To Bulgaria, again!

After a more or less sleepless night the alarm went off at 3:30am and the wife and I set off for Gatwick just gone 4. No mad taxi-drivers skipping roundabouts with cement mixers this time, just me at the wheel of the Prius pootling along gently to the North Terminal. Difficult-Jet must have known that I had paid for Speedy Check in and Boarding as the queues for standard check in were a mere fraction of what they were in June. Even so, I don’t regret paying the extra for a moment, check in taking 5 minutes or so and leaving plenty of time for the cavity checks from Security and a latte and Apricot Danish from a restaurant.

The flight was on time and uneventful, I was met at Sofia by one of the same organizers who ran the competition in Bourgas and greeted as a long lost friend, a bit later by a couple more people in the same fashion. The Bulgarians are very friendly albeit that a degree of curiosity about their country helps to grease the conversation. After a quick coffee and half an hour animatedly discussing how to load the car with €20k of recording kit we set off for the local restaurant for lunch. This not being an establishment in the touristy part of Sofia (which certainly has some fine buildings that I would like to look at more closely) the menu was all in the Cyrillic alphabet and therefore completely unintelligible. I was asked if I liked salad, garlic bread and chicken, I reluctantly admitted a partiality to all these so lunch was ordered. When it arrived I was shocked and stunned to find that I was the only one eating! The others were just having coffee! I overcame my embarrassment and enjoyed my lunch (no surprise there then).

On to the airport to pickup an Argentinian conductor who was arriving on Al Italia from Rome. He expressed no surprise and little frustration that the airline had lost his bag. He entertained us with stories of how the Italian cabin crew behaved on the flight (very badly) and though of Italian descent himself, how amusing he found the stereotypical Italian behaviour. The four of us, two Bulgarians, the Argentinian and myself had a wide ranging discussion in the four hour car journey to Ruse. We covered recent Bulgarian history, how people in general are nostalgic for the Communist era and disillusioned with democracy, the Falklands (sorry Malvinas!) war, and the origin of the English word posh. The Argentinian and I also had some interesting technical discussions on conducting, he is here for Mahler 2 which he has memorized, a substantial achievement! I was pleased to find that he admires Sibelius 7 as a feat of composition as much as I do. He has recently got married, and following the master-class will be going on his honeymoon. He has married a soprano and enjoyed my favourite soprano joke although I did have to explain it. How many sopranos does it take to screw in a light bulb - only one, but there will be twenty others demanding to know why they were not asked. I assure you that if you deal with singers of classical music this is hysterical.

Eventually on to Ruse and the hotel, which is fine. I had the usual battles trying to attach to the hotel Wi-Fi, it worked eventually but I have no idea what I did to finally persuade it to attach. Patience is often the key virtue with computers. I then spent some time watching the DVD of my conducting in Burgas, more on that subject later.