Foreign: Sofia's Palace of Culture

There doesn't seem to be much on the internet about the Bulgarian Palace of Culture. It's so large, so swollen, so beige-and-brown.  And so, no-one seems to notice it.

I can find that it was built in 1981, celebrating the foundation of the Bulgarian nation 1300 years previously. I don't really understand how a Communist-run state was allowed to celebrate its own uniqueness and history.  I'm sure it worked in the favour of politburo somehow.

The Palace is the focal point of a large set-piece park, sitting between the city centre and the Vitosha mountain in the distance (where one can ski cheaply with a gleeful disregard for health and safety / self-preservation).  The park, like the Palace, has clearly seen better days.  An irrigation (an excellent, and made-up, plural noun) of ponds and fountains is dried up and empty, and there was little greenery in the cold March sunlight.

The Monument to the Bulgarian State, also erected by the munificent Soviet overlords in '81, is either falling down or being taken down.  It remains as a fragment of something, some shattered hoarded-off thing that youths now graffiti to express their frustration at a time they didn't live through.

Unlike Socialist Realist art, this isn't the usual worker-duping interpretation-resistant propaganda (a happy Soviet soldier with a happy peasant farmer, holding a happy pudgy baby and a basket of food).  It looks to me like something horribly wounded.  I wonder how Hitler's pet architect, Albert Speer, would have valued this Socialist ruin.

Underlining the failure of the Communist regime, the northernmost edge of the park has been appropriated by gaudy advertisements in neon.  Which again make me feel like a Capitalist pigdog, personally forcing bland brands onto the homogenising Eastern European market.  Bulgaria, I am sorry for the Tuborg.

Sited elsewhere, the section of the Berlin Wall might have seen like a celebration of the human spirit over the divisiveness and horror of the Cold War.  But here, inscription daubed with more graffiti and on a dirty glass podium, it just seems to be another example of a nasty failure.  Perhaps, on balance, the perfect antithesis to Speer's self-serving assertions that his buildings would look wonderful when picturesquely weathered.

Crossing the park to the Palace (there is a old man busking opera, in the cold), there's a Costa coffee (again, I am sorry), and a security man vigilantly doing nothing.  The Palace is now just used for conferences and the like.  There is a lot of empty space.

An anatomically-improbable statue of Sofia welcomes you into the foyer.  A moulded crowd scene of interlocking waves rather counterpoints the emptiness.

Brown signs encourage you up to the empty three-and-a-half-th floor.

There's a startling geometry to the design.  Lights like chemical structures hang from a ceiling patterned like graph paper.  The treble-height windows create vanishing points with shadows.  

Science and art.  And no-one there.  At the top, facing the mountain, is a bar where trendy young things pretend to be somewhere cool, whilst drinking terrible cocktails made by a barman with absolutely no skill.

On the other side is a tremendous view of the park and the waterless water-features.

The Palace, in its current state, is a mess.  Notionally a gift to Bulgaria, it is inevitably more-so a self-aggrandising monument to the Soviet Union.  It is falling slowly into disrepair.  An overblown symbol of past failure, and the failure of the present to keep the building alive.

Foreign: (a bit of) the Sofia Metro

This entry on the Sofia metro is fairly short, for reasons that will become apparent...

Whereas the London Underground is proudly turning 150 years old, the Metro in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia is brand new, and still being built.

There're currently two lines, a red one and a blue one, which join up at the top (or bottom, depending how you read the map).  I'm not sure whether the completed configuration will form an 8 or an A.  There's going to be a third line, which will probably still form one of those wacky Cyrillic letters they use over there to confuse foreigners.

The construction is a deep cut-and-cover trench, which allows for spacious stations with plenty of headroom and platform depth.  The trains are likewise large and boxy.  I boarded at the station called European Union, which is next to the Sofia City Centre (SCC) shopping complex.  The SCC is:

1) Nowhere near the centre of Sofia
2) Utterly rubbish.  

I feel like a disgusting Capitalist pigdog when I visit a foreign country and see it, as in the SCC, splattered with McDonald's and KFC and Nike genericdom.  Even though, technically, it is not my fault.

Anyway, the EU station is brightly lit, and has a rather nice multi-layered metal sculpture which mixes together the EU 12-star symbol and the Euro sign. I imagine the edges have been smoothed off appropriately to meet an EU Regulation.

The plaque beneath the metalwork gives thanks for the financial contributions of the 'European Regional Development Fund' and the 'Cohesion Fund of the European Union'.  Such snappy names these EU committees give themselves.  Perhaps they're more stylish nomenclatures in French.

Because I have testicles, I am a man,  Or, perhaps, the other way round.  Either way, my scrotal munificence means that I [believe I have] an innate sense of bearing and polar North, and consequentially, a deep-seated fear of asking for directions, lest my magnetically-sensitive gonads be proved misaligned.  Which would obviously be a painful experience.

The upshot of which being that I misread the Metro map.  I therefore went two stops in the wrong direction, and ended up on an empty train in the sidings, being shouted at by the driver.  In Bulgarian.  Shouldn't they check the trains are empty, rather than assuming that all the passengers know which way up the Metro map goes?

Why's is everyone else getting off the train?  Oh, um.

That fundom behind me, I was relieved when shortly later the train left the sidings and returned to normal operation.  I decided to ride the train to the [other] end of the line.  I'd seen from an earlier taxi ride [they're cheap over there, I'm not suddenly rich.  Despite being a Capitalist pigdog] that the line emerged from its underground trench and was covered by a plastic chute, which looked like it might be fun to see (whereas London trains just emerge from their tunnels, blinking and startled, rudely exposed to the grey twilight and icy rains of a British summer).

So, a short ride later, I alighted at Obelya station, the top crossbar of the current A.  Here, the station is in a tunnel of blue plastic, much like a huge water slide.

At this point, there was an announcement over the station intercom in, of course, Bulgarian.  A nearby and timid member of station staff gestured that I should stand behind the yellow-tiled line.  As a seasoned Londoner, and since the next train wasn't due for 4 minutes, I thought this a little OTT (another EU Regulation?), but was content to comply whilst taking another few pictures of the distinctly-DLR-like Lego-coloured station.

I was surprised when the policeman came up the escalator and approached me.  He had clearly been summoned (by, I suspect, that fucking creep of station staff), to address some transgression.  He gestured that I should not consider boarding the train that had just pulled in.  I herefollowing recreate the conversation with startling accuracy:

POLICEMAN:  Something in Bulgarian 

ME: Oh hai, Mr Big Policeman Man! Do you speak English, officer? 

POLICEMAN: Something in Bulgarian 

ME: Um, sorry, I don't understand.  Do you speak English?  Incidentally, you're a quite a scary looking man.  You could probably crush me. Please don't.

POLICEMAN: Annoyed - something in Bulgarian. 

ME: Err, would you like to see the pictures?  Are the pictures a problem?  Do you speak English?  You would look less scary if you shaved occasionally. Or perhaps cleaned your teeth.

POLICEMAN:  Annoyed - something in Bulgarian...  Passport! 

ME: Ah, passport!  Um, no, it's in the hotel room, in the safe, along with, now I think of it, my wallet, containing, for example, my bank cards, and all sorts of other acceptable ID forms.  Do you speak English? Are the pictures the problem?  I begin to show him my photos of the Metro and other random crap like the shopping centre, and a can of beer with a funny name that I had the night before.

POLICEMAN:  Something in Bulgarian...  Passport!

ME: Ah, no, I still don't have my passport?  Do you want to see more photos?  This is like a modern version of a post-holiday slideshow.  How odd.  Aren't digital cameras amazing?  At this point I remember that my driving license is tucked into my jacket pocket, as an earlier precaution to ensure I am allowed to purchase alcohol.  My youthful good looks can be a real drag when trying to get pissed.  Aha!  My driving license!  I now cannot legally be sent off to a gulag to endure 20 years in a salt mine!  I think.  Is that right?

POLICEMAN:  Something in Bulgarian...  He looks at the driving licence.  Then at me.  He hands me back the driving license.  He points to the camera.  Ne! 

ME:  Is that No, as in 'I don't want to see any more pictures', or No, as in 'Don't take any more pictures?'  You know, I think I'll just not take any more pictures.  I don't want to be sent to Siberia.  I need to be back in work on Monday.

POLICEMAN:  Something in Bulgarian...  He walks away.

ME:  You still scare me, Mr Big Policeman Man.  I board the next train with slightly wobbly knees and sit down with utmost care not to break any laws.

I did not take any more pictures on the Sofia Metro.