When, in March 2006, I got on a plane from Sydney to Manila, the Philippines, on my way to Sofia, I was certain that Sydney and I had wrapped up our 6-year relationship.
Not that there was anything wrong with Australia – quite the opposite. I love it with all my heart! I've always said it and I'll always say it again – it is the very, very, very best country in the world. I have the confidence and the experience to claim this, since I've travelled round a good chunk of the world in question.
In Australia everything is sorted, the nature is unbelievable, and the people are incredibly positive and friendly.
The only exception to Australians' behaviour has been when I'm entering their country. Because the authorities want to keep the flora of their island in its original state, one of the strictest rules is that you mustn't bring in any fruit, flowers, seeds and so on. Once my student visa was nearly cancelled because, on arrival, I'd forgotten a little packet of roasted salted sunflower seeds in my jacket pocket. It was left over from a gossipy stroll with my mother back in Sofia.
So on one of my entries into the country in 2000, while I was waiting for passport control, an enormous dog lunged at me and knocked me over. Border guards came over and started frisking me while I was still flat on the floor. You'd think I was carrying a whole kilo of cocaine. Once we found the seeds, the dog calmed down, but the border guards didn't. A whole squad of officers lectured my 20-year-old self about how I wanted to compromise their country by sowing my ROASTED seeds in their soil, so that they'd go and sprout and wreck their bio-balance. Good thing they caught me and foiled my sinister schemes!
Apart from this one small unpleasant quirk, everything in Australia is top-notch and always has been. But back in the distant year of 2006, I was in a phase when my personal life mattered most, and I went back to Bulgaria for personal reasons. And shortly after that I met my biggest personal reason of all – Emo – and so I stayed here.
For the whole period from 2006 until now, I hadn't given Sydney a single thought, at least not on a conscious level. But at the same time, Sydney wouldn't leave my dreams. Very often I dream that I'm popping over to Sydney to get something done. But I don't know what. And before I know it, I'm already on my way back, wondering what I came for again and whether I did what I was supposed to. Basically, a feeling of unfinished business. And that's been going on for almost 20 years now. The same thing over and over.
Against this backdrop, when I found out last year that Zori had qualified for the World Masters Marathon Championship in Sydney, I got as excited as if it were about me. As if I'd qualified. Which, as it turned out a few months later, I really had.
Nothing, nothing could cloud my joy at the fact that I'd be running the Sydney Marathon, and as a competitor in a world championship, no less. Not the fact that I'd been invited "as a charity case", since the qualifying time for 40–44-year-olds is 3:05 and mine is 3:13. Not the more worrying fact that the course has a brutal 317 m of climbing. What matters is that I'm going back to Sydney. Maybe with this marathon I'll finally finish the unfinished business that's been tormenting my subconscious, and my Sydney dreams will stop.
Fast forward to the moment I climb stiffly off the plane at Kingsford Smith airport. I'd forgotten how horrible it is to travel for over 24 hours in Economy.
While I'm waiting to get through passport control, memories of dogs, border guards and lectures on biodiversity for foreigners float up from the depths of my memory and put me on edge.
A uniformed woman tells me to put my passport on the automated control machine. The machine would print me a card, and with that card I could walk straight into the country, unbothered.
This strikes me as too good to be true.
"I'm not Australian, though." When I tell her I'm Bulgarian, she opens a list – and nods at me – it applies to Bulgarians too. Well, well, would you look at the doors this European Union opens.
Twenty years ago I used to queue at the "other passports" desk, squeezed in between turbans, headwraps and curry fumes, and look at me now!
On trembling legs I go through to baggage inspection. A guy who looks like Mr October from the Australian firefighters' calendar smiles at me.
"Welcome to beautiful Australia," he glances at my card and looks at me again with a smile, adding, "Nia!" Hmm, how sweetly my name rang out when he said it.
For once in my life I actually fancy an Australian border guard giving me a good thorough search, and look at this laziness. Just walk straight into his beautiful country, apparently.
On the plane I'd read that it's forbidden to bring soil into the country too, so we should wipe our shoes properly of any foreign MUD before setting foot on the continent. I'm on the verge of asking Mr October to check together whether I might have brought in a bit of illegal Bulgarian mud on my MetaSpeed Edge trainers, just so we can chat a bit longer, but reason prevails.
Sasho is waiting for me at the airport and drives me to his place. Their home is enormous, over 700 sq m, and they're selling it at the moment. I was super impressed by the practices of the local estate agents.
To sell a property at a better price, they do what's called staging, or in other words – they doll it up for prospective buyers. A bit like girls putting filters on their photos. That way they've already hooked the candidates and fired up their imagination, and by the time it comes to reality, the would-be buyers have already invested in the property emotionally. And once a human being has invested emotions, dreams and time in the idealised idea of something or someone, they've latched on to it and are then inclined to accept you (whether you're a property or a person), blind to what you're really like.
So the staging procedure goes like this: the agent throws out all the old/neglected furniture and furnishes the whole house with furniture and accessories that do the rounds – they belong to the estate agency that has taken on putting the house on the market.
Tables, chairs, curtains, armchairs, sofas, everything!
The house starts to look like a Hollywood home. The bad thing is that you can't sit on other people's stuff, eat on it and so on. Here's my little room:
Because viewings with potential buyers are held on Wednesdays and Saturdays, I sleep in my bed illegally, and on Saturday I restore it to the state it's in in the photo. The owners have moved out of the house, officially nobody lives in it, and I'm inhabiting it incognito. Over one month, the buyers who have expressed interest are gathered and an official auction is organised. Once the house is sold, the agent takes back the travelling furnishings and installs them in the next home for sale.
But the biggest difference is how relaxed people are. Nobody here locks their home. When I went out for a run, I asked Sasho what we'd do about the key, and he told me, "Well, just don't lock it, nobody locks up here."
On Friday the 13th of Sept, I woke up a bit late, around 09:00; Sasho had already gone to work. My original plan was to go for a walk along the incredibly beautiful Coogee–Bondi route. But the weather was gloomy and windy and generally not inviting for outdoor activities. I made myself a coffee and stayed in my warm little bed writing blog posts! This is the life!
Living the life, all right, but all of a sudden Sasho burst into my room with a super angry expression. I'd never seen him like that.
"WTF!!!!!!" he erupted. "Didn't you hear or see anything???"
"Hear what and see what?"
He gestures for me to look out of the window. Below it, two cars have collided – his pickup has crashed into the back of his business partner's brand-new car. All of this happened without anyone in either car. Or at least not anyone we know.
Sasho's pickup had been parked in his garage, the roller door of the garage had been pulled all the way down, and Sasho himself had told his partner Michael to park in front of his garage.
After that the two of them went off together to do some work. Meanwhile, in the country where nobody locks their houses because crime is zero, someone got into the house. They raised the garage roller door, got into Sasho's pickup, reversed down the slope and rammed Michael's car, whose entire rear end is now a write-off.
And all of this happened right under my absent-minded nose, while I was peacefully in my room writing a blog post about Hristina Tusheva. In a moment of supreme blogging concentration, I'd stayed deaf to the almighty crash of the collision. But that's how we are, we artistic souls.
Michael, the owner of the disfigured car, is super calm. He's leaning against the garage wall telling me about his relationship with his ex-wife and his sons, as if nothing has happened.
I think of how Emo's temperature goes up over a single scratch on his car. I imagine what would have happened to me in Bulgaria if someone, right under my nose, had gone and savagely smashed Emo's Mazda, and not only had I not prevented the crime, I hadn't even noticed it, because I'd been "pecking at my laptop" again.
Well, I suppose a big part of Michael's calm is down to the fact that, literally 5 minutes later, the insurance company had already brought him a brand-new car.
I, however, in my role as the only person in the house at the time of the incident, become the prime suspect too, even though I have no motive whatsoever to stage a crash between two cars that aren't mine. We call the police to investigate the case and take my fingerprints.
I find this super funny and tell my friends in Bulgaria about it. My pal Kiro, albeit jokingly, pours cold water on my adventurous enthusiasm: "While they're processing your fingerprints, they won't go and ban you from running the marathon, will they?"
Emo is even more optimistic and reckons that while they're processing my fingerprints they'll keep me here and won't let me go back to Bulgaria!
Dream on, Emo!
The police never came. Clearly they were busy with more important criminal deeds than "mine". Although in this country, where crime is so thin on the ground that nobody locks their houses, I don't know what exactly they fill their days with. They can't even be bothered to frisk the veteran ladies at the airport for possible smuggling of illegal roasted seeds or mud. Slackers!
One day to go until the Big Event. Saturday, the day before the marathon, Sasho and I do our last easy run at one of the countless Australian 5kmruns.
Before the start of the 5kmrun in South Park, they call up the newcomers to give them a briefing. In Sydney, on the other hand, before the start we collectively apologise to the Aboriginal people for trampling their land, which we unlawfully took from them. Sasho, next to me, eye-rolls; he's not big on political correctness. I nudge him.
We set off on the 5kmrun. Literally every 200 m there's a volunteer reminding us, "safety first", "your safety is our utmost priority", "mind your step", "watch your step", "the municipality is reminding you to mind your step", "it is the local council advice to run mindfully"…. Sasho is rolling his eyes again: "Why do they keep repeating the same thing, look at these morons, as soon as I sell my house I'm off back to Bulgaria for good."
Here I'm actually inclined to agree with him; one "watch where you step" is, in my view, more than enough.
But that's how it is in well-run countries, I remind myself once again that I'm not the product of one.
And it turns out that even the best-run country in the world can't guarantee favourable weather conditions for its marathon. In 2023, 34-degree heat cost several people their lives, and this year the Australian early spring had prepared a new surprise for us.
The evening before the marathon I'm in my room trying to ignore the sound of the stormy wind outside, roaring in waves. Being well aware of the dramas my brain is capable of when it's wound up before a race, I'm hoping the situation just seems exaggerated to me.
Sasho, however, confirms my fears:
"Come here, come and listen to tomorrow's forecast on the telly."
"I don't want to listen to it!"
"Well….. better to be prepared."
The newsreader informed us that tomorrow a very strong wind warning had been issued for Sydney, with gusts of up to 60 km/h. Citizens are advised to avoid going out unless it's an emergency. But the weather report ended on an optimistic note:
"Just make it through tomorrow, Sydney, from Monday on it will be all clear blue skies for us".
In other words, it'll only be windy tomorrow for the marathon; from Monday onwards everything will be lovely.
I only managed to swallow this dramatic news thanks to the research of Ani Vancheva, on whose virtual shoulder, of course, I managed to lean. Not that she could stop the winds, but she could certainly come up with some kind of magic to calm me down. Which, of course, is exactly what happened.
After I called her on Messenger and traumatised her with the pitiful sight of me simultaneously stuffing my mouth with pasta and crying, she first tried to calm me down with the banal:
"Don't worry, there are far, far worse things in this world than a bit of wind….."
Even though I agree that this is true, I carried on worrying. I closed the chat even more upset. If even Vancheva can't come up with anything other than "the important thing is that we're alive and well", things are beyond saving. Just 5 minutes later, though, Ani rang with wonderful news. She'd thought and thought and come up with the following reassurance:
"Hang on, you won't have any problems at all tomorrow. The winds will be strongest in the afternoon, when they'll be 58 km/h. And in the morning, while you're running, they'll be between 20–35 km/h. Piece of cake!"
"Tell me you're not lying to me."
"I'm not lying to you, come on – here are the screenshots." Ani sends them over.
How would I have got through this life if I'd never met her? She always works out how to calm me down…
Lots of other people also went to tremendous lengths to cheer me up from my personal wind drama – Emo, Zori, Militsa, Acho, Ogi… everyone tried to calm me down, heartfelt thanks.
I went to bed shivering with cold, warmed only by Vancheva's screenshots. I trembled in equal measure at every sinister gust of wind outside and at the thought that in just 5 hours I'd have to get up and, in that darkness and cold and IN SHORTS, make my way to the start. I'd already decided I'd run in a windbreaker, but my long tights had no pockets for the 8 gels I had to get through while running.
There was no more desperate creature than me, screwing my eyes shut in bed, trying to fall asleep. I had to get up at 4.00.
Click here for the sequel:
https://zabavnotosemeistvo.com/sydney-i-love-you-chast-2-maratonat/
