A reservation, not a ticket!

It is fairly easy to buy a ticket in a foreign language. You write down the time of the train, you say the word "ticket" in the local language, and you add the name of the destination. Actually, you can even skip the middle step. If you are at the counter that sells ticket and you say your destination, it will work.

But I don't need to buy a ticket, I need to buy a reservation to complete the ticket I already have (and to know if I have enough cash, or if I need to withdraw money, because they don't take the Visa). Try to explain that in Bulgarian to someone who don't recognize my rail Pass! It can get... interesting.

So, in Plovdiv, after failing to make myself understand at the counter, I went looking for the on-board staff, waiting by the train. I was lucky to find a woman who spoke a few words of English and who recognized my Pass, and who knew what I wanted. So she took me back to the counter and bought my reservation for me.

That is why I was early at the train station.

So, forewarned, and armed with the reservation stub, I thought I had only to show both ticket and reservation at the counter in Varna to get my reservation to Bucharest. Since I arrived from Plovdiv at 13:40 and I intended to take the night train at 23:10 to Bucharest, I had the entire afternoon to take care of my ticket, but I thought prudent to get it before I did anything else.

Well, that was also fun.

I left my backpack at the luggage storage -the nice man spoke a few English words, which helped me afterwards. I went to the ticket counter, where the lady spoke Russian but no English, but understood what I wanted from my ticket because she wrote something on the back of my morning train reservation with great satisfaction.

Have you tried to read handwritten Bulgarian? You know, with the Cyrillic characters? Because the only thing I understood was "#13", which didn't take me far.

So I went to a different counter advertising accommodation for vacationing people, hoping they would speak more English there: the woman knew enough to indicate that it was an address. I got the sudden suspicion that international reservation were to be bought at travelling agencies.

I went back to the nice luggage man, who asked his colleagues about the address, and they called to make sure it was open (Sunday, remember?) and gave me directions to get there. (It was actually 5 min away.) Since I was still at the stage to try and understand what the address was about, I was most grateful to them.

So, having spent the afternoon gazing at the sea, I spent my last money on a sandwich for dinner and boarded my night train.

And that train was another adventure...