Smorgas-Bourgas

I awoke with a jolt when the train suddenly stopped in Bourgas.  What surprised me about all this is that I had actually slept at all.  The night train from Sofia had been packed, smelly, and fully of atrocious soccer hooligans* who were evidently just scream-counting to ten.  Getting to Bourgas may not have been comfortable but it was fairly easy.  From Prishtina I bused to Skopje, then immediately caught a bus to Sofia (at a terrible exchange rate in the bus depot because it was some sort of Orthodox holiday and everything was closed) and then found the Black Sea Express to the coast.  I had been through 4 countries in 24 hours, and the first thing I did when I emerged from the train at 5:30am was crawl onto a bench in the station and fall as asleep and the first thing the security guard did when he saw me was grunt angrily and poke me with a stick, telling me to leave.

I'm very much convinced that Bulgarian grandfathers are the original hipsters.

 Bourgas is great.  I think the Russians had something to do with it.  I couldn’t decide if I should stay there for the night and rest up for my big trip to Thrace, or if I should just go to Thrace and deal with the fallout later.  I decided to go to Thrace right away because there was the little matter of needing to withdraw cash.  I only like to withdraw $300 at a time, and while I could easily have blown $300 on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast on caviar and iced sweet red wine, my fiscal prudence had me counting the precious few lev I had left and purchasing a ride in a minivan (7 lev I believe) to Malko Tarnovo.  I had been to Veliko Tarnovo, so why not Malko Tarnovo?  It also was right on the border with Turkey, which I believed was a pretty good starting point to access Constantinople.

Surprise!  It wasn’t!  Malko Tarnovo, much like the name suggests, is a small Tarnovo.  This is the smallest tarnovo I have ever been in, and while I had a great mixed grill at the local hotel, there wasn’t anything indicating a means of transport to Turkey, nor a Turkish border anywhere in sight.  So onwards I walked, assuming the border was close, and minibuses were waiting to whisk me away.  I took a few twists and turns through the woods and found myself on a road, hoping it was the road the Turkey.  It’s fairly fortuitous I stumbled out onto it when I did because a car immediately stopped for me and drove me all the way to Constantinople. 

The driver’s name was Rouman and he was in logistics, or shipbuilding, or engineering, or porting, or something along those lines.  He had been to Vancouver, and much of the rest of the world.  Now he was driving to Constantinople for a business meeting of sorts and dropped me off in the centre square, which was possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.  Have you seen Constantinople?  It’s one of the biggest cities in the world and the suburbs look hot, unpleasant, and they start at the Greek border. 

C-Stan approaches.

Rouman also told me many great stories, and finally cracked the riddle of the Vauxhall mystery for me.  Evidently the Russian tsar had sent two agents to the UK to learn about railways and the two agents ended up getting disastrously drunk.  When the tsar asked them to relay all their information they could not remember a thing, and when the tsar asked what the train stops in they reached into their memories and came up with the only thing that stood out: Vauxhall, which is the name of a stop in London.  And now that name is on every train station across all the Russias.  The more you know.

And just like that, after waking up in a smelly and dingy train in Bourgas, and before that having been told by my best friend, like in Harry and the Hendersons, to “go on!” because I wasn’t wanted anymore, I was in one of the oldest and mot cosmopolitan cities on the planet.  The city was pulsing with life around every corner, so I took this opportunity to really let loose, find my bunk bed and fall asleep at 6:30 in the evening.

*AHHH!  What is up with soccer hooligans?  They are ruining Europe!  Young, unemployed men (myself excluded) are the worst thing for a society!