In one corner of the room a small TV broadcasts news and propaganda. Photo albums on the table are full of reminders of happy family gatherings. Some medals are proudly displayed on a shelf, while the drinks cabinet holds treasured bottles of imported brands.
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Our visit to Indochina was only just over two years ago, yet in some ways it feels like a world away. A world barely touched by Covid, in which we didn’t question our ability to travel. Took it for granted, perhaps? Looking back at my photos I wonder why we didn’t realise that the disease already causing deaths and chaos in China would spread to engulf the whole world. Were we like ostriches, our heads in the sand? Or was it such an alien concept that we couldn’t envisage it?
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In the last few years, with the batterings the world has taken – Covid, war in Ukraine, prices spiralling – flowers have been among the constants that have kept many people’s spirits up. The pandemic in particular reminded many of us to value the little pleasures of life, and what gives more pleasure for its size than a flower?
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Sofia may have moved its many communist era monuments to a dedicated museum, but that doesn’t mean that the city is short of interesting public art pieces. And there is quite a variety, from the purely artistic to the historically significant.
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Speaking figuratively, Sofia is not a black and white city. Its history is too complex, its architectural influences too diverse. But like any city it lends itself to black and white photography.
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On Iceland’s beautiful, but dangerous Reynisfjara black lava beach signs warn of the risks of getting too close to the water’s edge where ‘sneaker waves’ have been known to catch out unwary tourists and drag them out to sea. This has to be one of the classic Icelandic landscapes.
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What do you do with a load of monuments that celebrate a past you’d rather forget? You can haul them down and break them up for scrap perhaps. Or you can leave them where they are, a constant reminder of that troubled past. Or you can gather them up and put them in a museum; a museum that acknowledges and documents the past but doesn’t celebrate it.
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It’s no secret that I am a big fan of street art. I don’t mean scrawled graffiti, or even more precisely worked ‘tags’. I mean art. Like many cities today, Sofia offers a dedicated street art tour; we saw signs advertising it in several places. But we chose not to take the tour, instead preferring to seek out street art at our own pace.
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Bulgaria’s capital city intrigues and charms me. It seems to be in a state of constant flux, built on layers of history. One minute you are walking on a Roman road, the next staring up at 1950s Stalinist monoliths. Gold-domed cathedrals and churches dominate the vistas along wide boulevards while in side streets elegant villas sit side-by-side with their crumbling, neglected cousins.
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There is a theme emerging in these monthly round-ups, a theme of bookends! I’ve already pointed out that while July was bookended by happy gatherings of family and friends, August was similarly bookended with funerals. And now we come to September and we are back to happier bookends: city breaks.
