Someone blows a police whistle as I'm crossing near the Roman ruins under Serdika station, but it turns out to be a chubby man in a Batman t-shirt. I ignore him, and there are no consequences; batcrime can be committed with impunity here. Apart from this, getting to the international bus station is surprisingly uncomplicated.
The station itself, though, has signs in Bulgarian Cyrillic only, no platform numbers, and no general list of departures. It turns out that each platform, with its little adjoining storefront, is leased by a different company; you just loiter hopefully around whichever seems likeliest to be the one you bought a ticket from online.
The railway station is next door, and I go there to kill time and unload Bulgarian currency. It's very like Brewster's Millions, but with 26 leva, and in a Bulgarian train station. The charge for the washroom helps a little. You give a friendly old woman 0.5 leva, and she pushes three folded napkins towards you with a stern, use-them-wisely look. On the way out, she's insistent that you take your receipt, presumably for tax purposes.
At the bus, there's the usual confusion about what queue goes with what, which side the luggage for Nis is loaded on, and what the fee for that is (you give the driver 1 lev per bag, assuming you didn't blow all your change on washroom trips, and he gives you a tag, just as though there were some sort of luggage claim process at the other end, which there isn't). In front is a young couple who, overborne by the romance of bus travel, make out more or less continuously. Across from them, a weatherbeaten old woman who piles the seat beside her high with groceries.
On the halting cruise out of Sofia, there are dozens of the slummy white high rises beloved of communist planners, and then we break out into the countryside and head for the border.
Entering Serbia
Life being what it is, not everyone will get to live all their dreams; there are some who will never get to cross the Bulgaria-Serbia border by bus. This is what it's like.
To the left is a long, dirty, coral-pink building, like a seaside motel whose sea has dried up. Ahead, booths. Further up, in Serbia, ramshackle clusters of dubious-looking restaurants and currency-exchange operations. Running blithely back and forth across the border, a number of shaggy stray dogs. There's lots of time to drink in the splendour of the place, because there are two buses ahead of us. Half the passengers get off for a cigarette.
The driver asks for passports from a handful of people. The woman in front (American, I think) is one of them. After he comes back, she has a short but agitated conversation with him, and then she and her boyfriend get off the bus. The boyfriend comes back to retrieve something, looking angry and rueful, and then they vanish. I don't know what made Serbia unwilling to admit them (or Bulgaria unwilling to let them leave). The only thing I can think of is that they had Kosovo passport stamps. This is supposed to make Serbian border guards unhappy.
When it's our turn, we troop off the bus and line up inside. Afterwards, everyone stands around by a gray dumpster on the striped asphalt triangle formed by converging truck and car lanes, watching the stray dogs and smoking. It's like an incredibly unsuccessful cocktail party. If you're economizing on cigarettes, it's not really necessary to light one, as just standing in the general area will be pretty much the same thing. Two allied dogs bark warningly at a dog from a rival clique who has wandered into view. It starts to rain lightly.
The bus drives a hundred metres, and you do it all again for entry to Serbia. For variety, you don't go into a little building, but rather line up at a little booth. The driver walks back and forth calling out the names of those somehow selected for special attention, and when one of the names isn't Slavic, another passenger turns to me and repeats it. This leads to confusion, because it is impossible for me to stop shaking my head for "no".
Niš
On the Serbian side, tumbledown houses, families working fields by hand, chickens ranging across backyards, small towns where every yard holds five or six slumping sheds of rotten black boards, and two or three more substantial towns. In failing light, the bus passes through a series of stunning gorges, vast cave-riddled cliffs that yawn up and away from some little river.
Central Niš is 30% tiny casinos, 30% pharmacies, and 40% misc. It's the birthplace of Constantine, so there are monuments: a nice little crystal thing from the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan (what a party that must have been), and an alarmingly ugly bronze sculpture with three heads (arranged vertically in the middle) and wings, like several better statues melted together.
Nis also has underground shopping-dungeons, like those in Sofia or Bucharest, but a bit less desperate; a little pedestrian district lined with restaurants; and a sprawling fortress complex. On a wet and gloomy Orthodox Good Friday, the fortress is nearly deserted. There's an excavated Roman bath complex full of patio furniture and playground equipment, and a circle of Roman grave markers with a dozen crows nesting overhead. A restaurant at the gate fires up its stereo while I'm walking along the ramparts, which seems optimistic, because the population of the fortress is me, a couple of old ladies, and an indeterminate number of stray dogs. One thing to be said for Nis fortress is that, unlike a lot of other fortresses, it doesn't baby you. Its damp, litter-strewn buildings are open, and its dark tunnels are ungated. Sure, it says, go down there if you think it's a good idea. What am I, your mother? I'm a fortress. If anything, my child would be a stockade.
The west side of it overlooks a vast tin-roofed bazaar, which turns out, when I hurry past it later towards the bus station, to stretch for blocks and to snake way back into covered complexes along the street. Sellers spill out onto the road. A man by the bridge is trying to sell wine; the lower-shelf stuff is in 2L plastic bottles. Seeing my bag, he points out that I don't need to worry, I can drink it right here. Someone selling pantyhose has brought three detached mannequin legs with her and arranged them on the grass.
The waiting room in Nis bus station -- to move on finally to the A-list attractions -- is a stunning example of 1960s Serbian bus station waiting room design. Something like the inside of a really shabby UFO, it is dimly-lit, oddly-shaped, and full of 3-sided orange benches. Your instinct is to blame this on Communism, but the fault lies with the era. These things weren't so different in the west; bus station design is one of those disciplines that held hands across the ideological divide. At the time, you could point to the bus stations and say look, our peoples, they are not so different. We both love their children; we both wait for buses and strange, disorienting places.
The Belgrade bus was there, but the time on the station clocks seemed to be wrong. Throughout my stay in Nis, I'd been plagued by a strange problem. The hotel breakfast started an hour late (understandable; it was Orthodox Easter weekend). The bus arrived an hour late (buses are usually late). The clock in the room was an hour slow. I started to wonder about this remarkably specific and universal flaw in the Serbian national character. Staring at the bus station clocks, the explanation came to me in a flash of intuition of which I felt very proud. The solution is too intricate to describe in full, but it touches on the existence of different "zones of time".
The ticket to Belgrade was $10 or so, which seemed cheap compared to hanging around a bus station for an hour, so I bought a ticket for the current bus from a very nice lady at the ticket counter. I said "Beograd," and she tried to help me out by writing down times on a sheet of paper and saying things like "direct". From this I understood that I should wait for a direct bus that was leaving a bit later, so I slid along the window and toyed with my phone until one of her colleagues hammered on the glass in front of me and told me to get on the bus behind me, which was about to leave.
A stuffed blue bunny hung between the windscreens; its friend the stuffed bear sits on a shelf beside the first aid kit. On the way north, the chicken population falls, little plots are replaced by large farms, and prosperity generally rises. Serbia's rivers are orange and swollen. Highway signs eagerly promote the Serbian Wine Route, which runs through the garage of the gentleman by the bridge in Nis (I'm sure it's actually very nice, and if Canada can have one, so can Serbia).
The station itself, though, has signs in Bulgarian Cyrillic only, no platform numbers, and no general list of departures. It turns out that each platform, with its little adjoining storefront, is leased by a different company; you just loiter hopefully around whichever seems likeliest to be the one you bought a ticket from online.
The railway station is next door, and I go there to kill time and unload Bulgarian currency. It's very like Brewster's Millions, but with 26 leva, and in a Bulgarian train station. The charge for the washroom helps a little. You give a friendly old woman 0.5 leva, and she pushes three folded napkins towards you with a stern, use-them-wisely look. On the way out, she's insistent that you take your receipt, presumably for tax purposes.
At the bus, there's the usual confusion about what queue goes with what, which side the luggage for Nis is loaded on, and what the fee for that is (you give the driver 1 lev per bag, assuming you didn't blow all your change on washroom trips, and he gives you a tag, just as though there were some sort of luggage claim process at the other end, which there isn't). In front is a young couple who, overborne by the romance of bus travel, make out more or less continuously. Across from them, a weatherbeaten old woman who piles the seat beside her high with groceries.
On the halting cruise out of Sofia, there are dozens of the slummy white high rises beloved of communist planners, and then we break out into the countryside and head for the border.
Entering Serbia
Life being what it is, not everyone will get to live all their dreams; there are some who will never get to cross the Bulgaria-Serbia border by bus. This is what it's like.
To the left is a long, dirty, coral-pink building, like a seaside motel whose sea has dried up. Ahead, booths. Further up, in Serbia, ramshackle clusters of dubious-looking restaurants and currency-exchange operations. Running blithely back and forth across the border, a number of shaggy stray dogs. There's lots of time to drink in the splendour of the place, because there are two buses ahead of us. Half the passengers get off for a cigarette.
The driver asks for passports from a handful of people. The woman in front (American, I think) is one of them. After he comes back, she has a short but agitated conversation with him, and then she and her boyfriend get off the bus. The boyfriend comes back to retrieve something, looking angry and rueful, and then they vanish. I don't know what made Serbia unwilling to admit them (or Bulgaria unwilling to let them leave). The only thing I can think of is that they had Kosovo passport stamps. This is supposed to make Serbian border guards unhappy.
When it's our turn, we troop off the bus and line up inside. Afterwards, everyone stands around by a gray dumpster on the striped asphalt triangle formed by converging truck and car lanes, watching the stray dogs and smoking. It's like an incredibly unsuccessful cocktail party. If you're economizing on cigarettes, it's not really necessary to light one, as just standing in the general area will be pretty much the same thing. Two allied dogs bark warningly at a dog from a rival clique who has wandered into view. It starts to rain lightly.
The bus drives a hundred metres, and you do it all again for entry to Serbia. For variety, you don't go into a little building, but rather line up at a little booth. The driver walks back and forth calling out the names of those somehow selected for special attention, and when one of the names isn't Slavic, another passenger turns to me and repeats it. This leads to confusion, because it is impossible for me to stop shaking my head for "no".
Niš
On the Serbian side, tumbledown houses, families working fields by hand, chickens ranging across backyards, small towns where every yard holds five or six slumping sheds of rotten black boards, and two or three more substantial towns. In failing light, the bus passes through a series of stunning gorges, vast cave-riddled cliffs that yawn up and away from some little river.
Central Niš is 30% tiny casinos, 30% pharmacies, and 40% misc. It's the birthplace of Constantine, so there are monuments: a nice little crystal thing from the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan (what a party that must have been), and an alarmingly ugly bronze sculpture with three heads (arranged vertically in the middle) and wings, like several better statues melted together.
Nis also has underground shopping-dungeons, like those in Sofia or Bucharest, but a bit less desperate; a little pedestrian district lined with restaurants; and a sprawling fortress complex. On a wet and gloomy Orthodox Good Friday, the fortress is nearly deserted. There's an excavated Roman bath complex full of patio furniture and playground equipment, and a circle of Roman grave markers with a dozen crows nesting overhead. A restaurant at the gate fires up its stereo while I'm walking along the ramparts, which seems optimistic, because the population of the fortress is me, a couple of old ladies, and an indeterminate number of stray dogs. One thing to be said for Nis fortress is that, unlike a lot of other fortresses, it doesn't baby you. Its damp, litter-strewn buildings are open, and its dark tunnels are ungated. Sure, it says, go down there if you think it's a good idea. What am I, your mother? I'm a fortress. If anything, my child would be a stockade.
The west side of it overlooks a vast tin-roofed bazaar, which turns out, when I hurry past it later towards the bus station, to stretch for blocks and to snake way back into covered complexes along the street. Sellers spill out onto the road. A man by the bridge is trying to sell wine; the lower-shelf stuff is in 2L plastic bottles. Seeing my bag, he points out that I don't need to worry, I can drink it right here. Someone selling pantyhose has brought three detached mannequin legs with her and arranged them on the grass.
The waiting room in Nis bus station -- to move on finally to the A-list attractions -- is a stunning example of 1960s Serbian bus station waiting room design. Something like the inside of a really shabby UFO, it is dimly-lit, oddly-shaped, and full of 3-sided orange benches. Your instinct is to blame this on Communism, but the fault lies with the era. These things weren't so different in the west; bus station design is one of those disciplines that held hands across the ideological divide. At the time, you could point to the bus stations and say look, our peoples, they are not so different. We both love their children; we both wait for buses and strange, disorienting places.
The Belgrade bus was there, but the time on the station clocks seemed to be wrong. Throughout my stay in Nis, I'd been plagued by a strange problem. The hotel breakfast started an hour late (understandable; it was Orthodox Easter weekend). The bus arrived an hour late (buses are usually late). The clock in the room was an hour slow. I started to wonder about this remarkably specific and universal flaw in the Serbian national character. Staring at the bus station clocks, the explanation came to me in a flash of intuition of which I felt very proud. The solution is too intricate to describe in full, but it touches on the existence of different "zones of time".
The ticket to Belgrade was $10 or so, which seemed cheap compared to hanging around a bus station for an hour, so I bought a ticket for the current bus from a very nice lady at the ticket counter. I said "Beograd," and she tried to help me out by writing down times on a sheet of paper and saying things like "direct". From this I understood that I should wait for a direct bus that was leaving a bit later, so I slid along the window and toyed with my phone until one of her colleagues hammered on the glass in front of me and told me to get on the bus behind me, which was about to leave.
A stuffed blue bunny hung between the windscreens; its friend the stuffed bear sits on a shelf beside the first aid kit. On the way north, the chicken population falls, little plots are replaced by large farms, and prosperity generally rises. Serbia's rivers are orange and swollen. Highway signs eagerly promote the Serbian Wine Route, which runs through the garage of the gentleman by the bridge in Nis (I'm sure it's actually very nice, and if Canada can have one, so can Serbia).
