Decisions, decisions...

I am leaving Sofia. I can't take being apart from my family any more, especially when my little girl keeps crying when we do our nightly MSN video calls.

So, the plan is to get a job back in the UK and head home. Much as I like Sofia, it doesn't have enough to keep me from missing those who I love. I'm not sporty enough to get in with the football-playing crowd, and I'm not enough of a drinker to spend all day sitting in Irish bars.

I feel pretty wretched about it because I've made a commitment to a company (albeit on a freelance basis), and now I'm letting them down. The company seem a reasonably decent bunch, as companies go. I seem destined never to find the perfect job in the perfect location; it's always one or the other. Maybe I will just have to accept this and make a balanced judgement.

And as I keep getting told: I have to stop running. After leaving a company I spent seven years with in 1999, I have spent the best part of a decade trying to find the perfect job in the perfect place, and have spent no more than two years in any one place. I think the average is probably six to nine months, because I've been freelancing for a lot of it. It's starting to look bad on the CV.

I think I just need more from my career. I hate being stuck in open-plan offices, having to wear ties, pretending to be interested in a Matrix-like stream of numbers on a screen. I despise the whole rat race, the Protestant Work Ethic, the Office Politics and the soul-crushing, life-draining regimes and conventions that we have created for ourselves. While, I hate to sound precious, I know that I'm a creative person. Quantity Surveying doesn't really cut it on the creative side of things, in my experience. 18 years of it is enough experience to validate that view, I think.

So, my plan is, to find steady work that pays for me and the family to live. At the same time, I intend to enrol onto a Creative Writing course, which I will do in my spare time. It will stimulate me and help me improve my writing skills. If I get good and get lucky, maybe I can start earning some money from it. If I'm really lucky, I can mix careers. But one step at a time. Ambition is the last refuge of failure, if you take Oscar Wilde at his word.

What is my ambition, though? A shit-load of money? A huge house with a Bentley parked in the garage? No. I have lost interest in conspicuous consumption and crass consumerism. I don't buy into this whole Keep Up With And Ahead of The Joneses culture. I don't care if that makes me a loser, or an outsider. I've been along the road of buying pointless gadgets and nice sofas and flashy cars, and it didn't make me feel better for longer than a few minutes. It just got me into debt. It was like a drug. And I made myself ill with the cycle of stress and junk food that helped me through it. Nowadays I feel numb when I go to large shopping centres or watch commercials on TV. I've started going cold turkey and I let it all wash over me. I don't need the latest mp3 player, the fastest computer, the best games console or the sexiest mobile phone. In fact, I don't need a mobile phone. Mobile phones epitomise the modern world for me. They sell the notion of personal freedom, but are really just the lock and key on our cages.

My ambition is to be happy. I'm coming to realise that a life free of all the bullshit I've just talked about can be a happy one. When we break it down to what we really, really need, it isn't a lot. Air; food; water; shelter; heat. On top of these fundamental things we need companionship, friendship and love, and that doesn't cost anything. If only we could all be satisfied with this...maybe the world would be a better place. I don't know; I'm starting to sound like a hippy now, but it's really what I believe, or coming round to thinking. I don't pretend to understand human nature. It pleasantly surprises me and infuriates me in equal measure. Sometimes I'm optimistic about the future; at other times I wish an asteroid would do the Universe a favour.

But there we go. Writing. I've always wanted to write. I wrote a complete book as a young teenager, and wrote many ludicrous B-movie Sci-fi stories as a child. Maybe I can develop as a writer and learn how to plot and build characters and tell great stories that entertain and provoke. I am musical as well (especially after a curry, the wife says), and can hold a tune, but I'm probably too old to harbour ambitions of rock stardom now, and singing in clubland has never really appealed to me. Then again, I could combine the writing and the music, and maybe eke out a living...?

This has turned into a lengthy, self-indulgent soliloquy. I think I'm just writing it down to make sure it doesn't sound completely - rather than faintly - ridiculous, and get a few things off my chest at the same time. Therapeutic. That's what they call it these days.

It's been fun. And I promise: I'll be back, in one medium or another. Whether you like it or not.

Lovely beer and cheap women.

Everyone has preconceptions about places. Sofia - and Bulgaria - are no exception. Talk to anyone who hasn't been there and they will immediately tell you it's full of amazingly beautiful ladies and ridiculously-priced beer. And not much else. As is the case with a good deal preconceptions about places, they are right to an extent, but don't tell the whole story. There is a lot more to Sofia than jaw-droppingly gorgeous bee-hatches (apologies to any feminites reading) and beer that is so cheap you feel like you're being toyed with by wily foreign bar-people. No, there are buildings too, and trees and roads and cars and trams and lots of other things. Women and beer are very nice in their own ways, but one could tire of nothing but these two objects of desire to look at and drink. Well, some of us could.

Sofia is, for want of a better cliché, a place of contrasts. I know that a lot of places are, and I said the same about Dubai, but here, it is a different set of contrasts. I suppose it's more shades than contrasts. The contrasts aren't as marked as in the Middle East; things blend together to tell a story of a country with a turbulent political history and a recent transition from a stony-faced but stoic communist regime to a slightly inebriated merriness under a more democratic and Westernised rulership. I mean inebriated in the good, mellow and happy sense rather the lager-lout, aggressive sense.

A walk around the city centre on a sunny summer's day is a real treat for the senses. Wide, tree-lined boulevards stretch for miles towards the main political and cultural centres. Trams jingle along these roads, stopping regularly to pick up or drop off passengers. Pristine, intricately-architectured theatres, galleries and museums painted in bold colours stand proudly on corners or at the entrance to lush gardens. Ornate Orthodox churches scatter the sun's rays on their high, golden domes. Street cafés crowd the pavements with tables and parasols. Music floats to your ears from the various buskers dotted around; sometimes a guitar, sometimes a trumpet or a violin.

As you walk, you notice the people around you: from the afore-mentioned stunning women in expensive-looking clothes, to the long-haired male lovers of Rock, to the old, almost doubled-over ladies with little walking sticks, inching their way along the street, like Yoda with a shopping bag. Here and there you notice the slightly darker countenance of Romany gypsies; some begging from the passing throng, some picking through bins.

As you turn the corner and walk away from the main boulevards, you come into much narrower streets and alleys, often pocked with pot-holes the size of small cars. Many still have trees, but they don't do a good job of hiding the state of the buildings. On the side streets, away from the main thoroughfares, they are almost all of the same yellowy-brown hue, like the colour of ceiling tiles in a Northern working men's club. Graffiti seems to cover every spare inch up to about head height, and the pavements are often in a shocking state, with random collections of oddly-shaped paving slabs jutting up at all angles, as if Godzilla had recently jogged down the street with his i-pod on shuffle. You wouldn't get away with it in the UK. There would be a hundred people lying on the ground clutching sprained ankles and muttering about there being no such thing as an accident.

As well as contending with the assault-course-standard pavements, you have to weave between and around cars that seem to have been parked with the aid of a crowbar and some vaseline. Not a scrap of space is left between them, and spaces are at a premium. Again, you notice the shades - the contrast; gleaming new BMWs and Audis parked next to rusting Ladas and matt-coloured Trabants. I don't think they come in metallic, for some reason, which is a shame.

There are smaller shops and bars along these streets, and here and there you notice little kiosks built into the basements of the buildings, with a serving window that comes up to your knee. If you want something you have to crouch down to carry out the transaction, unless of course, you have a well-trained dog.

Further along the street, where it sometimes widens out a touch, the extra footpath is taken up by market stalls. So far, I have only seen books and vegetables for sale, but not on the same stall. That would be a turnip for the books. Shoot me now for having that thought. Anyway, the vegetable stalls are quite a sight. One street I walked down had almost a hundred yards of uninterrupted stalls, all selling the most colourful range of fruit and veg I have ever seen, ranging from plump, purple aubergines to fiery-skinned nectarines, all filling the evening air with their deep, sweet aromas, compelling you to reach out and grab one.

Outside the centre it is different. The main roads widen to carry buses and trolley-buses as well as trams and cars. The residential areas immediately around the centre look dilapidated and in need of refurbishment if not knocking down, and the legacy of the communist era is all-too-apparent. But further out, where the city has kept growing in recent years, you start to find more modern apartment buildings and shops, and more being built. The outskirts are teeming with building sites and cranes, although not quite as many as in Dubai. Shopping malls have taken hold here, with two reasonably large ones already doing well, and at least two even bigger ones in the pipeline. I am here essentially to work on one of these malls, which at the moment is all on paper or in computers. There's not even a hole in the ground yet, just a large scrap of wasteland behind the train station. It looks very nice, of course, but these architects always do nice concept drawings, or "pretties", as we like to call them in the trade. I've also heard that the economic growth and development is going on in other towns and cities, like the ski resort of Bansko and the Black Sea coast towns of Varna and Borgas. It's an up-and-coming place, that's for sure.

So that's Sofia. It's an intriguing place. It can tell the visitor a lot about the people and the country, and especially the history. I am certain there is more to be found, though. This is just one city, and tries to present a bright, modern, progressive face to the outside world. There is vibrant culture and night-life, and a definite cosmopolitan/continental vibe. It feels like a European capital, but with a little catching up to do. The transition following the lifting of the Iron Curtain is still ongoing, with some people of the opinion that the progress here has been delayed as a result the wars in neighbouring Balkan countries. Still, quite a few people have done well out of the new order, and that is evident in the cars you see driving around and the boutique shops that line the boulevards. But you also sense that there are many left behind, who you don't see a great deal of in the capital. I've heard the poverty is more visible and more marked in the rural areas.

Still, I definitely want to see more of the country. There are mountain ranges to climb and beaches to sit on. There are little old towns and villages scattered here and there. It is steeped in ancient history and culture. I look forward to seeing and learning more.

Zdrasti!

I'm back...

I did warn you.

Sofia. Sounds like a beautiful, sexy lady, and to be honest, it behaves like one too. It has an enigmatic, chequered history, it has some really good looking areas, and it has a relaxed air of cultural sophistication. It also has trolley buses, which all sexy ladies should have.

I'm in my fourth week here, and have been living in a hotel, like I did for four, desperately long weeks in Doha. But this is different. I've enjoyed it (in the main). I move into an apartment on Saturday, which will ease a little of the biggest annoyance of being here, i.e. being stuck in a hotel in the outskirts.

A year to the day from my arrival in Dubai, I arrived here, landing in sheeting rain in an aging 737 that tested my nerves. At least the flight was only three hours. I was picked up - PICKED UP - by my new company's local manager. ON A SUNDAY NIGHT. This is unprecedented behaviour. Every other company I have worked for overseas has either left me to find my own way around a new city, or sent some gurning, obsequious lackey to pick me up and dump me at the cess-pit of a hotel they've chosen for me. I was impressed.

So we drove at quite a healthy speed through the soaked streets of my latest destination, and I watched the red, blue and green neon signs of a strange town blur past me, as my driver told me all about Bulgaria in faultless English. He helped me check in at the hotel, where I crashed and slept soundly. The manager picked me up from the hotel in the morning, even though it is literally across the road from the office, and he had to do a U-turn at the lights two hundred yards down the road to get to the office. I was taken to a bright, modern, open-plan office and greeted by a dozen new faces whose names slipped immediately from my mind. I was given strong coffee. I was handed a brand-new laptop and mobile phone. I was in love with this place already. Even better, on my first proper night in Bulgaria, I was taken out for a meal and a few beers.

Compare and contrast all this with my arrival in Dubai. No manager meeting me off the plane, wearing a fedora and a red carnation. No manager picking me up in the morning. No mobile phone or laptop (which I wouldn't expect, to be fair). No proper coffee, and NO social interaction for the first two months. The miserable bastards. I really had wondered if it was me that was the problem; but it wasn't. I would learn that lesson.

Anyway, enough about Dubai. It's in the past, and is all recorded for prosperity. Or something. I'm here now, and new experiences are just around the corner.

Ciao for now.