Beside the Seaside

« In Which I Whinge About The Whingers | Home | In Which I Hear Echoes Of The Past »

In Which It All Smells Like 1973

November 7, 2008 by Mike

Constanţa

Varna - Kavarna - Krapets - Durankulak (Bulgaria) - Varma Veche (Romania) - Mangalia - Constanţa

I'm racing round the Black Sea because it's bloomin' chilly and it's only going to get colder. That's why I'm already writing from Romania, having spent... [counts on fingers and toes.. only four nights in Bulgaria. Still, that's four nights more than the time I was Arrested In Bulgaria For Spying.

I grow attached to a country very quickly, so that Bulgaria had a hard fight living up to Turkey.. but already, I got defensive about Bulgaria and Romania has a lot to prove.

Take my last moments in Bulgaria, for example. I'd followed the 'coast road', intermittently approaching the Black Sea, north towards the border. I took a final loop down to the sea itself at Krapets -- I could never resist a name like that -- and found a small, dirt-poor fishing village. I don't take pictures of extremes of poverty and I try not to dwell on them here. I don't get a kick out of others' misery.

Krapets is no worse off than most of Bulgaria that I've seen; the houses are ramshackle, the roofs corrugated, the dogs thin and sickly, the women headscarfed, the paint long gone. The fishing boats are small, worn, creaking. So was Gheorghe: tobacco-stained fingers, acres of whiskers missed by his razor the last time he remembered to shave, clothes too thin for the cold. We managed a conversation of sorts in half-a-dozen languages, and lots of laughter. He had Paul Newman's eyes. And so did his pal, Reçip, who wandered ovr while we were talking, just in time for this photograph:

Reçip, on the right, is Turkish, and was greatly tickled when I remembered how to say Fally-man-derrit.

The border is at a place called Durankulak. Susan, I took a photo for you and it's in yr inbox. Other Duran Duran fans can apply by email.

Romania is poorer than Bulgaria. It certainly feels it.

More 'secondhand' shops - a giveaway.

But that's nothing. In small villages near the border with impoverished names like "2 May" and "21 August" (nobody wealthy or connected or powerful makes a choice to live in a village called 2 May), the side of the road is liberally sprinkled with people selling potatoes and cabbage. Lots of potatoes. Lots of cabbages. Nothing else. When 20 of your next-door neighbours are competing with you to sell potatoes and cabbages to the thin line of traffic pootling past your front door.. you're poor.

I'd noticed this occasionally in Bulgaria, but here most of the gardens I see have been turned over to grow vegetables. Potatoes, I'm guessing. And cabbages. Animals are tethered in open ground and on road verges in every village. A manky cow; a pair of goats; a donkey; two horses. There are ducks and an elderly woman wrapped in layer upon layer of cardigans and tights, fussing over a flock of geese. A gooseherd: my first!

Horse-drawn wooden carts.

Women sitting together on rickity benches and discarded kitchen chairs, set back from the road, watching the world motor(cycle) by. This is another first -- and long, long overdue. All those men gathered in cafes and benches across Europe, from Portugal to Italy to Albania to Bulgaria, drinking coffee or more likely guarding a long-finished cup, some playing cards, some chatting, some arguing, some who have clearly said not a word to anyone since 1977. But I have *never* seen, until today, women doing likewise.

I still won't approach them asking if I can take a photograph of them in all their picturesque poverty.

Bonfires everywhere as people burn up the falling leaves. They leave litter everywhere; their houses are in a state; but they get rid of their leaves. The smell is wonderful, and reminiscent to me of my dim and distant past, getting in my Pa's way as he stoked a lingering "bonf" at the bottom of our garden, gettin caught on purpose in the smoke so that his old green gardening jacket and once-were-green gardening cords, and my t-shirt and jeans, our hair and our hands and our very beings, would become infused with the pleasantly harsh tang of burnt leaf.

It's the smell of Doctor Who and Final Score and the Generation Game and toast for tea on a Saturday night in 1973.

That's it. Romania smells of the seventies. Luckily, without a hint of Brut 33.

Constanţa: time to catch up on the site, and my sleep.

Beside the Seaside

In Which It All Smells Like 1973

Comments

Leave your comment

Latest comments