I had had an (unintentional) early night, back in my tiny hotel room. I had intended to have a nap and ended up asleep for thirteen hours. I must have needed it, but I felt just about ready to face the day after I showered in a cubicle-type room that also contained a loo, no partition between the two. Very odd. One sensed that the proprietor was cutting costs.
Today was colder, but momentum kept me going, revisiting some of the haunts of yesterday. The splendidly Ruritanian presidential guard still semi-goose-stepping and getting it slightly, comically wrong; the parliament which looked like one of those presents that Stalin was fond of foisting on his satellite regimes- a faint hammer and sickle could still be discerned; the little church in the shopping centre which contained early Thracian graves in the basement.
I haven't been to many operas and this was my first Carmen, but I would say that it was a very traditional production. I had printed off a synopsis from the internet and stopped myself from reading the final couple of lines, just to preseve some mystery, although I suspected, not unreasonably, that violent death and unrequited love would play at least a part in the denoument.
I did enjoy it very much, though. The central prop was a bridge on a rotating stage that managed to appear wherever the action took place- in the town, outside the cigarette factory, at the bull ring, up a mountain. Members of the chorus wandered across it like extras rhubarbing in Crossroads, and the costumes reminded me of those ghastly dolls sold in Spanish holiday resorts. Jose was, I feel the better performer- I got it into my head that Carmen resembled a young Elsie Tanner, and I couldn't quite take her seriously after that.
A little culture, in whatever form, to end the holiday is no bad thing. I walked through the tidy centre of town towards the station, shamefacedly spent a few final leva at KFC, and made another in a long series of farewells to another country.
