Sunday, June 23
We're basically to the end of the trip here. Our last couple of days are just seeing countrysides from the windows of transportation. Today, we have a train, a bus, a taxi, a plane, and finally another bus.
The train, as predicted, did not give much in the way of nighttime comforts. We were seated in First Class, which is supposed to be child-free but i guess babies are technically luggage, but i sure didn't see any difference between this six-person bullshit car and our previous six-person bullshit cars. Sure, since the first one, we've figured out how to recline the seats, but it's not that big of an improvement.
We pulled into Thessaloniki pretty close to on schedule, just after 6am. Our bus was scheduled to leave at 8am to take us to Plovdiv, which is in neighboring Bulgaria, but we still needed tickets for it. The ticket office was, according to our Eurail timetable, to open at 6am, but it was closed when we got there, and the posted hours read 7:00 – 14:00, Tuesday – Sunday. Lucky we weren't coming in on a Monday! That little detail was not included in our Eurail book. Also lucky they hadn't decided to take off Sundays like most agencies.
So we camped out right in front of their door. I took a moment to go score us some breakfast.
While Amanda was in the bathroom, a girl came up and was reading the new posted hours, and started freaking out a little bit. Then she asked me if i was going to Sofia, i said, “Plovdiv.”
“...I'm sorry?”
“I am going to Plovdiv.”
“What?” She spoke English, but did not know the city of Plovdiv. Which is not all that surprising. She turned to look at the hours again, in a panic.
“It's Sunday,” i said, pointing at the Sunday hours.
“Oh!” she cried out. “Oh! Oh, good! Thank you!” and then she walked over to the next pillar and sat down to wait also.
It's maybe not a very interesting story, but it's about the best one i've got for today. This log entry is going to be very short.
7:00 rolled around and the office opened right on time. We were the first in. Tickets in hand, we went back outside, and continued to wait. Just before 8:00, a driver showed up and started up the one bus sitting in the parking lot, which the woman at the counter had told us was not ours. We watched for a few minutes as he started throwing other passengers' bags into the possum belly, wondering when our bus would arrive. Finally Amanda prodded me to go ask if this bus was going to Plovdiv, so i did.
The driver did not speak English in any capacity, beyond recognizing just a few key words. When i said Plovdiv though, he got excited and assured me, in his native tongue (either Greek or Bulgarian, i am not sure which), that this bus was going there. So we pulled our luggage over, he slapped destination tickets on it, and loaded it in next to one solitary other bag marked Plovdiv.
As it turned out, this was also the bus to Sofia. It made three stops in Bulgaria, Plovdiv being the final destination.
We slept for the first two hours on the bus, then we crossed the border into Bulgaria and had to go through customs. I'm not really sure how they determine which countries you need to go through customs for and which you don't; this is our 11th country on the trip and we've only needed visas upon entry to three of them (Ireland, France, and now Bulgaria). I wonder if we'll get stamped in Germany, coming in from here?
Just past the border, we took a break at some kind of a truck stop. It was a little strange; out in the middle of nowhere, aside from being right at the border, and it consisted of one restaurant, one grocery store (which seemed to be half cosmetics), and, largest of all, a sports shoe store. The water closets were in a different building entirely, across the parking lot.
I tried to get some reading done, but ended up sleeping for most of the next leg of the trip. We made our first destination, and a few of the other passengers got off. So far, what we'd seen of Bulgaria had been wide expanses of trees and mountains with just quaint little farming villages near the rivers, but pulling into this first city, i don't know what city, we got a good look at the urban decay. Tall buildings that looked like cinder blocks with most of their exteriors ripped away but signs of life in every apartment, crammed close together everywhere. Some buildings were just empty shells, concrete skeletons with no exterior walls offering a clear view straight through to their staircases that lead only to other blank floors.
Sofia, Bulgaria's capitol, was exactly the same. Places of business, clearly still in operation, looked like they should have been abandoned for years. Even the operating city buses seemed the animated skeletons of scrapyard scenery. I got a good amount of footage of it, but it seemed that every time i got my camera put away was when we'd pass the most dilapidated specimens of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that Bulgaria seems to be.
Most of the passengers disembarked in Sofia; in fact, besides us, only one woman remained on the bus to finish the trip to Plovdiv. We tried to get off just to use the restrooms and hopefully find some food, misunderstanding the driver's “10 minutes” amidst his foreign words to mean that we had that time before leaving again. But when we did, he called to us and motioned us back into the bus.
Ten minutes later, we pulled into a bus depot. The driver let us out at one of the run-down buildings, pointed into the open door and said, “toilet,” and then i guess something about being right back. We entered the building, and the bus drove off. It was nondescript whether the restroom we found within was men's or women's, but there were two stalls, and nobody else around, so we each just went ahead and picked one.
The stalls did not contain toilets as we know them.
The facilities were of a style that i'd thought existed only in Japan. Essentially a hole in the ground with a rectangular funnel and grips on either side, to place your feet. If you're a man and you're just going #1, hey, good for you, just aim for the hole and do what you do.
Amanda, on the other hand, did not have a good time. It was fortunate she had decided to bring the day bag off of the bus, since it contained the roll of toilet paper we'd absconded from the last hotel, knowing that parts of Romania, which was originally part of our itinerary but ultimately got dropped, did not provide toilet paper in public restrooms, because neither did this one. That was a lot of commas. I'd left my HandyCam on the bus, but by chance there was a Flip in the day bag, so yes, i got a shot of this travesty of a lavatory.
Also when you went to wash your hands, the sink shot more water out of where the faucet connected to the porcelain than it did out of the actual faucet-hole, and the paper towel dispenser was devoid of supplies, as well.
We waited around in their little lounge area, still feeling a little like we'd stepped into 28 Days Later, and then went back outside. I saw a bus that looked like ours pulling around the outside of one of the other buildings and said, hey, there's our bus, but then our bus driver walked around the corner of our building, clearly not driving the bus.
That bus pulled up alongside our building anyway just as he was getting to us, and he extended a hand to me and bid us farewell. Another driver was to take us the final two of our eight hours to Plovdiv.
Our original driver had been listening to a variety of musics during our drive, mostly pop music that i recognized like Savage Garden and Red Hot Chili Peppers but also some that i must assume is regional. This new driver, however, was playing metal the whole way, at a low volume. Rainbow (Dio's band previous to Dio), Iron Maiden, Judas Priest...hell yeah. Except then he put on a movie, which drowned out the metal. I don't know what it was but it was in English and had Jason Statham. But at least this guy did not drive like The Transporter.
Which is more than i can say for our taxi driver from the Plovdiv bus terminal to the airport. Nobody in Plovdiv spoke one bit of English, but i managed to get “no autobus” out of one lady, and “taxi.” We could find no maps, so that put the kibosh on the idea of walking to the airport. Also, Bulgarian as a language seems similar to Russian, so once again the alphabet is not the same. The familiar letters are there, along with Russia's arcane glyphs and numbers used for spelling.
There were several taxis parked outside the bus station, so i approached one and asked how much to take us to the airport. I needed to know because i had no Bulgarian money; they don't use the Euro, they use the Lyra. The taxi driver had some basic English in him, and said “Twenty...or thereabouts.” I told him i needed to know because i had no Lyra, and would need to get some, pointing at the ATM. “Twenty will do,” he conceded.
Then the ATM would not give me money, for whatever mysterious reason. I tried several times, and then the taxi driver approached and said we would try another machine. He drove us around the block to another, which worked fine. I still only withdrew the 20 Lyra he'd quoted me, not wanting to pay more. I didn't really want to pay that much, but it was a bargain compared to our last taxi, which was 20 Euros. The Lyra is valued at roughly half a Euro.
I had initially thought that this guy was a more sane driver than our cabbie in Bari. Then he started passing people while straddling the center line when there was oncoming traffic. He was clearly speeding, because there came a point where he dodged back into normal traffic from his center line shenanigans and slowed way down, and then we passed an obvious speed trap with at least four motorcycle cops at the ready. Once we were a distance past them, he returned to his Sega Genesis-inspired taxi driving, if you follow my meaning.
The Plovdiv airport turned out to be far, far out of town, past rolling fields of sunflowers. Seriously, the way we grow corn in Wisconsin, they grow sunflowers here in Bulgaria. It was quite disappointing to see where we were, though, because there was still over four hours until our flight, and we had really wanted to go out and see some of Plovdiv, including getting some food. We were pretty hungry, but the food was somewhat less important than seeing another European city. We resigned ourselves to eating whatever was available in the airport and sitting around twiddling our thumbs for a full sixth of our day.
We entered the building and...it was completely devoid of human presence, save a solitary security officer making his way toward us. There was an x-ray machine immediately inside the door, which he manned presently, and had us run our bags through. That completed, he returned to wherever he had come from, and we were all alone. There were a couple of cafes, but no one to sell us food out of them. The RyanAir check-in counters were right in front of us, but nobody to check us in.
The scales were functioning, though, so we took the opportunity to weigh our suitcase, since there's a 15kg limit to checked luggage. We clocked in at just over 19. So, having so much free time on our hands, we reorganized, stuffing items into our carry-ons and throwing away things we did not need. Never have we had a carry-on weighed before getting on an airplane, and we hoped this would not be the one to break that streak, because at least mine is seriously over the 10kg carry-on limit. I'm pretty sure my carry-on is heavier than the suitcase.
Then we headed over to one of the cafes, noting power outlets within the reach of my Macbook's power cord from the table. I had to stretch it all the way out, so here we are with a cable across what should be a major walkway, ready to trip people, but as there was no one else to be seen, we didn't really worry about it. Then i logged on to the free WiFi, a pleasant surprise for an airport, because even in 2013 those pirates make you pay exorbitant amounts for a service that they limit your time with. I predict that in another five years the Internet will be free everywhere except in airports.
People started to trickle in, eventually even a cafe operator, and we got some sandwiches. The check-in lines still weren't open, though. And then, some weather started to happen.
Amanda first noted some nasty-looking clouds rolling in through the windows behind me. Then the wind picked up so strongly that the flagpoles out front started to bend. We observed a bird attempting to reach the top of the windows out front, which stretched from the floor to the ceiling approximately two, two-and-a-half stories high, where we assumed it had a nest, but it just kept getting thrown about in the air currents, sometimes falling almost to the ground and others being pushed past the point it was trying to reach. I saw a man holding a blanket as the wind ripped through it, unsure what he was doing, but then seeing him try to stuff it in the trunk of his car with little success. I think he was trying to fold it up, i'm unsure how it became unfurled in the first place, but i guess i joined the action late. Eventually he got it in there, but half of it blew out as he was closing the trunk and hung out of his car, flapping maniacally. So he tried again, and as he was doing so, i saw the wind tip over a parked motorcycle.
We were starting to have doubts about our flight. Would they cancel it? Then what would we do? Our timing is kind of precarious, for other travel arrangements, although really our endgame for the next couple days is just to get on the plane home and we're taking a weird roundabout way to get there, just to see more things and also save money. If we don't get on this flight, we can probably find a workaround.
But soon enough, check-in and gate security opened, and we managed to get through both of those things. Right now we are waiting in our terminal for our flight, still an hour away, and i might note the only flight leaving out of this entire airport all day. A good number of people have shown up for it, so i'm no longer worried we're going to be in a four-seat cropduster, as i had posited when Amanda was musing about what type of plane we'd get earlier. There's probably fifty people here.
Well, that brings us up to current. I'm going to go use the water closet, then patiently await boarding by reading either some more Neal Stephenson, or some Cracked while i've got the internets.
--
The flight ended up being a full house, every seat on the plane occupied. This RyanAir plane was identical to the one that took us from Dublin to Liverpool, unassigned seating and all. Amanda, jammer she is, cruised through the masses of people and toward the back door of the plane rather than the front, securing us some decent seats with empty overhead bins before many people had boarded. Most of them were going to the front, so choosing the rear door was really a boon for us.
This was my eighth commercial flight. I remember being somewhat terrified when we started cruising down the runway back in 2008 on our way from Chicago to San Francisco, but since that first time, takeoff has been my favorite part of a plane ride. I've long lamented not being able to film out the window, since electronic devices interfere with something or another on airplanes, but moreso the steady climb to cruising altitude that follows. With this flight taking place well after dark, i think the first of the eight to do so, i found that regret to be even more compelling.
As we pulled away from the ground, i watched the lights of Bulgaria slip away smaller and smaller on the ground. It wasn't a sea of them, like launching out of big cities is, but rather a series of unconnected pools of glowing orange, like droplets of light had rained from the sky and were collecting in the pools of the lower land. Beautiful.
Penetrating the clouds, we lost them, and then as we exited on the other side, we could see lightning dancing back and forth between the more ominous vaporous bodies that had, to our favor, passed by us in time. The flight had to be delayed fifteen minutes, but it was a nearly insignificant price to pay. In fact, despite the late go, we still arrived in Frankfurt on time.
And then they overbooked our bus by fucking double.
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