A child was sick on the seat in front of him between the second and third pee stop. The dizzying smell of vomit and cleaning agent lingers in the overheated air of the bus, which is supposed to have AC in working condition, but clearly does not. Adrian, with his headphones spilling loud music into his ears and The Collected Stories of Ernest Hemingway propped up on his lap, is trying to ignore it all — the shifting of passengers getting in and out of the bus when it lurches to a stop in the middle of nowhere every twenty minutes, the Bulgarian radio channels with their loud military marches and terrible European pop music, the human smells, and the inhuman, stagnant heat.
Bulgarians refuse to open windows because the draft can bring in evil spirits and make you sick.
According to the woman who sold Adrian his bus ticket in broken English, the trip to Veliko Tarnovo is supposed to take about three hours. Four hours after having left Sofia, Adrian is still in the bus, left trying to decipher the road signs in Cyrillic for any hint of his destination. The bus only seems to stop on countryside roads and tiny villages, or suburban bus stations that look like abandoned communist checkpoints. Once again, the clerk at the Sofia bus station, whose reliability Adrian is now starting to doubt, assured him that the bus would stop in the center of Veliko Tarnovo, near the fortress which is the city’s main historical attraction.
The bus drops off the Bulgarian version of a highway and stops beside yet another cement block bus station. Adrian tries to read the large block letters above the station, but he is stalled by the Rs and Ps and Bs that must be converted into other letters, and more symbols he does not understand. There are three words, however, and one of them is only three letters long, so he is fairly sure that he hasn’t arrived at his destination yet. The bus driver shouts something muffled and runs out of the bus. Another pee break. Soon most of the other passengers also get out of the bus, and Adrian stands among them, drinking from a bottle of water, as the others suck on cigarettes, drink coke, and munch on exotically flavoured chips (prawn cocktail and barbecue chicken figure prominently).
Soon the driver returns and a silent queue forms, the passengers board the bus again. Before the bus starts off an employee from the station comes in and counts the passengers quickly. He frowns, counts again, says something to the driver. Adrian observes all this and feels something hard suddenly erupt in the pit of his stomach. The employee then says something loud enough for everyone to hear, and all the other passengers start fumbling in their pockets and bags for their bus tickets. The employee walks down the aisle and checks all the tickets. Adrian pulls out his own ticket for Veliko Tarnovo. His seat is near the back of the bus and he has to wait, with a growing sense of dread, as the employee slowly scans every ticket. He knows already, somehow, that he is faulty. Yet, this cannot be Veliko Tarnovo: the writing on his ticket doesn’t match the writing on the bus station. Perhaps they already passed Velicko Tarnovo? He knows he should’ve asked someone for help hours ago — but how, when no one seems to speak English in this country?
Finally the employee reaches Adrian and takes his ticket with a stern face. He peers at the piece of paper, anger suddenly flashing in his eyes, and speaks a few words in Bulgarian, viciously, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“I don’t speak Bulgarian,” Adrian says back. After a week in the Balkans, it has become an automatic reply. “Do you speak English?”
The employee’s face lightens slightly. He almost smiles as he turns around and shouts something at everyone else in the bus.
“Where you going?” He asks, looking at Adrian again.
“Veliko Tarnovo."
The employee turns around again and shouts something to the driver, who calls back in exasperation. Heat blooms up from Adrian neck, he feels himself blushing. The employee turns back to him and screams: “This is Velicko Tarnovo! Come.”
Adrian grabs his stuff and follows the employee out of the bus. All the other passengers look at him, laughing and seemingly commenting on his mistake. The driver calls something after him, which of course he does not understand. Outside the bus station employee opens the luggage compartment Adrian points at and helps him remove his large backpack. The bus starts off quickly and Adrian follows the employee into the bus station.
*
The hostel is a very large stone building with whitewashed walls. A young man who works at the hostel came to pick Adrian up at the bus station after he called the number he’d been given in Sofia. He didn’t mention his bus blunder to the hostel guy, who is now showing him around the various terraces outside, his dorm, the bathrooms, kitchen. Beside the counter at the entrance, there’s a small fridge filled with beer and soda bottles.
“This is the bar,” the hostel guy tells him. “You can take whatever you want. Coke, beer, whatever. Just write your name on this line and mark what you take beside it. How many bottles. Everything is two levas. You pay at the end.”
This is one of the best hostels Adrian has seen: the common room has a large TV, constantly turned on to football, the dorm is large and luminous, with clean, wooden bunks, there are plenty of bathrooms and they all have real showers (as opposed to a shower head connected to the sink and a hole in the floor beside the toilet, like most places).
The hostel guy sits at the counter, where Adrian left his backpack when he came in, and starts to fill out some paperwork. Adrian hands him his passport.
“Ah, Canadian! There’s another Canadian staying here. He’s in your dorm.”
Once everything is settled, Adrian deposits his bag in the dorm. He chooses one of the bottom bunks, on a whim. He still doesn’t quite understand why some people have specific preferences about which bunk to choose. It must be about experience: if something sketchy happens to you when you sleep on either the top bunk or bottom bunk, you never want to sleep there again.
As he opens his bag and takes out some of his stuff, two pretty girls come in. They are chatting away in a breezily-accented English. Australian.
“Hey.”
“Hey!”
“You just got here?”
“Yeah… You’ve been here for a while?”
“No, we got here yesterday.”
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” her friend adds. “Back to Sofia, by the morning bus.”
“No partying for us tonight,” the first one continues. “We’ve got to get up bright and early tomorrow morning.”
The girls giggle.
“So it’s a good place to party, then?” Adrian asks.
“Yeah. The bars are great. You have to go on that main street, where the restaurant is, but closer to here. What’s that place we went to last night called, Tish?”
“Oh! Ummm… Borro something something. Anyway, it’s like, in a basement or whatever. You can’t miss it.”
“They’ve got terrible music, but the people are really friendly.”
“And drinks are really cheap.”
“It’s a university town the rest of the year, so they’ve got loads of bars and stuff.”
“Except now its quite dead, only tourists and the old people who stay all year.”
“It’s still a good place, though.”
“We met a bunch of American guys —”
“They were staying here but they left today.”
“— and there’s, like, an underground community of Aussies who live here during the summer.”
Adrian stares at them, incapacitated by their cheerfulness, their constant flow of talk, their good humoured beauty. He marvels at their tanned arms, their long, sun-bleached hair, the lithe bodies shown off by their short shorts and pale tank-tops.
They’ve stopped talking now. To break the awkward silence he turns to the subject of nationality, the heart or start of every backpacker’s conversation.
“So, you girls are Australian, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you? American?”
“No. Canadian.”
Adrian figures they couldn’t tell because he doesn’t have a maple-leaf flag sewn on to his backpack.
“Oh! There’s another Canadian here.”
“Yeah, the hostel guy told me.”
“He’s real friendly! His name is like Simon or something. He’s got a cute accent.”
“Yeah, your English is better than his.”
“He’s probably Francophone,” offers Adrian as an explanation. “Anyway, I’m going to grab something to eat. I’m famished. You want to come with me?”
The Australians look at each other for a moment.
“No,” one of them answers. “I’m not too hungry.”
“Me neither.”
“We’ve got to pack—”
“—we leave early tomorrow morning.”
4 comments:
Good travel-diary. I thought it was a bit unrealistic that he would call stops "pee stops" though. On the other hand...
I thought the whole thing was believably tame. Traveling isn't all high fly and you can see that here. Things are just different elsewhere.
I liked that Adrian is trying to read the bulgarian while on the bus. It is a very natural thing to do.
This was very entertaining, although as a piece in and of itself I can tell that it definitely needs the other parts to it to hold it up, since right now there isn't much substance.
I really like your travel stories though - like Francis said, it seemed very believable. I like how you managed to make the foreign culture not alien at all, but rather Adrian alien. The Bulgarian culture oddly felt much more familiar, simply because of the way the people acted - like this is something they do every day. Take the bus. Drive the bus. Inspect the bus. Welcome newcomers to hostels. Even the way the people all laughed and commented on his error felt like such a natural thing to do, and showed them as a community, even if they were all strangers to each other. So I just thought it was really well done.
I feel like right now Adrian as a character is still a bit flat. He's so busy observing the outside world that we as readers don't get a chance to observe him. Unlike Victor in Boyhood, he doesn't seem distinct in personality as of yet. He shows nervousness at traveling (like most people would), a sense of displacement and confusion in the completely foreign culture (also like most people would), and buds of lustful feelings toward the two Aussie girls (as would be expected of most males), but none of these really go any farther in depth. He's reading Earnest Hemingway at the beginning, and it would be interesting if you maybe went into a slight detail about why he's reading that particular book, if he's enjoying it, if he reads that kind of thing all the time. I'm sure the later parts will go into it, but just something to keep your eye out for at the moment.
The dialogue of the two girls was great and engaging, although it was hard to keep track of who was saying what and I felt like I wanted just a little more character distinction or description of what they were physically doing to go along with the words. Maybe a bit more of Adrian's reaction to them too to add to the attraction he feels for them.
I liked the whole beginning of him on the bus, I must say. The descriptions were great and you did an excellent job of sketching out the feeling both physically and emotionally of going on a bus trip. Also that sinking feeling of knowing your ticket is going to be wrong was fantastic, and it also lent an element of humour at our narrator's expense, which was fun.
Looking forward to the next part!
I feel like what this is leading to will blow my mind. Everything is so engaging. The fact that he is on a bus at the beginning sets a pace and the two girls really reminded me of the bus.
There's something about that Canadian, eh? I need to read the next part. Excited.
Oohh, travel stories! You make this feel so authentic Charles. I agree with Marta about how Adrian feels foreign, instead of the other way around. It really emphasizes how he's so understated and shy. I wonder what drove him to another country like that?
I actually really liked the conversation with the two Australian girls. I didn't have that much of a problem following who was saying what, and even when I did I liked the idea of the two girls melding into one. They're such bubblegummy, sorority girls, I can just see them in some drunken girl-on-girl action.
Definitely want to read more! (not for the drunken girl-on-girl action lol)
Post a Comment