Belgrade to Sofia train, continued

And again, I kicked myself for not taking a couchette in the bleary morning, with everything outside wet, dark green and heavy over hugely swollen rivers. Light came slowly. I’d been drifting in and out of sleep but at some point noticed a more prolonged stillness and the muffles of police rumbling a chap who’d crawled on board at some point and sat just behind me. This bloke had a coarse cut plastic check laundry bag full of kilogram bags of sugar. How did I know this? The noise was a clue. With the train stopped and all power turned off, and with the still - very still - countryside only just waking up around us, the noise of dozens and scores of bags of sugar being cut open and having their contents poured into a handy sized receptacle which the Bulgarian border officials apparently just ‘happened to have’ with them will stay with me.

Only after every bag of sugar was emptied was the man finally taken off. We crawled off again. The few people travelling with me looked tired and resigned by the whole bags of sugar affair.

The arrival into Sofia was - like the train - underwhelming. I was red eyed and jangling and Sofia station enhanced this. Where Italian stations had been clean and modern; Bar functional and Belgrade unnecessarily grand, Sofia was architecturally brutal and falling to pieces. Pools of water stood everywhere and access from the platforms to the main building was down stairs which ran into a filthy darkness, next to escalators which no longer made it all the way up to the platform, but which twisted angrily up from the bowels of the earth. Walking through subways, in and out of the rain from the station to the city centre was accomplished by skipping as delicately as I could past ragged retail units and over broken paving and cobbles. Things improved the closer I got to the city centre to the extent that, by the time my internal navigation broke down, I was able to gather my bearings and complete some emergency ablutions in a distinctly plush and posh ‘western’ style arcade.