It’s always the same at a hostel. Why they insist on giving you a 20-minute monologue about the city I will never know. Pointless chat. Just hand me the keys to the room. Minging.
I don’t see a single person in the hostel building (for private rooms). I christen it the ‘Overlook Hotel’ and bash the bathroom door in with my e-cig. The hovel was dangerous, the Vertigo (1958) staircase a neck-breaking scenario waiting to happen. Thankfully I didn’t die, but I was terrified every time I went up or down the fucker.
Like all post-communist countries, it’s backward. Street urchins are everywhere, Bugsy Malone (1976) rejects wandering the alleyways in search of shrapnel and fags. Bar staff are just awful. They scowl and grimace – pure hatred in their eyes. And they do this to all tavern visitors. Taxi drivers are scam artists. It’s the usual let’s-drive-around-in-circles nonsense. Scum.
There were some highlights: I like the trams because they appear to be sent via DeLorean from the GDR in the ’70s. Also, the supermarket selection is eclectic. The Lidl was once again the crème de la crème. It was located slap-bang in the middle of a social realist nightmare of a housing estate, dirty-as-fuck matchbox apartments out of the age of Stalin.
The booze is cheap. The city is ugly. It’s cold. And that’s Sofia.
Back to Portugal again, but this time the heady delights of Porto instead of last year’s Algarve. Arriving in the middle of a heatwave, I sweat my tits off for the remainder of the trip; as milk was a bad choice for Ron Burgundy, so here was my predilection for trousers and sweatshirts. No matter, the situation was somewhat rectified (t-shirt donned) after a decidedly traumatising wait in a sauna of a taxi rank. It’s a lovely city replete with multi-layered sandwiches and aesthetically pleasing denizens eating the sandwiches. For the record, I didn’t eat any sandwiches. I did, however, source cheap mushroom pâté from a convenience store. Winning.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 