Bulgaria with Noodles

What has been happening in Downton Abbey ? Well, the youngest of the Crawley girls, the one who married the Irish chauffeur, has just died. Now on to more serious matters. I forgot to mention one of the weirdest things about the main station on the Sofia MTR. It is called "Serdica" and there are archaeological exhibits on the MTR platforms. In large class cases, there are bits of Roman architecture, statues and so on. Rather strange. Most of these Roman artifacts were found when the new MTR stations were being built. Just in case you were wondering, the Serdii was the local tribe who were living in the area when the Romans came along. In fact, in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, the city of Serdica became one of the largest and most prosperous in all of the Roman Empire. You are also wondering what an MTR ticket looks like. Well, here we have a genuine MTR ticket from the Sofia Metro.  Note the price: 1.60 leva. It is standard price, no matter how long or short y...

It was my hero Michael Palin, in his classic BBC series Around the World in Eighty Days , who said that railway stations do not intimidate and dehumanize people in the way that airports do. Well, we have been making so many train trips into Sofia over the last two weeks. The time-consuming visits to the notarius and the Microwave Woman are now over, but our dealings with the Russian visa office and the Nissan dealer are continuing. No sign of Hercule Poirot That means catching the train from Dragoman just after seven and arriving in Sofia's central railway station after eight. The main station has been transformed from the gloomy, pigeon-and-pickpocket hole that it was when we first started travelling in BG. With two years of teaching in Bucharest and a house in Bulgaria, Irena and I got to know this dark and dingy transport centre rather well. Nowadays it is a very different place, no doubt thanks to a generous dollop of EU money. It is much brighter and cleaner, ...

Now it is time for some good news. Or maybe not. Art or just vandalism? On Monday morning, we woke up early once again and we took the train from Dragoman. Then we arrived in Sofia and went back to the notarius. First, we had to wait in the glass waiting room and then - guess what? Yes, we had to wait some more. It rather reminded me of my experiences in a Chinese bank. Then, eventually, we were told that we could come out of the greenhouse and go into the Inner Sanctum. There the assistant gave us the stamped and signed document for our Bulgarian residency cards, but he said that he could not do this for the other two documents, the ones for our freight company, AGS, because they did not have parallel English translations. (Oh, the joys of Google Translate!) Sofia station, yet again   AGS should really be called a "fright company" because it was such a shock when they told us how expensive it would be and giving them all of the documents is a nightmare as ...