Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In the event, TSUM wasn't open when I hit the sunny streets, so I walked instead up a long straight
avenue called Vitosha where most of the other main stores seemed to be. None of them were open yet
either, but already long queues were forming at most doors. I had read that things were desperate in
Bulgaria - that people began queuing for milk at four-thirty in the morning, that the price of some staples
had gone up 800 per cent in a year, that the country had $10.8 billion of debt and so little money that there
were only funds enough in the central bank to cover seven minutes' worth of imports - but nothing had
prepared me for the sight of several hundred people queuing around the block just to buy a loaf of bread or
a few ounces of scraggy meat.
When they opened, most shops posted some beefy sour-puss in the doorway who would let the
customers in one at a time. The shelves were always bare. Things were sold straight out of a crate on the
floor by the till, and presumably when the crate was empty the door was locked and the rest of the queue
was sent away. I watched one woman come out of a baker's with a small loaf of bread and immediately join
another long queue at a butcher's next door. They must have to do this every day with everything they buy.
What a life.
It had been nothing like this in 1973. Then the shops had been full of goods, but no one appeared to
have money to buy them. Now everyone was clutching fistfuls of money, but there was nothing to spend it on.
I went into one shop called 1001 CTOK?. There was no orderly queue, just an almost incredible crush
of people around the door. I didn't so much enter of my own volition as get swept in. Inside there was a mob
of people around a single glass display case, waving money and jockeying for attention. All the other cases
in the shop were empty, though there were salespeople still posted behind them. I slid through the crowd to
see what it was the people were so eager to buy and it was just a pathetic assortment of odds and ends -
some plastic cruet sets, twenty long-handled brushes with no identifiable function, some small glass
ashtrays, and an assortment of tin-foil plates and pie dishes such as you get free in the West when you buy
something to heat in the oven.
Clearly people weren't shopping so much as scavenging for purchasable goods. Again and again, as I
ventured up Vitosha, I would peer into the impenetrable gloom of shop windows and discover after a
moment that I had attracted a small crowd looking over my shoulder to see what I had spotted. But there
was nothing to spot. One electrical shop I passed had three Russian hi-fi systems, two stereo and one
mono (when was the last time you saw a mono hi-fi?), but they all had knobs missing and didn't look as if
they would last five minutes.
Another shop sold nothing but two kinds of tins - yellow tins and green tins, stacked in their hundreds in
neat pyramids on every shelf. It was the only well-stocked shop I saw all day. I have no idea what was in the
tins - the labels gave no hint - but I can only assume that it must have been pretty dire or they would have
sold out long ago. It was the most depressing morning I have spent in a long time.
I went to TSUM fearing the worst and found it. Whole departments were stripped bare, including my
beloved TV section. The premier department store in the country couldn't offer its customers a single
television, radio or other electrical item. In some departments three salespeople stood by a till with nothing
to sell but perhaps a small stack of tea towels, but elsewhere there would be a lone desperate salesgirl
trying to deal with throngs of people because a shipment of something desirable had just come in. At one
counter on the third floor a big cardboard box full of socks had just arrived - hundreds and hundreds of
socks, all an identical mustard-brown colour, all in thin cotton in the same size and all in bundles of a dozen
- and people were buying double armloads of them. I suppose you buy what you can and think about what
you are going to do with it afterwards - give some to your father-in-law for Christmas, swap some for a hunk
of meat, reward a neighbour for queuing for you.
The saddest department was the toys - one shelf full of identical, ineffably cuddly teddy bears made out
of synthetic wool, two dozen identical plastic toy trucks with bowed wheels and peeling, crooked labels, and
fourteen metal tricycles all painted the same shade of blue and every one of them scraped or bashed in
some way.
On the top two floors were whole departments full of boxes of unidentifiable odds and ends. If you have
ever taken apart some mechanical contraption - a doorbell or a washing-machine motor - and had it all
spring loose on you and 150 mysterious pieces have gone bouncing in every direction, well, those pieces
