Sleepless in Subotica

I've been to Subotica, and I have seen the big yellow building in the square, and I have eaten a pizza there (all 2007), so when I rolled in around noon on the 20th I was all hungry for Hungary.  My whole plan was to just start walking towards the border and then hop on a train once I got there.  Ugh.  Not so easy.  

I walked along what I had determined to the bus route and was finally able to catch a bus to the border after a considerable distance.  At the border, the Serbo-babe border guard followed instructions and stamped where she was supposed to, but the unruly Hungarian guard stamped with reckless abandon, upsetting my system.  

The crossing by car is at Tompa, but the train crosses at a village called Kelebia.  I had to walk from Tompa all the way to Kelebia which proved to be longer than I thought and I ended up hitching a ride from a very nice man and his son.  I was deposited in the centre of Kelebia at a bank and then I waited around for the train to take me to Budapest.  Totally an unnecessary trip on my part, because the cost of the ticket to BP was 3088 forints (~$12) and it would ahave been similar with the cost of the ticket between Belgrade and Subotica to have gone BG-BP direct.  Live and learn, I guess.

Budapest was a sight for sore eyes indeed.  I feel like I had closed a loop: After arriving there in November, 2009,  and thinking to myself that I was finally in "the East" I was now coming the other way after 8 and a half months and nothing ever felt more Western in my eyes.  I was greeted with froccs and given a tour de force of the city.  I felt like I had arrived home, and to a degree I had.  

Making the Belgrade

There is something really exciting about taking the night train through Southern Serbia.  There is always so much intrigue and hijinks going on with the conductors, border guards, passengers trying to bribe and evade paying, while the poorly-afixed windows are so rattly that as we race along it feels like we're going too fast and are on some sort of runaway train (see: The Caboose Who Came Loose.  Lots of parallel themes).  It fills me with a sense of excitement and adventure, as though I have no idea where or how we are going to end up.  The laughable part of all this, of course, is the concept of going "too fast" on a Serbian train--unless we're all willing to remove our Western lens (and let's face it--none of us is) and rearticulate in our minds the concept of how a train should run, and that a train in Serbia moving at all is indeed "too fast."*  

Anyway, I wasn't able to enjoy as much of the hijinks as usual because I was so exhausted and trying to avoid the Erasmus students who ended up de-training at Nis.  They had burst into my cabin to give me more Fisherman's Friend liqueur and ask how they would know when we arrived in Nis.  I told them the station would say "Nis."  They asked how it was written.  I wrote, "Nis."  So, Europe's future is in good hands.  

After splaying myself out on the bench seating and passing out, I had a rough and not totally fulfilling sleep and arrived in Belgrade at around 5 or 6am.  It was jam-packed full of backpackers.  Ugh!  Suddenly, and without warning, Serbia was the hot new destination.  This is in direct contradiction to 2007 when I arrived in abandoned, rainy Belgrade and was nearly murdered by taxi drivers outside the station and had to wander the streets looking for a place to sleep.  I would give anything for it to be 2007 again. 

I slept on the bench outside the train station because the Serbs let me do that (take note, station personnel in Bourgas, Bulgaria) after figuring out my plan to get home.  I would take the 11am train to Subotica and then walk across the border.  I refused the 7am Budapest direct train because I assumed it was going to be super expensive--something I learned later was incorrect--but that's a story for another time.  In any case at this point I had gotten really, really good at reading train boards and schedules, and I want someone to finally ask me either how to get between the various Eastern European countries by rail, or to simply tell me I am doing a good job and to keep on truckin'.

*WHAT was that Wellington quote about how it was unsafe to move too fast so trains were actually bad for peoples' health?  Or else that was just the prevailing logic at the beginning of the 19th century, logic that has been firmly embedded in the Serbia transportation authority's mandate ever since?  Can someone look this up for me please?  I am asking, not telling.  As I'm sure you can tell I try to encourage this blog to be a forum for open discussion.

Dmitrovgrad

Apparently I had some sort of plane ticket to the UK from Budapest with an expiry date of the 22nd so I really needed to get up there.  This is why in the wee hours of the 19th I walked down to the train station and waited for a train to Sofia with a couple of Brits and a Peruvian-German for a really long time because it's Bulgarian rail*.  When we finally did roll into Sofia I had no time for coffee or food at Kartofi Kron.  Instead I had to walk at a fairly quickened pace to the Northern Bus depot which was way out in the industrial zone and required me to take a bunch of shortcuts I wasn't comfortable with taking.  I managed to get there to find a line of people waiting for the same minibus, and for 7 lev we set off, stopping in front of the central train station to pick any stragglers up.  Huh. 

As we inched closer and closer to the Serbian border I worked up the courage to coax the driver into turning off the main road and driving me right up to the border so I could get out.  I bought some orange juice and got ready for Serbia.  As usual I was apprehensive because 1) I had three (3) Kosovo stamps in my passport and I wasn't entering Voivodina, but the southern part which may hold some animosity towards the breakaway state; and 2) Serbia.  The Bulgarian guard gave less of a shit about anything than anyone I have ever seen in my life.  The Serbian border guardress looked through my passport, frowned a bit, asked me how much money I had (trust me, not much), and then sent me on my way.  I was back in the Exoslavia.

Not far from the border had I walked before some Mercedes or BMW screeched to a halt right in front of me ("A" or "D" on his licence plate) and some young Turk asked me in whatever language was our current medium which country we just crossed into.  I did not have patience for this.  You're driving a car.  I am walking.  Check your passport.  What the hell?  How are you a functioning adult?

A bit further I made it into Dmitrovgrad where I learned the train to Belgrade (there was two per day) would leave at 7pm because I had just missed the 1pm one.  It was coming from Sofia.  Everything I had attempted by getting up early in Sofia had been thwarted.  No buses were leaving, and I was trapped in Dmitrovgrad for several hours.  

Things could have been a whole lot worse though.  I love small Serbian towns, and in this one I got my hair cut, had an ice cream, coffee, and ate a huge cevapi fry-up which also included liver even though I was adamant that I do not want liver.  In the end I got liver and ate about half of it before giving it to an elderly gentleman who had walked past my booth and asked me if I was going to finish that.  I wasn't.  

At the appointed hour I got to the train station with a couple of cans of beer, found my own cabin to spread out on, and was about to fall asleep when some atrocious foreign students piled into my cabin and insisted I have a shot of some Danish alcohol that tasted like Fisherman's Friend cough drops.  Ugh, Erasmus!


*I don't know why I say such things.  Bulgaria has a perfectly acceptable rail network, and after crouching on the floor of a dirty Georgian train packed to the brim, this Bulgarian train was absolute luxury even if it was 3 hours late.  

Vulgarities in Bulgaria

Hold the phone--if you think you have met a bad American, then think again.  The worst American currently in existence is in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (as of Jul 18, 2010).  Bulgaria tends to be the country in the world where I encounter the most terrible Americans. In 2007 there was some ox from Los Angeles who couldn't properly articulate a sentence and got into a fight with an equally atrocious British woman about whether people around the world were speaking English or American as a language.  American.  The language.  To be fair to him, his linguistic prowess was such that I wouldn't feel comfortable calling it English in its purest form, so maybe he is correct.  

In any case, that was 2007, and now it's 2010 (It's actually January, 2014, but backdating paperwork is my forte).  And in 2010 I rolled into a boiling hot Plovdiv at 11pm and went straight to the only hostel in town.  I don't think I had a reservation, as I rarely do, and they told me that there was one room they could put me in but it may pose a few difficulties.  The "difficulty" they were referring to was a guy from Philadelphia who just could not for the life of him handle any form of uncontrolled externality.  In fact, my entire stay in Plovdiv was full of people who had just had too much excess in their lives and had for some reason ended up in Bulgaria.  It really upsets me that the Bulgars have to put up with all this garbage because they deserve better.  

So in the end I ended up sleeping down in the common room because it was cheaper, cooler, and the American had had a nervous breakdown of sorts and I did not want to be near that.  So instead I sat in the common area and talked to a British girl who was on a crunk tour of Eastern Europe and didn't know a single thing.  About any subject.  She actually did not know a single thing about anything.  Potentially one of the least-informed people I have ever met in my entire life.  Then some van rolled up and a bunch of North Americans spilled out, including someone from Ontario. That was the final straw for me and I resolved to eat a pizza and hit the old dusty trail the next morning.  

Oh, another thing that happened to me in Plovdiv is that I was approached by someone who works for the Ministry of Tourism in Bulgaria and wanted me to answer a questionnaire about tourism in Bulgaria.  She told me that it's still a dangerous country and that I should not be wandering around from town to town but instead staying at resorts.  I told her I didn't want to and she argued with me and told me they are trying to discourage backpackers!  Ah!  Things are not going well for me socially.  While I know all of these people are unreasonable and I feel that way to this day, I know in some way it's not them, it's me. 

Plov-Diving into Plovdiv

Sadly enough there wasn't a single dish of plov in Plovdiv to dive into, and I have been subsequently scathing of my review of the city ever since.  I love Plov, despite what I was told by an old Russian cafe proprietress in Simferopol who told me that it was no good.  I suspect she was a bit racist, though, and just didn't like the Tatars.  Anyway, I actually did like Plovdiv, plov shortage notwithstanding, mainly because I really love Bulgaria and as always I regretted not spending more time in the country.  

Getting to Plovdiv was no treat, however, only made worse by the lack of plov upon arrival.  Walking from the border and trying to catch a ride was particularly difficult because no one had time for me.  Some even gave me a thumbs down, which I think reflects poorly on their upbringing.  Everyone transiting between Turkey and Bulgaria were just a bunch of busy assholes, and I ended up walking for a really long time in considerable heat.  The highlight of this walk was in a sort of abandoned retail strip zone where two men emerged from behind a container and demanded to see my identification.  Guess how I reacted.  Just guess.  

I was pretty set on not giving them my passport, despite the fact that they looked like Olympic weightlifting coaches, but when the badges and guns came out I thought, "Fine.  I will show you my passport, but if you keep it I will do something that will make you have to kill me and then you'll be greatly inconvenienced by having to dispose of my body" which I like to think guided their decisions wisely.  It turns out they were part of the EU's "green border" patrol and had to ensure any suspicious characters weren't in the country illegally.  While I tried to explain that obviously I wasn't in the country illegally, because it was Bulgaria, I just let the whole ordeal happen because getting in fights with police officers is something I've decided is no longer worth my time. 

After this brush with EU internal security I continued on the long and lonely road towards the town of Svilengrad.  After being rejected for several rides, even from a van full of French hippies, I was picked up by a man on his way to the Svilengrad casino.  He could not wait to get there and burn all his cash.  He let me off in the casino parking lot and I was forced with the very uphill task of getting myself out of Svilengrad.  For such a small town, you would expect this to be easy, but sometimes Western geography degrees have zero application in the East.  Because geography is, like, different over there. 

Ugh.  Everything makes so much sense with a bird's eye retrospective view.  The blue line represents where I should have gone and the red line represents some totally needless anabasis on my part that only exhausted me physically and emotionally.  

Outside of Svilengrad I absolutely broke down and bought a Coca-Cola, which to me is an entirely insane gesture.  I think I can count on one finger the number of times I ordered a Coca-Cola in the past year.  In any case, it was starting to get dark, I was starting to panic, and no was was starting to indicate they would like to have me along for a ride.  Suddenly, and without warning, a car U-turned in front of me and a man picked me up.  He was a border guard, and seeing as I had been having such luck with them all day, I eagerly agreed to go along with him to Plovdiv where he lived.  He told me all about guarding Bulgaria's frontier from the wily Turks and said that I looked like one of the least threatening people to cross a border.  I suppose if lined up with human and drug traffickers and other swarthy brigands banging at the gates, that would be true. 

He also told me a number of fantastical stories: a Japanese man who had been walking across Asia to Europe for three years and had budgeted to spend $3/day and had lost a couple of fingers due to the cold and carrying his rickshaw ("it was not rickshaw, but yes, let us call it rickshaw"); a 90 year old Turkish woman found stuffed in the ceiling of a train who was trying to visit her husband in Bulgaria; how his mother's father had been aristocracy and had studied at the Sorbonne but had been sentenced to hard labour once the communists took over, while his father's father came from the peasantry and was a diehard communist.  In fact, this car ride to Plovdiv was incredibly pleasant and I feel like a better person for it.  He dropped me off at the train station and I was free to find my way to the centre of town and the hostel I was to stay at.  

Thrashin' Through Thrace

This video pretty accurately illustrates the Constantinople-Adrianople leg of my trip.

Thrace sounds like such an awful name.  It makes me think about thrush, which is something I have always been terrified of waking up and discovering I have.  Thrace has always been a bit elusive, as it was part of the Hellenistic world and there were some references to it in Civilization II and also in some of the other books I read as a child on Ancient Greece.  But what is most interesting about it is that it is part of Turkey but it is in Europe.  It is the last remaining vestige of Turkey-in-Europe.  I don't know how they did it, but it looks more like Asia Minor than any other part of Europe or the Balkans.  My theory is that the Ottomans cut down all the trees to build their massive triremes and continue their siege against Christendom, much like the Spanish did in Iberia.  Most of what used to cover the Iberian peninsula now forms a ring around Great Britain, I believe.  

Anyway, Thrace.  I took the bus from Constantinople to Edirne, which I had forgotten was actually Adrianople.  As in, the old capital of the Ottoman Empire.  I know, it makes you wonder why they would move the court out of the most cosmopolitan city in the world, but it makes sense when you think about how it smells in the summer.  It must have smelled so bad.  Adrianople was beautiful, had a large mosque/palace, and a sign pointing towards Bulgaristan.  There were also a few soldiers who hassled me and I had NO TIME for that so I just walked away.  I was having a serious problem with authority figures at this point in my trip.

There wasn't much in the way of help in getting to the border.  I walked a good deal of the way and was passed by about a hundred minivans with "D" or "A" with a circle of stars on their license plates.  I was picked up by a city bus, paid out my last Turkish lira to the driver and walked to the front of the line because that's the type of person I am.  Besides, what I gain in time by budging they more than make up for when speeding past me and not picking me up while I'm walking from the border.  I breezed through the border, bid adieu to the Turkish Republic, and was greeted by a wholly indifferent Bulgarian border guard who could not take direction and stamped wherever he wanted to on my passport.  But with little trouble I was reunited with the EU, and it felt so good.  

Murder on the Occident Express

If anyone was going to get murdered on this train it would probably have to be, besides me in order to access all the wealth that people seem to assume I have, the dining cart attendant who insisted I tip him gratuitously.  Like, I mean really gratuitously.  But that was on the train going the other way.  This time around I just hung out in my own berth and then at Kayseri bolted off the train and demanded two kebabs from the nearest stand and was ready to run back and leap onto the train if it were to start departing.*  Luckily trains in Turkey go about 5 km/an hour so if I had the endurance I probably could have run and beaten it back to Constantinople.

Otherwise I spent a lot of time reflecting on the Caucasus, staring at my map of Europe, and carefully planning how many more stamps my poor, tattered passport could take, and cutting out little paper placeholders based on currently existing stamps.  I had a lot of time to kill.  Not enough time to finish War and Peace, however, which was proving to be one of the biggest challenges of my mid-20s.

The train stopped so many times along the way that I wasn’t surprised or alarmed when it stopped in suburban Constantinople on the Asian side and there was a bunch of hollering and a knock at my door.  I was told to pack up and get out.  The power had gone out and they had done all they could to get me to the city.  I tried to explain to them that no, getting me all the way would have meant paying for a taxi for me to the station, but that’s not the way Turkish Rail rolls (it barely rolls at all, actually) and it was a pretty severe blow to my deeply ingrained sense of entitlement.

So while there were a hundred taxis trailing the train waiting like vultures for something like this to happen, I decided to walk all the way, as I had been on a train for 48 hours.  It was a nice day, there was a lot to see, and I was able to plan exactly how I would escape from Turkey.  A couple of hours later I arrived at my old hostel, in the antique furniture district.  There was a team of Australians (surprise!) who called me worldly and gave me free juice.

*In 2007 I rolled into Romania thinking I was such hot shit and then realized that there was nowhere to sleep in Cluj Napoca so I crawled into a hedge in someone’s back yard and slept for a few hours and then went and caught a train to Brasov at 7am but could not for the life of me find track 3a.  I only realized it was some stubby spur line off to the side and just as the train was leaving I started bolting towards it and leapt off the platform and onto the last rug and tackled the conductor who was about to shut the door.  So Turkey wasn’t going to be a thing for me.