Sofia

I could not start this Blog with anything else but Sofia. This is where I am from. I was born there in 1976. This was probably the best time for one to be born there. The eighties were pending and with them long summers of endless childhood of seemingly flawless quality.
It still seems so. Many years later. You know this feeling when a gust of wind or a firing neuron reminds of you of something while you are walking in June. Sometimes it brings a smell, a scene or just the beginning of a memory of how on the 15th of June every year school would end and eternity awaited. 90 days indeed seemed like eternity.
Not now. At 32 90 days barely suffice to just get a good glimpse of the trees to realize they blossomed somewhere in early May. You missed that one again. By the time your formulate a good thought and it is already July and that is how it goes.

Anyhow, this is not about time, I am sure there will be another posting about that one, this is about Sofia.
While I developed some superficial understanding of the city early on, I grew to love it much later. In 1996 I moved to live in the center. This was a defining point. I remember the first night I went out for a walk. It seemed I was traveling somewhere. Well - at that time I was still impressionable and even the center of Sofia in 1996 ( just months before the economic collapse) seemed like a great place to be. I walked and looked at the stores. I walked for hours. It was a beautiful night. This is how I fell in love.
Now, by all European and world standards Sofia is an insignificant and after all not very appealing city. The commie infrastructure and housing all over the place, dilapidated roads, narrow streets now allowing normal traffic etc. Since 1989 the city progressively grew more cluttered, crowded, dirty and constructed with ridiculous building of dubious architectural value.
This was the age of Mutro Baroque. Greenery was going away while greedy former nomenclature and thugs started devouring the city by the day...

But do you know what it means to walk in some of the well cherished parts of Sofia on a sunny Sunday after say it rained during the night. See Vitosha hovering in the distance. Not many people on the streets. No frowning faces aiming their barrels at you. Just sit down and have a coffee or just take your walk.

Or at night in the summer when the Linden trees have cast their spell and you are waiting for a friend "na Odeon" and he is good 30 minutes late (observing an old Bulgarian tradition of punctuality). Sofia has never been very well lit and that has always been ok with me. I like to be able to hide, whether in a street, a park or in a garden with some friends darkness used provide shelter for drug addicts and dreamers alike.

This ofcourse was before Sofia's population grew by 50%, respectively trash grew by 200%, before you could hardly breathe because of the poor air quality, before it got full of tightly-clad chalga fashionistas and accompanying thugs thuggish looking representative of the male part of the species. It seems to me that before Sofia's inhabitants became heartless, aggressive and evil.

Don't take me wrong, every time I get to go to Sofia I find my moments of solitude where I walk for hours on end. I still like it. I like to discover the small hidden things that give Sofia some meaning. Still on occasion I would get a gust of memories rushing through my head and reminding me of late school nights with the red December sky, long walks through the park, first emotional enchantments or just the sweet whiff of a great youth I had there.