Chinese tonguetwister

An old video that I found from when I was hosting two Chinese couchsurfers in Germany!

Sofia

The French girl, the Spanish guys and some other people who were riding with me in the same seater compartment eventually all left the train in Pleven. After that I had the whole wagon completely for myself only sometime people coming in to walk through. So I fell asleep and woke up when it was already dawn, kind of panicking that my laptop got stolen and that we were already in Sofia and the train was about to leave again before I could get out. In reality we were just at a really deserted train station waiting for them to detach a few wagons from the train. 

More and more people got on the train after that which was awkward, because I smelled badly and kept dosing of and everytime I opened my eyes other people were sitting around me and I was a bit confused. 

The last part of the journey really seemed to last forever and we arrived 2 hours later than I had thought we would. I immediately went to the international ticket office (that I would have never found without the description on the wikitravel page) and bought a ticket for the same night to Belgrade. For the first time someone recognized my surname because it's a Bulgarian seaside town. Nice!

In a tram that had clearly seen its best days a long time ago I drove to the core of the city center to go to a hostel for a shower and a nap. My Serbian skills that I had expected to be very useful in Bulgaria didn't help me at all, I asked one man at the train station in my bad Serbian where those tram lines that I search are leaving and he didn't seem to understand a word of what I was saying. It was refreshing that almost all signs on the streets were in cyrillic, no matter if commercial or official...so it gave me the chance to practise reading it.

In the hostel I had to wait a long time before I could get a bed for the day. The common rooms of the hostels I saw on this trip were not what is always praised as a meeting hub for fellow travellers to socialize, but more a place with free wifi for people to pass out on the internet in front of their smart phones or laptops. 

The staff were really helpful though, she gave me an awesome map of Sofia so that after the shower I wanted to try one of the restaurants that they recommended on that map. Walking in the blistering cold I saw a blue sky and the sun for the first time in a few months. It was a really beautiful day and I enjoyed the bustle on the street and had a fantastic fish meal in a stylish restaurant.

After that I made a big walking tour of the circularly arranged city center, seeing beautiful churches, a mosque, a really nice synagogue, some government buildings as well as large parks with unique monuments. 

Maybe it can all be blamed on the weather, but Sofia made such a better impression on me than Bucharest, even though everything else indicates that Bulgaria is poorer and less developed than Romania. The architecture is a surprisingly tasteful mix of really old buildings mixed with communist buildings and here there was a little more Turkish influence. Gypsies speaking in Turkish on the market (mainly mothers telling children to cadge cigarettes for them) and the mosque which is so centrally located that it coins the picture of the city and gives it a charme of a little sister of Istanbul. 

I must say it was one of the best hostels I've seen in eastern Europe, providing a plate of spaghetti and a beer for every guest every night and fruit snacks on the tables for everyone. I did eventually talk to some fellow travellers, a British guy and a Californian girl who didn't know each other but incidently picked almost the same overland route to China, two Korean sisters who barely spoke English, a Canadian who just worked for 2 years as a teacher in Riyadh.

Expecting the worse from the train ride I went to the train station and together with two Japanese girls found the right train and discovered that I had a whole sleeper compartment with 6 beds just for myself. It was the most comfortable train ride I ever had, with sheets, pillows and a lock on the door so that I didn't have to worry about the luggage. When I asked the conductur how long the train is stopping at the border and whether I could go outside to have a cigarette he looked at me as if I was retarded and says in Serbian "Just smoke in the hallway or in your compartment". You can tell that you're not in the EU anymore, I like that and the relaxed friendliness of the Serbs. 

Bucharest

                                                                                             I instantly fell asleep upon sitting down on the plane and woke up when we were descending over Bucharest. 

After a long-hauled journey on the bus to the city center I checked into a cheap hostel and ate something. Maybe it was the rain, but I couldn't help but see a miserable side to this city, full of aggressive and sad looking huge grey cement castles decorated with tacky commercials, beggars on every corner. 

I spent most of the day nurturing my hangover, there were not many other guests in the hostel and the weather wasn't exactly inviting. So at night I went on the very easy to use and modern metro in order to find out at the train station what options I have to get to Belgrade from there. A really nice student on his way to his home town in Transylvania assisted me with my inquiry and I ended up waiting with him for his train, having very interesting conversation about various topics. Unforunately his explanations only confirm the trist impression that I had gotten from Bucharest, he said most young educated people try to leave, because it's so hard to find work and the country is buffeted by corruption on all levels of public organization.

The next day, in spite of the weather, I mercilessly walked up and down the whole center to visit at least some of the points of interest, for example the state palace which is the second largest building in the world, or the square of the revolution etc. before embarking on my first eastern european train ride and night. In the seater compartment of the train coming from Moscow headed to Sofia, I spend the whole night being paranoid about my luggage and talking to a pakistani-french girl who studies medicine in English in Pleven in northern Bulgaria! It was really interesting to hear from someone who is in a similar situation as me and she gave me some good tips for my day in Sofia.

She told me interesting things about Romania, for example that the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu tried to outplay Paris, creating majestic Boulevards over the entire city, tearing down countless residential houses to make room for the monstrous palace, most of which rooms are nowadays empty, of course.

I think this arbitrariness with which the despot ruled the country left deep scars in this nation. Maybe that's why I got the impression that everyone who lived there would like to leave if they only got the chance.

Gypsies selling stolen mobile phones at the train station, prostitutes roaming the streets at day time, large packs of stray dogs...it could pass as a post-apocalyptic Paris, but to be fair I'm intrigued to visit it again in the summer, when I'm sure the long boulevards as well as the parks and lakes of the city will make it seem a lot more beautiful than on my short stay.

As the unfriendly romanian officers were checking our passports at the border with a view over the dark Danube it occured to me that I was crossing from the country where my grandfather grew up into the country where my grandmother grew up. Apart from countless linguistic relics, I didn't notice a lot of Ottoman influence in Bucharest and it started to really bother me that I know almost nothing about my grandparents' lives in these countries, not even which town/city they lived in, let alone how they lived there.

Well, only more reasons to explore the Balkans more thoroughly!