guest entry (a few days late) from kristen about sofia

Currently I am in Sofia, Bulgaria. We arrived last night via train. Somehow we ended up in the train compartment full of the most disgusting and lecherous men in the country. But then some of them left and we made friends with a young guitarist who played us Mozart. We had spent the three previous days in Sozopol, on the Black Sea coast. It was rather boring because there were not that many people there and everyone we met couldn't get enough of bad-mouthing the Roma. But the food was good and we got some rest. I seem to have left my wallet in Margarita's house, but she is supposedly sending it, so it should get here tomorrow.

Sofia is very interesting. It has given me a completely new perspective on Bulgaria. Not to pass judgment on a whole country, but I had been getting rather melancholy energy from this land. Last night when we arrived I had a strange feeling I was entering a kind of netherworld and thought that perhaps Sofia would be more of the same. But, in fact, it is quite lively here. Sofia is certainly changing and beginning to look a lot like many western European cities I've visited. As in other parts of Bulgaria, people make very good use of public space. But there is something underneath the glitz that is very East Bloc-ish and extremely dark. I don't mean this in a bad way. There is just some intense darkness. There are an abundance of bizarre, tortured looking statues. There is the 20 foot head with a slash in its skull as well as a number of starving corpses throughout the city. There are also an inordinate amount of swastikas everywhere and in front of the Alexander Nevsky church someone was selling a box with Hitler painted on it. Someone else was also selling old photographs, and I purchased a funeral scene that I like very much. The whole walk up to the church is thus rather eery, and the suddenly sinister-looking sky only intensified this mood. The church itself, which was built to honor those who died fighting the Turks in the late 1800s, is the darkest and perhaps most morbid place I have ever been. There was very little light at all and there was something very peculiar and unsettling but also really beautiful about it. Clutching my funerary photograph, I stood in a spot on the floor where the tiles met and formed a circle and closed me eyes. I am not sure what this means, but for a long time afterwards I was not sure if I was in Satan's palace or the Nevski church. I am not sure they would be separate buildings. I thus like Sofia immensely.

We are staying at Art Hostel, which is indeed somewhat artsy. Last night we went to the bar downstairs to get our complementary welcome drink and stayed there for entirely too long. Nicole met a sketchy Brit (another football tourist... and we thought we had left all of these fanatics behind in Istanbul) who would not leave and then I talked to a bunch of slimy others, including one Bulgarian boy with three nostrils whose first words to me were, "Canadian women are even more beautiful than Polish women." I think he had some mental problems, and his gay mohawked Macedonian lover eventually got jealous and forced him to leave. Cheers for Kristen, the international gay weirdo magnet. Then some kid from Georgia with a wife and a girlfriend who are not the same individual told me he loved me. I finished up the night with a hunk of chicken at 4:30am. I was awoken early by the Polish theater troupe staying in the room next to mine who felt inspired to perform a muscial at 9am and then some asshole composer's musical alarm that continued to go off every 10 minutes despite his absence.

We were going to head to Macedonia next, but I think we are going skip it and go to Belgrade for a night and then on to Sarajevo. I am most excited to be in Bosnia-Herzegovina, so my eyelids are sweating beads of anticipation at this very moment. I am enjoying the East Bloc very much, though the people are hard to get to know. They are not very friendly in a superficial way, though of course there is a lot of heart underneath it all.

Someone spray painted the word "sorrow" in English on the side of a building next to this one.