The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Now I know what true wanderlust is
After learning so much about it from her lockdown buddy, Anna Hart can’t wait to visit Bulgaria
One year ago, I did not expect to find myself today in a compulsorily cloistered co-dependent friendship with a Bulgarian chef. But I also wouldn’t have believed that Margate’s theme park, Dreamland (already a solidly dystopian apparition, admittedly) would be converted into a pandemic test site, that I’d willingly pay £7 for William Morris face coverings in the V&A shop, or that I’d neglect my highlights so grievously. I wouldn’t have believed any of it. I’d have laughed at you like you were a lunatic, and gone back to reading something realistic, like my horoscope.
Aleksandar moved from east London to Margate in March, days before the first lockdown, at the same time I returned from an aborted trip across America. We met online at a Zoom quiz hosted by a neighbour during the first lockdown, and we became fast friends in real-life Margate over those giddy summer months of sun-kissed freedom. This latest lockdown, as two adults living alone in small flats yards from each other, we formed a support bubble. So we’re stuck together like glue, an odd little commune of two, a dazzlingly unsuccessful cult, charged with keeping each other semi-sane and alive.
This translates into pestering each other to go on long walks, making sure neither of us drinks alone (drinking together watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, naturally, is entirely wholesome) and texting each other memes or music videos or fascinating facts about archaeological digs. We take these seemingly trivial duties seriously, to distract the other from fretting about family members and feeling despondent about endless professional “pivoting” and spluttering and halting work prospects.
Our bubble also operates as an educational exchange programme, our very own post-Brexit version of Erasmus. Aleksandar is being fed episodes of Father Ted and bowls of Irish stew as part of his Irish cultural immersion. And I’m developing a powerful yearning to visit this Bulgaria place that I hear about, ooh, 40 times a day. I’ve been shown pictures of Sinanitsa in the Pirin Mountains, and I’m already daydreaming about the hut there that serves Pirinsko lager and meatballs (kufteta). We had a Bulgarian wine tasting, “helping” Aleks put together the wine list for his new restaurant, Primitivni (tomthumbtheatre.co. uk), that will open in Margate as soon as it’s legal. So I’m keen to visit Via Antica, its Wild Syrah my new favourite red. I want to visit Black Sea beach towns such as Sozopol, and dance at Lost Gipsy Land music festival in Stara Planina, and take part in the rose harvest at the Kazanlak Rose Festival (roseoverdose.com). I’ve
watched darkly humorous films such as Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat, and a stage production of Dobri Popov Voynikov’s satirical 1873 play, The Misunderstood Civilisation, on YouTube. I can sing along to pop-folk superstars Ivana and Azis. I’m even learning some basic Bulgarian, mainly from chalga (pop-folk) hits, useful phrases such as, “When I fight, it is with the power of a pitbull,” and “Pour me some love, champagne and tears we’ll drink all life long.” I cannot wait to debut my splendid new vocabulary in Bulgaria! Aleksandar won’t be able to leave me alone for five minutes without me getting into a fight or a torrid affair. It will make our tour of the country’s Byzantine monasteries and opera houses all the more thrilling.
It’s been an interesting exercise, feeling my curiosity about the Balkan region grow slowly, because I come from a generation with a smash-and-grab approach to travel, propelled to places on the spur of the moment by an affordable rate at a snazzy new hotel or a fashion editor’s Instagram pics. I’ve shown up in some destinations unable to say “hello”, let alone well-versed in local history.
My parents travelled differently. When my dad, Ian, a Presbyterian vicar, walked us around Ephesus on a family holiday to Izmir, he knew all the stories told by these “old stones” (family lingo for Dad’s interest in archaeology) and could translate every inscription. Everywhere my parents took us, they knew about, they had longed to visit for some time, and they’d learned some of the language. And now I can see the merits of this older way of travelling, of slow-burn wanderlust. Because as I try to make Aleks listen to Ulysses and he explains to me the difference between dolma and sarma, it feels like the start of a journey. It might be a few months before I visit Bulgaria, but I’m already on my way.