Arriving

Arriving

I arrived today at Sofia. It is a Big journey from Lisbon, reminding me that we, in Portugal, are really at the end of Europe.
I left home at 4.40 am, and arrived at 16 pm, local time, after a 3 hour stop at Munich. There I had a strange experience. Stepping out of the bus that took us to the Airport (from the plane), a policemen came to me, introduce himself, said he was from costumes, and ask me to carry a bag with me. I look at him, I look at his badge and I wondered:
– is this for real???
He then came to explain that they were training costume dogs to catch drugs, and that this will be a test.
Since I was in Germany, and he was doing it in open air, were everybody was seeing, I thought:
- It’s probably real. This is Munich, after all. I’ll have a go at it.
So, he gave me a bag, with the drugs (cocaine he said), and as, I was passing through costumes, this big German Sheppard, after smelling the bag, jumped at me. He was a big fella, and the god thing was that he was soon controlled by his keeper. What an original way to enter a country, I must say..
The German Sheppard passed the test.
After this adventure, and another plane trip, I arrived in Sofia. Freezing. Snow all over the place, showing me that the all the time summer weather we have in Portugal is not shared with the rest of Europe. We are still wearing shorts at home...
I went to the hotel, after being sightseeing with the taxi driver (all the taxi drivers are alike, aren’t they?...), took a shower and went straight to the Council venue.
After asking directions to a non English speaking population (most of the old people don’t speak English), and trying to read the Cyrillic-base signs, I managed to took the tram to the venue, but it the wrong way. Instead of a 5 minutes trip, it took me an hour through traffic, a bus change and a wonderful experience in Sofia transport system at rush hour.
I arrived.