After a very short flight from Vienna which served to impress on me how close Bulgaria really is and how much uncharted territory I have to cover mentally to get there, we drive to the hotel, unpack and re-pack – the cameras, recorders and mikes have to be as unobtrusive as possible and allow us to walk around with them, all day if necessary. As we are doing this a thunderstorm instantly saturates the air to produce a Panama City, one notch higher up on a personalised scale of temperature and humidity than Colombo, Sri Lanka. Not being a weather scientist the numbers never produce much of a response in me. But if L says, ‘it’s San Cristobal weather’, then I know that the air bites, the glare burns the eyes and shadow and sun are so sharply contrasted that walking round a corner can be like walking rapidly out of a cathedral on a boiling hot day. Thinking this prompts me to wonder about other people’s personal weather systems and I remember Rev. Phil from the church youth club who had a definitely theological weather taxonomy ‘heavenly weather today, isn’t it?’ or ‘hellishly hot’ or even ‘it’s such horrible weather, it’s enough to try the patience of Job’. For intermittent, unpredictable, heavy showers with gusty winds (his umbrella had turned inside out a number of times).
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While we wait for the storm over Sofia to pass, I lie around on the bed a half doze, mentally compiling a tally of everything I associate with Bulgaria. I’m not one of these people who reads guidebooks before I go somewhere, I’m so easily influenced by ‘authoritative interpretations’ in books that if I read a lot before I see something it gives me the feeling that I’m viewing everything through a veil. It’s also akin to the experience that is becoming more and more prevalent in Europe, travel to a different town only presents you with a cloned high street – the same chain stores. Even when one travels abroad many of the small souvenirs you bring back could have been purchased only a few streets away from home. So not reading guide books is both a strategy of self-defence that gives me time to absorb patterns, fractures and ‘unimportant’ details from the surroundings and also not to have to pre-empt real life with the photos in the guide book. On the other hand L likes to read extensively about where she is going in order to choose what to see and to be able to give it an immediate context. This doesn’t seem to reduce her enjoyment at all and I must admit I like being able to ask her about things – as we go along.
By maintaining a state of being enveloped in a relatively disordered field of visual, auditory and olfactory impressions the compulsion to immediately categorise my experiences is suspended for a while. Or at least I like to think so. In fact one's own list of interests very soon starts to make itself felt.
One of the things I enjoy most is trying to check my embedded biases against other realities. My list of not-necessarily related information:
1. On the business level, the EVN, the energy company from Lower Austria, has acquired
an interest in the electrical network in central Bulgaria and is responsible for supply from
substation to customer.
2. In the same commercial vein, with rather different results, Rover suffered a debacle in the 1990s by trying to pass on its old machine tools for producing the popular but outdated “Maestro” model to a joint venture company – a similar strategy to the Brazilian VW Beetle. The managers seem to have counted on a market for western cars of any description. They miscalculated on ‘local conditions’ and, possibly, on the fact that what is fastest in the West is its information and capital: its propaganda for goods and services – selling images before products through advertising and television programmes. People get up-to-the-minute images of what they should be wanting long before they can afford it. |
