Back on The Cusp (prelude to flying saucer III)

So ... getting to where I am now has involved several highs, but also a number of fairly intense lows. 

As I write this, my overriding thought is basically “I’ve put everything into this flying saucer thing – DAMN, it better be good!” 

That probably isn't the best frame of mind to be in when you're going into an 'adventure'. It's how I feel, though. Shit has gone down. Some of it has been great - like detouring to visit Span, Jits and their family in lovely Antwerp, on my way back to Bulgaria - but some of it has been ... well, not so great.

I think my mistake was leaving my summer camp in Finland early. If there was an “and it all went wrong from there” moment, that was almost certainly it. 

Picture the scene, though: I’m having an after-lunch cigarette at the college where I work in Anjalankoski, in idyllic regional Finland, and the head administrator Alexei is there in our little 'smoking pagoda' with his lady friend. 

He says to me “Entoni, would you like to go to Sweden?”. I ask “When?”, and he replies “At about three o’clock”. He’s paying for the ferry ticket, which ordinarily would set me back about 120 Euros.

It’s the last day of this particular camp (they go in two-week cycles, which is to say that every two weeks one group of students leaves and another turns up on buses that come from Russia), and that means today we're having performances. These involve teachers and students working together on a little stage production for maybe the last 2-3 days of the camp, and then presenting it on the final afternoon.

I obviously don’t want to miss seeing my class perform (especially after being so inspired by my 14-year-old 'music supervisor' Anja, who pretty much pulled the whole thing out of the fire single-handedly), so I bargain: 

“Is there another ferry that goes a bit later?”

Alexei thinks. “I’ll go and check”, he says. 

We agree that I’ll sail from Turku (three hours away by car) at 9pm, and that Alexei will drive me. So I get to watch my guys perform, then I hug them and let them write stuff on me with board markers, and then I leave.  

And there you have it: the decision which set the “everything went wrong” ball rolling. 

The essential problem here is that when another person suddenly suggests out of the blue that I go to another country which I hadn’t planned on visiting, and says “Let's do it today!”, I simply can’t resist. 

And I must say, the journey itself was really enjoyable, in a weird sort of way. We sailed out through the Turku Archipelago, which I’ve mentioned before in these pages as a place that really inspires me. It’s a vast slick of about 2,000 islands off Finland's south-western coast, and some of these islands are for sale. A few are quite large, with whole villages/towns occupying them. Others are mere islets with just one or two houses, or with no human habitation at all.

ISLAND-SPOTTING AT DUSK

Turku Archipelago, off the coast of Finland, 31.07.14

I flew over the archipelago a few years ago, but seeing it from ground level was perhaps even more exciting, because I got a stronger sense of what it would be like if I ever did decide to pursue that whole ‘live on your own island’ dream.

I also got to enjoy some live entertainment on the ferry, because there’s a bar on deck 10 (near the top) where an acoustic live show happens. I hadn't planned to watch the show, but there was a bizarre moment when I was walking past the entrance to the bar, on my way outside for a cigarette, and I heard the following coming from the stage:

“So, what about Australia? Has anyone been there?”

This came at the end of the singer’s rendition of Sweet Home Alabama, so I'm guessing he must have preceded that song with a question about whether any of his audience had visited the US state in the song title, and that he was going to play an Australian song next. But it was just so weird to hear such a remark while making my way around a Nordic cruise ship, on which I was possibly the only Australian passenger. 

(It was  greeted, btw, with total silence).

I froze for a second, not knowing what to do. Should I speak up? In the end, I decided not to. I just headed outside and continued inspecting islands, considering which one I was going to buy. 

As I closed the door, though, I heard the singer start playing the song which his question had referred to. And believe me, until you’ve heard Land Down Under* sung in a Swedish accent on a ferry off the coast of Finland after not having set foot in the country of your birth for seven years, there's a level of weird cultural displacement that you've yet to experience. 

So that was fun. Or at least, it was a pleasantly intriguing mild headfuck. 

Between the overnight voyage to Stockholm and this present moment, essentially four main things have happened:

The first was the camp in Sweden, which I didn't really enjoy. It was, quite frankly, just a bit dull. Unlike the Finnish camps, there are only two teachers in the Swedish one. The other teacher was a charming, soft-spoken American woman called Kelli ... but see, Kelli lives in Stockholm, so after lessons she goes back to the city to get on with her normal life. 

That leaves me pretty much stuck in the camp venue alone – and the venue in question is Sweden’s National Sports Training Complex. 

On the up side that means free gym, and meeting a few interesting people who come to the camp as part of United Nations development projects and the like. On the downside, those people are in the minority. Most of your fellow campers are the Swedish equivalent of folks you’d expect to find at the Australian Institute of Sport, or at a similar facility in any other country. They’re loud, they’re in great enough shape to constantly remind you of your own physical disrepair, and on top of that, many of them are just plain annoying.

A particular source of irritation was the Swedish female gymnastics team, and I mention this because I actually found it quite amusing that I was so annoyed by them. 

On the day they arrived, I remember them swanning past me in single file while I was eating lunch in the dining area. A few hours later, a Hungarian guy who I’d made friends with passed a comment along the lines of “Whoooooaa ... check out that Swedish Gymnastics team, eh?” He’d also been having lunch when they made their grand entrance, and he’d been quite impressed.

At the time when he made this remark, I was still quite poorly acquainted with the team members and I was able to genuinely agree with my Hungarian friend that they were indeed quite attractive to look at.  

Two days after that, I’d pledged to shove a live eel down the shirt of the next Swedish gymnast who I heard giggling for no apparent reason – and for an impossibly long period – while I was trying to concentrate and/or think and/or not go completely insane courtesy of their girly racket.

Moving on ... the second thing was that, at the end of the Swedish camp, I either lost my salary or had it stolen. I think I’d actually slightly prefer the second option, because if the loss of half my summer pay was entirely my own fault, then that makes me kind of a colossal idiot.

LOVE THOSE WINDOWS!

Antwerp, Belgium, 13.08.14

Thing the Third was visiting Span and Jits (two old and dear friends) in Belgium, which was awesome. Antwerp turns out to be a really beautiful and cool city - a fact which I never would’ve suspected had I not gone there. And of course, time spent with these two fabulous human beings (and their kids, and also Span’s mum as it turned out) is always time well spent.

SERIOUS LESSON FROM A BEER EXPERT

Antwerp, Belgium, 14.08.14

Among other things, Span took me to a couple of great little bars and introduced me to the endless diversity of Belgian beer. Probably the best of said bars was this one next to the cathedral, into which the publican has crammed around 1,100 religious statues. Collecting Marys, Apostles and so on is not something that ever would've occurred to me as a good way to decorate a bar, but somehow it really works.  

(Btw, subsequent to a conversation I had with one of the Russian camp leaders in Finland, I also used being in Antwerp as an excuse to do a few little experiments in 'reflective photography'. Don't think I'm in danger of winning any prizes, but it was fun.)

MY LITTLE EXPERIMENT IN 'REFLECTIVE PHOTOGRAPHY'

Antwerp, Belgium, 13.08.14

And here are some examples of people who really know what they're doing, which inspired me to try the technique. You should definitely follow this link, because the page contains some incredible images:

Reflective Photography - 25 Beautiful Examples

Finally, there was my attempt to get out of Belgium and back to Bulgaria. 

That was a total nightmare involving missed flights, being trapped inside airports for hours at a time, public holiday crowds in Brussels that threatened to crush me as I tried to get my wheelie bag through them, weird, overpriced and unpleasant hotels in the middle of nowhere, and a bunch of other stuff which, when added together, seriously made me question why I travel at all.

Yeah, I know ... when I’m questioning that, things are pretty much at rock bottom! 

In fact, when I woke up this morning in Brussels, I’d more or less  decided that this would be my last holiday for a long, long while. Things had just spiralled out of control, financially and psychologically. Courtesy of the various screw-ups - coupled with the fact that both mine and Yuliya’s computers chose this summer to die, within weeks of each other - I was looking at paying back this holiday for a good portion of the next academic year. “And for what?”, I asked myself about 273 times.

So that’s the headpsace I was in as I dove into August 16th. It’s now technically finished - these being the wee hours of the 17th. But after about 15 hours of solid travelling, I’m well over 2,000 kms from where I started.  

I’m also back in Kazanlak, about 20kms from Buzludzha and the Communist Flying Saucer. And there are three other people in this hotel who are going there with me tomorrow. I haven’t actually seen them here yet, because I arrived at 1am. In fact, there’s one who I haven’t even met. But they’re here. I’ll see them at breakfast.

Also, they’re all Bulgarian, which is perhaps as it should be. After all, Buzludzha is their national monument, not mine :-)

At least one of the people with whom I’m going up the mountain tomorrow thinks I’m mad for being here now, and told me so while I was in Brussels. I was talking to her online yesterday, sitting in a cosy cafe and sipping white wine (which is about the only affordable thing in Belgium), while explaining all the difficulties I’d had. The actual word she used was “stubborn”, but then I prompted her a bit and she revised upwards to “insane”. 

She went on to suggest that maybe the cosmos didn’t want me to see the inside of Buzludzha right at the moment, even going so far as to advise that I consult the I Ching. 

Obviously, that only increased my determination to get here.

And so, at 12:30am I found myself winding towards Kazanlak in a taxi with a Serb driver called Todor, who offered me a cigarette en route and asked if I'd like to hear some Serbian narodna muzika (folk music) to help us on our way. 

Great clouds of steam were rising from the highway, the result of earlier rains combined with summer temperatures and high humidity. As well as producing a weird ‘alt world’ atmosphere, they were making it quite difficult to see, and thankfully Todor kept slowing down to compensate for the poor visibility. 

There were moments when no sign of human existence was visible anywhere - no houses, no distant lights from a town, no oncoming traffic. Just us, the steam, the narodna muzika and the darkness. 

Perfect.

So ... for all of the reasons above, along with several others, I'm overwhelmingly glad to be back in Bulgaria :-) 

Now off to sleep, to the melodic sounds of Bulgarian crickets. Obviously I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. 

Good night!


(*An iconic Australian song from the 1980s.)