Our last evening in Sofia was spent in a restaurant called Einstein's. An effigy of the great man sits at the entrance to the cellar bar, and the menu has numerous pizzas named after distinguished scientists - Fahrenheit, Pascal and so on. We were unable to make the connections between the name and the fillings, perhaps they were obscure Bulgarian puns. After 24 hours in the city, Dec felt linguistically competent to order a beer whose name was written entirely in Cyrillic (a mutant version of the Greek alphabet - see yesterday's post) but we ended up with two glasses of Raki, an ouzo-like spirit. Very drinkable, and at 1.5 lev (about 65p) per glass, not a financial disaster. The pizza was ok too.
Our last night in Sofia was relatively quiet. The people in the next room seemed to like clomping around in hobnail boots but a power cut put paid to their fun. We woke refreshed and ready for the next phase of our adventure - a nine-hour train ride to Bucharest. Nine hours On a train which turned out to have no refreshments on board.
Getting to the central station was our first achievement. It's hidden behind the bus station, with no signs. Guesswork prevailed, and we made it to the main hall where the shortage of signs has led to a minor industry of freelance guides who accost you in English (how do they know that WE SPEAK ENGLISH? have they been following our blog?), and insisted on leading us around the station to our platform, sticking to us like glue. FOr this service, which was hardly essential, our 'guide' expected to get a fat tip. So he was most put out when Dec gave him the last of our Bulgarian money - 1.20 lev, about 50p. I hope that we all learned something from the experience. He will probably spend the next 5 years telling his pals how tight the British are.
The central station in Sofia is nothing to brag about - about a dozen drab concrete platforms, many seemingly no longer used. The rolling stock is also a great deal more, erm, mature than we Brits are used to. Picture the train in Hitchcock's 39 Steps, all corridors and compartments. Now imagine nine hours of clickety-clack, with the heating on full blast even though it's a lovely sunny autumn day.
The weather has been glorious and makes it easy to enjoy the scenery. As we left Sofia, the train passes through some fairly shabby industrial areas, with sidings and derelict buildings on either side. As we left the suburbs, the scenery changed to farmland dotted with tiny stations serving small villages, a bit like Devizes but without the railway or the stations. This alternated with hilly areas and other sites with heavy industrial architecture, some in use, some seemingly abandoned.
One thing we noticed as we travelled through Bulgaria was a dearth of birdlife. Apart from a few pigeons and sparrows in the city itself, we hardly saw any birds at all from the train. Not another communist legacy, surely! We suppose that many birds fly south for the winter, as temperatures regularly hit minus 15. But you would expect to see a few flocks, fattening up for their migration in the recently ploughed and presumably just-seeded fields?
The train travels across northern Bulgaria at a fairly sedate pace, stopping at half a dozen of the larger stations. Before long, we have our compartment to ourselves. The train is comfortable enough and the occasional doze is in order.
At last we pull into Ruse station, on the border. The indicator on our platform still shows the previous departure - 15:05 to Istanbul. We wonder how long that journey is, and whether it's worth taking...
The border control staff made their way through the train asking the usual inane questions and seemed to be satisfied that we weren't terrorists. The train set off for Romania. The border is marked here by a river and, after crossing the bridge, we looked for dramatic changes which might signify our new location. But it's much the same. Later on we spy a few herds of sheep being minded by men with sticks; a less common sight in the UK these days. They also use horses to pull carts in the timeless fashion. But that's rare; much of the agricultural work is done with tractors and monster cultivators, and we spied a bumper crop of solar panels - thousands and thousands of them. Romania is not as backward as you might think. We also saw many more birds...
Our last night in Sofia was relatively quiet. The people in the next room seemed to like clomping around in hobnail boots but a power cut put paid to their fun. We woke refreshed and ready for the next phase of our adventure - a nine-hour train ride to Bucharest. Nine hours On a train which turned out to have no refreshments on board.
Getting to the central station was our first achievement. It's hidden behind the bus station, with no signs. Guesswork prevailed, and we made it to the main hall where the shortage of signs has led to a minor industry of freelance guides who accost you in English (how do they know that WE SPEAK ENGLISH? have they been following our blog?), and insisted on leading us around the station to our platform, sticking to us like glue. FOr this service, which was hardly essential, our 'guide' expected to get a fat tip. So he was most put out when Dec gave him the last of our Bulgarian money - 1.20 lev, about 50p. I hope that we all learned something from the experience. He will probably spend the next 5 years telling his pals how tight the British are.
The central station in Sofia is nothing to brag about - about a dozen drab concrete platforms, many seemingly no longer used. The rolling stock is also a great deal more, erm, mature than we Brits are used to. Picture the train in Hitchcock's 39 Steps, all corridors and compartments. Now imagine nine hours of clickety-clack, with the heating on full blast even though it's a lovely sunny autumn day.
The weather has been glorious and makes it easy to enjoy the scenery. As we left Sofia, the train passes through some fairly shabby industrial areas, with sidings and derelict buildings on either side. As we left the suburbs, the scenery changed to farmland dotted with tiny stations serving small villages, a bit like Devizes but without the railway or the stations. This alternated with hilly areas and other sites with heavy industrial architecture, some in use, some seemingly abandoned.
One thing we noticed as we travelled through Bulgaria was a dearth of birdlife. Apart from a few pigeons and sparrows in the city itself, we hardly saw any birds at all from the train. Not another communist legacy, surely! We suppose that many birds fly south for the winter, as temperatures regularly hit minus 15. But you would expect to see a few flocks, fattening up for their migration in the recently ploughed and presumably just-seeded fields?
The train travels across northern Bulgaria at a fairly sedate pace, stopping at half a dozen of the larger stations. Before long, we have our compartment to ourselves. The train is comfortable enough and the occasional doze is in order.
At last we pull into Ruse station, on the border. The indicator on our platform still shows the previous departure - 15:05 to Istanbul. We wonder how long that journey is, and whether it's worth taking...
The border control staff made their way through the train asking the usual inane questions and seemed to be satisfied that we weren't terrorists. The train set off for Romania. The border is marked here by a river and, after crossing the bridge, we looked for dramatic changes which might signify our new location. But it's much the same. Later on we spy a few herds of sheep being minded by men with sticks; a less common sight in the UK these days. They also use horses to pull carts in the timeless fashion. But that's rare; much of the agricultural work is done with tractors and monster cultivators, and we spied a bumper crop of solar panels - thousands and thousands of them. Romania is not as backward as you might think. We also saw many more birds...
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