has been bleached white, and my eyes are wrinkled from squinting at departure boards and trying to work out if I'm in the right airport. Indeed, by the end of 2023, I will have spent an aggregate lifetime total of literally 3 whole years on the road. I feel like it would be a bit ridiculous to keep doing this forever. But I'm not ready to stop just yet.

And so I'm in Bucharest. In my ignorance I had unthinkingly assumed that Romanian would be one of those incomprehensible Slavic / Cyrillic languages, but in fact it's mostly descended from Latin, and so my familiarity with French (dimly remembered GCSE)  and Spanish (more or less fluent) has been a great help. For example, 'thank you' is mersi, and 'house' is casă. My own casă here is a short tram ride out of the city centre, in a large communist-era block of residential flats. I quite enjoy the throwback feel, though of course in the communist era they didn't have aircon and wi-fi and Nespresso machines.  

Nor, I imagine, did they have framed signs on the bookshelves saying 'Live! Laugh! Love!'. If I had a pound for every time I've seen that inane slogan, then I'd have enough coins to execute its creator by dropping them all on his moronic head.

Bucharest is generally avoided by tourists, and to be quite honest, the tourists have a point. It's a sweaty polluted place with scary traffic. Also it's a bit bewildering at first, because there are no signs in English, and the same goes for the tannoy announcements on the subway. But it's worth persevering. I've been here a full week and the place has grown on me steadily in that time. All you have to do is obey two simple rules: never get in a taxi, and don't drink the tap water. 

And of course, though it's vulgar to say so, everything is agreeably cheap. I got served three gourmet tacos and three beers for a grand total of about £11. My train ticket from airport to city, plus 72 hours of unlimited transport on bus and subway and tram, was less than £7. Speaking of trams, a random bit of local colour: when approaching a corner, the tram stops and the driver hops down to switch the rail points himself, using a big metal implement kept in the cabin for that purpose.

Another notable bit of local colour is the grave of former dictator Nikolae Ceauşescu. Those of my generation or older will remember that in 1989, along with a few other minor reshuffles in Europe, his 24-year reign as Romania's leader came to a very abrupt end. Live by the sword, die by the sword, right? Or in this case, by the bullet. 120 bullets in total, between him and his equally unpleasant wife Elena, after a half-hearted show trial. I suppose there are worse ways to go. Lethal injection takes 10 minutes or so. Cancer can spend years torturing you to death. 

Anyway the Ceaşescus now lie in a fairly nondescript corner of a quiet civilian cemetery, not far from my apartment. The grave has 13 reviews on Google Maps, with a total rating of 3.6 out of 5. When I visited, nobody else was around. There was no security around the grave, nor was there any graffiti; just a few week-old flowers and cheap burned-out candles. Sic transit gloria mundi. Good riddance to the old bugger.

More to follow in a week or so. In the meantime, live laugh love, and all that.

Fountains at the Unirii park

Palace of Parliament

Ceauşescu's grave

There's no particular significance to this beer.
I just like the way the photo came out.

My apartment. The aircon unit in the top right has been doing some very heavy lifting.

Edd vs Food #114
Romanian pork stew with polenta, fried egg and "cow cheese"
At the Restaurant Bucătărașul