I left Sliven at 4:00am, direction Bucharest. A fifteen-hour trip separates me from the Romanian capital, fifteen hours on the uncomfortable trains of the Balkans; first stop Ruse, a city on the border between Romania and Bulgaria, who dwells on the huge Danube river.
After the first three hours the train stops suddenly, waking me up from a deep sleep. It's 7:00 in the morning, from the dirty and dampened window I read "Povelianovo". I'm pushed out of the train by the "gentle" lady of the BDZ staff (name of Bulgaria's state rail company) before even figuring out where I am and what's going on. With my confused look, I soften the heart of a homeless man in the station, and with a mix of English-Bulgarian-French-Italian language, he makes me understand that the train to Ruse usually arrives at 9:00. Two hours of waiting are added to an already disproportionately long journey to reach a city less than two hundred miles from here.
I look around and realize that I have never seen such a desperate landscape. The station is surrounded by smoking factories, gray and menacing, probably shipyards and metallurgical companies. Everything is crumbling, miserable, old. The floor of the station destroyed, the internal rooms abandoned. An automatic coffee machine seems to be the only thing operating here in the Povelianovo station. Even the staff of the station seem to be swallowed by the indifference of the time that has destroyed this place.
Two stray dogs comes to me, imploring food. The sign in cyrillic "Station Café" lies on the ground, submerged by the dust and the plastic spoons delivered by the automatic machine. To pass the time I decide to inspect the perimeter of this implausible station. Old stairs lead me to the back of the station where I found only a small street full of dirty weeds and trash with a stop for the bus that connects the villages closest to this huge giant in decline which is the station. On the horizon the sun glows orange another steaming factory, beginning the daily battle between man and nature.
Tired and frustrated I find the waiting room to repair me from the frigid Bulgarian breeze. The interior of the room is nothing but a smelly and messy little room, full of mosquito, furnished with an iron cabinet and three painted wood benches devoured by thermites. Escaped from that room I decide to sit next to the rails. I start to scrutinize the ceaseless mass of smoke coming from the factory in front of me. I remember "Goodnight, Mr. Lenin," Terzani's book, where the tuscan journalist describes the fall of communism in the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia; I remember his words describing the stench of Communist dictatorship, the smell created by cement, metal, and misery. In Bulgaria, land that I love and who has welcomed me as a child, I am thrilled with this smell. This is a developing state to hear who lives here. So why i can smell just the past of this country? Where is the smell of the future that everyone is talking about?
Everything in the Povelianovo's station seems to have stopped 30 years ago. This place looks like a cynical and ruthless time machine, me one of the few travelers interested to understand a past that is present, but that no longer interests anyone, not even to the Bulgarians themselves. My train arrives, with a delay of four minutes. Another three and a half hours separate me from Ruse, in total i have to travel eight hours more, between trains and waited. I get on the train and from the window I look at a man who begins to paint the gray columns of the station with the colors of the Bulgarian flag, a sad attempt to revitalize this place.
The man dips his brush in red paint, the train is moving. I put my head on the backpack, the train speeds up. I fall asleep in a few seconds.