Eurotrip Day 2

Day 2: First Day in Sofia

Day 2 did not start well for me. Having arrived at stupidly early o'clock, I was amazed to find I had remembered to change my watch to Bulgarian time - two hours ahead of the UK. So on waking up dazed and confused, I was unsurprised to find out from my phone, which I had not changed, that it was 9am in the UK and therefore 11am in Bulgaria. Feeling pretty dopey I rolled over and went back to sleep for a bit, this time waking in shock to find out that my phone now read 11am, which meant it was really 1pm in Bulgaria and I was wasting the day. I leapt up and unpacked some clothes for the day, then checked my watch which read 11am as well. Knowing that I had changed it the night before I checked the phone again, only to find that it had somehow recognised that I had relocated it to Bulgaria and automatically updated its own clock. Whilst I acknowledge that this is quite clever, it highlights yet again my complete failure to find 'innovative' and 'intelligent' technology useful.

Nothing a nice shower wouldn't cure, I thought. The shower was a floor to ceiling glass affair with a Swedish style wooden floor. On the facing wall were three knobs that I assumed were connected to the provision of water. The middle one appeared to be of the sort that you pull up to provide water and then twist left or right to control the temperature. The right one twisted left and right only. The left one appeared to be a microphone. None of them provided any water, no matter how much pushing, pulling, twisting and singing I carried out. Thinking outside the cubicle, I looked for a pull cord in case it was an electric shower. The only cord I could find was an 'SOS' cord to pull in the event of an emergency, so I elected not to test that one. Finding nothing in the bathroom, I checked the rest of the room. The lights were all independent of one another, but nothing was linked to the shower. Realising that I would be in for serious mockery if I called Fran, I decided to call reception. Instead of simply explaining it to me, they decided to send someone up to demonstrate. Two minutes later there was a knock at the door and I, swathed now in a towel, opened it to find a very attractive maid standing in front of me with a look of bemused frustration that she had to attend to a half-naked British idiot who couldn't work the shower. Clearly I was an imbecile. She headed for the bathroom, leant in to the cubicle and pulled up the middle knob (no pun intended). Nothing happened, and she looked slightly put out by the fact that she was also now uncertain of how to produce water. Her instinct was to head for the right hand knob, which she twisted to the left. This had a dramatic impact. A stream of water shot out of the microphone horizontally onto her front, soaking her and causing her to squeal. In a panic she reached again for the right hand knob, and twisted it in the opposite direction. But she overcompensated, and a powerful deluge rained down from the shower onto her head. Now coated in cold water front and back, she regained enough composure to switch it all off. I was now oddly aware that I was half-naked and she was soaked to the skin. She looked round embarrassed and mumbled something along the lines of 'That's how it works'. I tried to apologise and asked if she was alright, but the poor girl got out of the room as fast as she could go.

Having agreed to meet Fran and Graham for breakfast/lunch, I was informed by hotel staff of a good traditional Bulgarian restaurant around the corner. We made our way there and sat down, ordering our first breakfast lager and a few Bulgarian dishes to share between us. One of these was a meat platter, which contained horse meat among other things. When it arrived, it was not clear which one was the horse (I'm not sure what we were expecting!) so we asked the waiter what was what. He knew the English for pork, but didn't know beef so instead made a small devil's horn symbol and a mooing sound. Following his lead, we asked which one was horse, but he didn't know the word, so Graham had to neigh and toss an invisible mane while galloping. The impression was so good that he got it immediately.

We elected to have a short walk about to see the sights. We found designer shops, trendy bars, ice cream parlours, churches, lush green parks, communist architecture and fountains. But what we couldn't find was an English tea. I don't drink tea and am therefore totally oblivious to the sufferings of tea drinkers, but it was to become a theme of the weekend that the only available teas were Earl Grey and Rooibos. Fran bravely made her way through several unsatisfactory tea experiences before giving up and selecting juice instead.

The tea search continues

The evening started at the hotel roof bar, with wide views over the city. From there we made our way to a restaurant cellar where we were given giant hanging platters of salad followed by giant hanging platters of meat. This was accompanied by vast quantities of Bulgarian red wine and assorted noisy conversations with family members, which were finally drowned out by some traditional Bulgarian music. Of course I took the opportunity to make use of my camera, which always goes down well when people are eating and getting steadily drunker.

The evening's entertainment

Aware that we had to save ourselves for the main event tomorrow, we decided to call it a night and returned to the hotel. On arriving in my room, I found a small chocolate next to my bed and the radio tuned to smooth jazz classics. I looked around to see if I was alone, wondering whether this was standard hotel policy or was in fact connected to my rendezvous with the maid in the shower. 

The Bride-to-be, Dot

Eurotrip Day 1

Like many of you, I have cousins. Unlike many of you, one of mine, Dot, resides in Bulgaria - Sofia to be precise. This came about when her boyfriend, Graham (for ease of separation between the two Graham's in this story I will be referring to this Graham as Gray), decided to follow a path in diplomacy and so, armed with a modest sprinkling of Bulgarian words and a few Lev, they eloped to Eastern Europe. Much to my delight, they then decided it was time to get married. Obviously I was thrilled for them, but mostly pleased that this meant heaving the might of the Tomalin empire, along with the Glen clan and myriad UK-based chums, out to Bulgaria for a long weekend of festivities to celebrate their nuptials. It is from this fine weekend that I am recently returned, and upon which I base the next few posts.

Day 1: Travel to Bulgaria

Having received the invite some months ago, I had managed to navigate the treacherous waters of booking a hotel room and forking out for low-cost airline tickets on the same flight as my sister Fran and her fiancé Graham. This meant placing ourselves and our luggage in the hands of the good folk from WizzAir. My hopes that 'Wizz' described a sort of simple, uncomplicated and easy-going travel experience were dashed almost immediately. Following a high-speed taxi chase to the airport (for no apparent reason other than that the taxi driver obviously felt that two hours leeway was not long enough to check in for the flight) I was ready to offload my luggage at the check-in desk. With my old and trusty rucksack in tow I was told it would have to be checked-in at the oversize luggage desk, only for it to be whisked onto the conveyer of standard dimensionality. A short, sharp exclamation from the check in attendant did nothing to ease my nerves, nor did her supervisor's nervous questions about what was in the bag. He assured me that it would be fine, and that the baggage handlers would remove it if they thought it was a problem, which wasn't quite the solution I was hoping for.

Airport security always makes me chuckle (see here!), but I failed to get frisked and was disappointed to see that my sister's hand luggage, that can have been no bigger than a piece of toast, was randomly selected to be searched. Unfortunately, it was randomly selected behind a German family who had clearly paid little attention to which particular items were verboten. Several bags were packed inside larger bags, all of which had to be unpacked. Having surrendered half a department store's worth of cosmetics, they checked the x-ray image to reveal that they were harbouring wine glasses in the bag, and something that looked suspiciously like a gherkin. This cost us another twenty minutes of waiting, and when they finally checked Fran's bag I wondered what they possibly expected to find. Images of Mary Poppins floated briefly into my mind, but there were no hat stands or lethal weapons and we were allowed to continue.

At this point Fran and Graham confessed that they had purchased priority boarding to ensure that Graham could get a seat with extra leg room. This meant I got to wait with the common folk whilst they swanned forward and sat in comfort. When it was finally time for me to board, I went straight to the plane's back entrance assuming, naively, that the plane would fill from the front backwards. Apparently low budget airlines operate a free for all policy, where the weak and infirm are systematically rooted out. Finding an inoffensive seat right at the back, which I assumed was immediately above the black box and therefore the safest place to be, I was delighted to see Graham advancing down the isle to inform me that they had managed to save me a seat, right at the front. This necessitated a long crawl back up the isle, but was worth it for the extra half inch of knee space.

The highlight on-board was listening to the safety announcement, given in English and Bulgarian, that moved monotonously between the two languages so that it was impossible to tell where the English ended and the Bulgarian began. Clearly the strain of having to give the same talk repeatedly, presumably within a certain time limit, was too much for the steward. At one point during the announcement he actually held his head in his hands and, I like to imagine, wept inwardly. I contemplated whether he was actually a flight attendant, or perhaps was really an undercover Bulgarian Secret Service agent who had been given an embarrassing assignment. The flight itself was uneventful, taking off and landing in the dark.

Having arrived, the Sofia airport experience was considerably better than the Luton one. As it was 2am in Sofia, the staff had clearly decided that the best thing to do was throw everyone out as soon as possible and go to bed. The sleepy customs man barely glanced at our passports, and our luggage was the first to arrive at baggage reclaim. In fact, mine was the very first bag, presumably because worried baggage handlers had carefully placed it atop the pile in order to keep it safe from ordinary-sized cases. We barely had time to ask what sort of idiot would be present at the airport at this time of night before we bumped into Gray, who had arrived, as we thought, to greet us. But he sheepishly confessed that there were other more important people on the same flight and we would need to get into a taxi. He did at least have the grace to organise one for us, and we wound our way through the empty streets of Sofia to the hotel.

Once arrived, the desk clerk said she had a room for Fran and a room for me, looked awkwardly at Graham, and asked diplomatically which room he would be using. We were directed to the lifts, which were made by a company called Shindler, and were proudly shown how the room key cards would automatically direct the lift to the correct floor. This seemed too good to be true - no need to waste precious energy pushing a button! Then I collapsed into bed and passed out.

Lunchbox Dilemma

I experienced a particularly British problem today: I struggled to get my pate packaging into my Tupperware lunchbox. It should have been just the right size but the edges of the pate casing needed to be folded in to make it fit. What made it worse was the fact that the pate packaging had extra, vacant space that wasn’t needed. Either they had fallen short on filling it with pate or they had wasted valuable plastic. In truth it was the latter, since there was more than enough pate contained therein. Ironically, it even said ‘Bigger Pack’ on the packaging as though this was a selling point! Presumably it was intended to dupe people into thinking that that it meant more pate, not more packaging? To combat the space dilemma I had to remove the pate from its packaging and relocate it to a more suitably sized piece of Tupperware that sat more snugly in the lunchbox.

Lights Out

I have a terrible affliction that I need to confess to. I suspect others out there will suffer in silence as I have, but the time has come to open up to the world. I struggle to turn light switches on and off. I don’t mean that I forget to turn them off when I leave a room. It’s worse than that. I remember to turn them off, but as I reach out for the switch I simply fail to switch it! This most basic of tasks seems unnecessarily difficult to me. I think it’s overconfidence. Being so unbearably straightforward makes me think that I need not give it the due care and attention that it deserves. Most of the time I reach for the switch but then look away, and am not actually looking when I try to switch it. This means I frequently overshoot the switch, where my pathetic motor skills are not capable of switching it before I have walked past it, and I have to double back. I don’t seem to learn either. This happens with an unnerving frequency, and I constantly look round to see if anyone has noticed. I have only shared my affliction with a select few until now. I hope that I will find the strength to manage the problem, and hope that, with your help, I will get past it one day. Maybe I should invest in lights that go on and off when you clap. Even I should be able to manage that.

Technofear Part 5

Is there a human being in the world who knows how to use a projector? I’m talking about the portable ones that can be plugged into a laptop to give a presentation. It seems that nobody is capable of comprehending what selection of connections in what order are necessary to facilitate projecting. It appears that there is an unnecessarily elaborate series of tasks one has to undertake in a very particular order before the projector and the laptop will begin to communicate with one another. The correct sequence is a closely guarded secret, known only by a handful of top international projectionists across the planet. It’s a bit like the inner circle of projectionism, but where projectionism is to do with projectors and not projecting people’s personal feelings onto others. If the projectionists used projectionism to project their knowledge of projectors onto others then we wouldn’t have this problem. I digress.

The net result of this ignorance is that, no matter what laptop or projector you use, and regardless of how many people are present, there will be a long period of unplugging and replugging in of cables, followed by pressing buttons repeatedly in the vain hope that one of them is a ‘connect’ button. I find that, after a while, I usually recall that F5 has something to do with it, but even then I can only establish a link where either the computer is displaying and the projector is not, or the projector is displaying but the computer is not, but never both simultaneously. And even when we do figure it out, I know deep down that I will have forgotten how to do it when I next use a projector. They should make it part of the national curriculum for all 12 year olds, saving hours of expensive work time and frustration later in life. If I ever see a CV containing the phrase ‘can operate projectors’ I will employ that person instantly.

Postage

When I was in New Zealand I purchased a few gifts and things to bring home that were likely to stretch the boundaries of my luggage allowance to carrying capacity. Since I was residing at the time with my good friends in Te Anau, they offered to stick it in the post for me as they had successfully sent parcels back to the UK previously. This seemed like a cracking solution, as I would not have to struggle under the extra weight for the next few days, nor would I glance anxiously down at the scales when my backpack was being weighed at the airport. So I boxed up a load of stuff, wrapped an entire roll of parcel tape around it and wrote up the necessary declaration label and stuck it on. I left it with my friends, who popped it in the post the following day. I then spent another week travelling and returned to the UK eagerly awaiting the arrival of my package.

Guestimates suggested that two weeks was a probable delivery time. After a fortnight had passed, I started to get a little nervous, and after four weeks I contact my friends to see whether there was any way to trace the parcel. After failing to locate the tracking number online, they called New Zealand Post to see if it was still in the system. Indeed it was! On its way back to New Zealand! Apparently it had beaten me home by a day or two, but I had never seen any hint of a ‘we missed you’ note that might have been deposited through my letter box in its place. Nor had I received either of the two letters apparently dispatched to alert me to its presence in a warehouse somewhere. So it had been returned to sender, back in New Zealand, presumably by a much slower route.

Some weeks later my friend informed me that it had landed on his doorstep and he could see no reason why it had been returned. So he checked the address and duly dispatched it again on our mutual hope that I had simply missed it when it beat me home. This time I would be ready! Several days elapsed and I checked the tracking number on the website only to be fobbed off with a message suggesting that the parcel was not being tracked. I waited another few days and nothing changed. Finally I heard the wonderful news from my friend that the parcel had, yet again, been returned to him in New Zealand.

So he contacted New Zealand Post to ask why the parcel is so desperate not to stay in the UK, and they had no idea. I have no idea how the financial arrangements of international mail work, but having now paid for the parcel to be delivered twice, and with it still remaining in New Zealand, I’m inclined to suspect this is relatively poor value for money. And since we knew not what the issue was or who was responsible for it, I had no idea who to contact to get it resolved, or to seek compensation financially, emotionally, or environmentally. This package is now responsible for a vast amount of carbon emissions as a direct result of incompetence within the mailing community! But it is a well-travelled parcel and I was very much looking forward to hearing tales of adventure and mystery when/if it finally arrived. 

Having made a complaint to New Zealand post, I was asked to confirm my address via email, which I duly did.  I followed this up after two weeks had elapsed to see whether any progress had been made, only to be told that the contents of the package had now been lost. This was news to me, since they were residing safely with my mate as far as I knew, and he was able to confirm this. I subsequently received a letter from NZ post, asking me to confirm my address again. I duly replied, whilst acknowledging the irony that this was the only letter I had received from them of all the things that had been sent! After several more weeks had elapsed I contacted NZ post again to see what progress had been made, only to be told that the results of their investigation had found that we had not included the postcode on the parcel! This was a kick in the teeth since I had written the original address, including postcode, and that was copied to the customs label that was also attached to the box. My friend had double checked it when it had been first returned to him, confirming that all details were correct. Now I was mad! Outright lies to cover their incompetence!

I wrote again to customer services in a less than enthusiastic tone, demanding to be taken seriously. A delightful chap called Jamie took on our case and assured us that he would personally investigate the matter. Not only that, but he kept us informed of progress each time there was a development – a resounding success for customer service at last! My friend took the executive decision to send the package recorded, which cost a bit more but might turn out to be excellent value for money since paying the lesser amount was clearly not enough! And indeed it worked. I have been reunited with the package, including all of its contents; a mere four months after it was initially dispatched on the other side of the world. 

Hair today...

I suspect most men will go through a period of wondering whether facial hair suits them or in fact makes them look like a badger. In the past, when I have wondered this, I have allowed my childish stubble to proliferate during November so that most people assume I am doing something for charity rather than completing my own personal experiment in itchiness. Since I don’t get much growth down my cheeks, I always end up with a goatee, which suggests I’m trying to look ‘cool’ or ‘mature’, neither of which are accusations that are frequently levelled at me. Or I get patchy areas that looks like a child has stuck small pieces of felt to my cheeks, a bit like this:

I find it bizarre that I don’t get much growth on my face since my eyebrows have never needed any encouragement. It’s like having a pair of liquorice allsorts permanently glued to my forehead. And worse still, I have one super-long eyebrow hair. It has twice the virility of any of its neighbouring hairs, and shoots forth with remarkable velocity. At the hairdressers recently I was asked if I wanted my eyebrows trimmed, which was a first for me and seemed to be a leading question since they presumably don’t ask people who don’t need a trim?! Undeniably it creating a neat effect and levelled the playing field again by keeping my super-hair in check. My main concern now is if and when I will be asked if I want my nostrils trimmed too!