The JaYmes Escape

“An excellent choice sir”, said the waiter, using an English phrase he’d probably picked up from some film*.

I’m sitting in Moskva (”Moscow”), an upmarket Russian restaurant in central Sofia, with my mother and Ray. The carpet is thick, the tablecloths are immaculate and the elaborate chandeliers hang from a pristine white ceiling with gold trimmings topping the deep maroon walls. We’ve all just enjoyed a traditional Russian meal of various dishes including lapsha (chicken noodle soup, pelmeni (stuffed pasta) and chicken kiev complemented by some excellent Bulgarian merlot, plus some fabulous live entertainment from a pianist/vocalist and violinist playing everything from Russian classic to Russian folk.

The waiter, whose precise nationality is uncertain, has been decidedly surly all evening, but this may just be part of the authentic Russian experience. However, his opinion of us seems to be enhanced considerably when we decide to finish the meal off with my favourite vodka. The waiting team swarm around us with frozen shot glasses and from a great height pour in the 50ml shots of frozen Nemiroff, fresh from the Ukraine. This establishment knows how to dispense the stuff properly.

*If you can name the film, put it in a comment below. For the first correct answer I’ll buy a shot of Nemiroff.

The Bulgarian waitress shakes her head. It takes me a few moments to remember that here, this means yes.She is going to get us another beer. I’m sitting in Angelina’s restaurant in the Bulgarian mountain town of Etropole. Yesterday, under a hot Bulgarian sun sitting in a crystal sky, my cousin Michael married his beautiful bride Millena in a tiny chapel in the nearby village of Boikovets.

The orthodox minister chanted in Bulgarian, with Millena’s mother Mariana occasionally chipping in with English translations, a role she reprised several times during the day as everything down to the speeches are carefully translated into the other language. It was a day Pimms and local wine, of Bulgarian dancers and late night disco, of wedding cake and shopska salad. A truly bilingual, bi-cultural wedding unlike any other.

Tonight, the two waitresses in Angelina’s have been running around all evening catering to our every whim, but as we prepare to leave they are incredibly happy. Our party of 24 eating tonight have rounded up the bill giving them a tip of around £50 (US$100) between them, a small fortune by local standards.

“We want to escape the cigarette smugglers”, the young Norwegian girl says to me, worriedly. Her friend, a Polish girl, says that they study together in Italy and explains that she can understand about 30% of what the people in her compartment are saying because Serbian and Polish are similar.

“They are worried about getting caught”, she says, “very worried. And I don’t want to be in there if they do”.

I’m on the train from Belgrade to Sofia, which has been running slowly and stopping for the whole day with no apparent reason, and is now something like two hours late. It’s looking like I’m going to miss the last bus to Etropole, the small town in the Bulgarian mountains where my cousin is getting married in two days’ time, and might end up staying the night in Sofia or doing the two hour journey in a taxi.

I’d seen the dodgy looking men with rather too many bags with rather too many right angles protruding from them, but it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would want to smuggle cigarettes from Serbia into Bulgaria. I can’t imagine them being anything but incredibly cheap in both countries, but they must be doing it for some reason. The train staff and even the Serbian police appeared at one stage to get in on the deal, and the dodgy looking bags were spirited away as we approached the border; presumably to be hidden somewhere discreet in the depths of the train.

As we trundle across the frontier towards the Bulgarian customs post the train is clearly home to a number of highly agitated people. The men in uniform board, check passports and poke around suspiciously in various bags. They know something is going on but can’t seem to find anything. When the train eventually pulls away the relief is apparent; beers are opened and celebrations ensue. Pity I’m still not going to make that bus.

“Ask that man if you can stroke his hedgehog”, chuckled Sarah. She and her friend Becci are music teachers from Stourbridge, and we’re sitting in the midst of the Belgrade beer festival with Paddy from Melbourne.

For reasons that will always be a mystery to us, a local character is carrying a hedgehog around the rows of makeshift bars and bustling tables. Actually, ‘makeshift’ is doing them a disservice; the local brewers have clearly gone to town with their illuminated giant inflatable beer bottles and enormous branded banners. This is not the kind of festival to attract connoisseurs of rare ales so much as a free rock concert geared up to sell as much of the stuff as humanly possible.

As the dubious Serbian rock music booms out here below the walls of the historic Belgrade castle, at the point where the river Sava meets the mighty Danube, the bizarre man stops to entertain us, or perhaps to be entertained by us. Becci does indeed get to stroke his hedgehog.

“Nye, nye Pivo”, the Serbian barman says to me resignedly, before continuing in English, “Would you like something else? Brandy? Wine?”

I’m surprised. The train has run out of beer, and despite the heavy night in Munich, ten hours of travel has left me hankering for refreshment.

“Vodka?”, I reply hopefully, and the man nods and heads for the fridge. The train is now in Croatia, the fourth country of the day. It all started at 0726 in Munich with the journey heading south through the beautiful Austrian Alps where I struck up conversations with students heading home; an Austrian to Vienna and a young Serbian bound for Belgrade after her first ever trip to Western Europe. Then there were the Japanese girls en route to Dubrovnik.

The restaurant-bar was coupled on after we emerged from the Alpine tunnel that connects Austria and Slovenia, but it was the Croatian hordes who boarded in Zagreb that seem to have consumed all the beer. Maybe it was something to do with the burgeoning temperatures.

As I sip my rather disappointing (but astonishingly cheap) Serbian vodka it starts to get dark and I chat to a gynaecologist on her way home to her family in Serbia from her job in Ljubljana. As we approach the final frontier of the day I begin to wait impatiently for this pento-national, fifteen hour ride to finally conclude.