PART XI – The Shaken, Not Stirred Apparition
As I arrived in Sofia there was a girl from the Bulgarian offices of my company waiting for me. I wasn’t able to determinate whether she was happy or annoyed to skip a day of work to accompany a Brazilian-Japanese from Romania in his quest for a visa.
After doing some currency exchange, we took a cab to the Romanian Embassy, which by the way, is located on Mihai Eminescu avenue… I wonder how much spaga changed hands for that.
We enter the embassy and ask for our inside string and are informed that he’s out for the moment but will be back in an hour. There’s a café behind the embassy so we decided to go there for a coffee while we wait.
We took a table and ordered coffee and I noticed that in the table in front of ours was a man in his 50s, mostly bald with grey moustache and goatee and wearing an olive green military style jacket.
I was wondering whether he was a retired general when the front door opens and in comes a tall man, black hair, sharp black suit. I almost could hear the James Bond theme playing in the background. And I couldn’t believe when he shook hands with the retired general and sat down at the same table and started to talk to him.
I was in disbelief. I didn’t know if I should laugh or just let my jaw drop. I was trying to decide when the ex-general reaches down, grabs a briefcase, opens it extracts a brown envelop with a logo on it (SPECTRE, perhaps?) and handles it to the Bond-like man.
I decided to let my jaw drop while wondering if that was maybe an on-location film set and started looking around for a camera crew filming the latest Bond movie or perhaps one of those hidden camera programs playing a prank on unsuspecting people.
Nope, no camera crew around.
Is this some sort of show they put on for tourists? Nah. That was just a small café in a back corner of Sofia… Not many tourists here.
Maybe a prank by the people of the company? I look at the girl who’s accompanying me. She was sipping her cappuccino and looking out through the window. No. No one in the company has that kind of imagination and wit…
As I was immerse in these thoughts the men stand up, shake hands and the Bond-like man leaves.
I wanted to follow him to see if he drives away in an Aston Martin but I was half afraid of looking ridiculous for doing so and half afraid of being shot by henchmen. So I just continued to sip my coffee, smiling and shaking my head in disbelief.
After an hour we went back to the embassy.
I met our inside man, gave him my passport and all the papers. He flicked through them and put a stamp in my passport for a work permit visa and that was it. And I wondered why this time I didn’t have to go back to Romania and come back here after a month to receive the visa. But I didn’t ask, in case he had just forgotten and gave me the visa by mistake. So that was it.
The company girl took me to the railway station and I invited her for lunch, which she accepted. We had lunch while I told her the joys of traveling in cryogenic trains and other adventures in my quests for Romanian visas and she tried to convince me quite hard that what we’ve seen is not the nicest parts of Sofia and she begged me not to judge Sofia from what I’ve seen.
After lunch I told her that she doesn’t have to stay with me until my departure, which would be in the evening, and told her she can go do whatever she had to do. I hope she didn’t go back to work and just took the rest of the day off. And I hope she found carrying this unusual geek around Sofia less unpleasant than her average day at work.
She missed the whole Bond episode though.
The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful.
I had my visa and I was going home.
I decided to get a ticket in a sleeping car. At least, if there’s no heat I will have a blanket.
There was heat though. Too much, actually.
As usual, on CFR trains the heaters are binary. They are either on at maximum or completely off. 1 or 0.
But I preferred lightly cooked than totally frozen this time.
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