Sofia

My initial view of Sofia was sullied by the failure of my internal compass and by the T Cook guide book talking about Latin versus Cyrillic street sign confusion, but doing absolutely nothing to untangle it. Where the guidebook map used Latin, the street signs were in Cyrillic. And vice versa. I ended up lost, drizzled and sorely tempted to throw Thos Cook’s useless little book under a tram.

Once I found my bearings, I had to flee from a committed lady beggar on Vitosha Boulevard.  After which I huddled, continental style, in a windswept London-themed coffee concession called Hendricks, where I had a London-themed cup of coffee. Which was ok. A bit strong, but okay. Leaving Hendricks proved something of a problem, as attracting the waitress took some doing. She should have taken a lesson from the lady beggar.

My room in the Rila Hotel was on the eighth of eight floors. Rila is very central and a notch or two up from the kind of dive I usually stay in. Nothing swish or swank you understand, but infintely more pleasant than the horrors of Slavija.

I spent my time in Sofia feeling wet and exhausted. Loathe as I am to admit it, I trumped my visit to Hendricks the next day, when I ummed, ahhed, then tore across a Costa Coffee threshold and thoroughly enjoyed an Americano. A brownie too. Coffee and cake were both thoroughly enjoyed, as was my fellow customers’ propensity to sit and stare into space without doing very much. All of which made me feel a little guilty, until I compared Thomas Cook with a street map - a street map, mark you, which was far more useful - and realised there wasn’t much more to see and that I should concentrate on the fact of being in a far-flung city and not try and get too wound up by the fact I might be missing out on something, or somewhere, or both.