SOFIA LETTER/Michael Foley: Sofia is a city of contrasts; it's the old travel-guide cliché, but in this instance it is correct. Have a cappuccino in one of Sofia's new ultra-cool bar/restaurants, where the staff take orders in Bulgarian or English, and probably a number of other languages as well. Walk past the designer shops on Boulevard Vitosha to the metro and take the train to Obelia.
Obelia is bleak and desolate. In the spring the mud has given way to grass and weeds, which are already knee high. Here in the crumbling concrete flat complexes live people who probably earn little more than €100 a month, who never drink cappuccinos in cool bars or go to designer shops.
Between the blocks of flats are temporary shops made from rusting metal. In fact the dominant colour is rust, from the water stains on the crumbling walls to the broken and dilapidated cars. Here and there are planted some patches of flowers or vegetables that add little other than to emphasise the desperation of the place. On a Saturday afternoon the area is lively, people out having a beer, mending cars and pushing shopping trolleys home. Behind the flats, in the distance, rises Mount Vitosha, a tall peak, snow-covered for much of the year, that can be seen from most of Sofia. It is a reminder of the sheer beauty of this mountainous country. Across a large field are more crumbling concrete flats.
But back to Sofia and the centre of the city. Boulevard Vitosha is lined with designer shops and restaurants. Luxury goods from Western Europe and the US are on sale at Western prices. So in a country that still has third-world levels of poverty, and where farmers but a few miles from the capital use animals to pull ploughs, who buys these expensive goods? Well, according to crime journalists, no one really: many are simply fronts for money laundering and other criminal activities.
Only 10 minutes from the designer shops, past the magnificent former party headquarters, a fine example of Stalinist neo-classicism, across from the main mosque and the old Turkish baths, is the Ladies' Market, a network of stalls and market buildings that sells everything and sell it cheap. Here one can get a glimpse of what Sofia might have been like before the communist takeover of 1947, and the more recent Mafia rule. Even some of the buildings have an Ottoman feel. Here farmers come to sell bags of potatoes, handfuls of herbs and bags of spices. Tomatoes and cucumbers are piled high, and the smells are not of McDonald's but of kebabs.
Corruption is the big problem. The press, especially the English-language press, constantly complains that corruption and the Mafia mean business cannot flourish, and furthermore an innocent civilian might get shot when the occasional Mafia shoot-out takes place.
Journalists delight in making links between politicians, drug dealers, Mafia and even church leaders. Our own Criminal Assets Bureau has been advising the Bulgarian police on its crime problem, and the EU has said the judiciary must reform itself and deal with the issue.
Behind the designer shops and the cool bars and restaurants is another Sofia, one of peeling walls, of lovely buildings being propped up by temporary and very dodgy-looking scaffolding, of pavements that are a jigsaw of cracked and broken paving that clicks as you walk. Street furniture such as traffic lights, traffic signs and bollards are broken and rusty. Manholes and other coverings are lethal. The roads are a mess of huge potholes that fill with ice, water or mud, depending on the season. There are inexplicable lumps of metal sticking out of the pavements.
A Bulgarian political scientist suggested recently that Bulgaria could become a "Mafiocracy", a society where crime rather than government rules. Mafiocracies do not, of course, bother repairing pavements or roads. They just buy a four by four with tinted windows.
But Bulgarians are optimistic and much of that optimism is invested in the EU; over 80 per cent favour membership, and many see Ireland as a model and dream of a Balkan tiger. Recently Dr Garret FitzGerald spoke to a packed hall in Sofia explaining the realities of Ireland's 20-year wait for prosperity. Bulgaria is due to join in 2007. Despite the corruption and other problems Bulgaria has done well, especially when one considers that in the 1990s it had to lop a few zeros off the currency as massive inflation reduced the value of the country's money. Inflation is down, growth is up and the country has a confident and well-educated young population. Oh, and unlike most of its neighbours, it never went to war in the post-communist period.
Sofia is already covered in EU flags; a huge one even greets you at the airport as you queue to have your passport checked. One wag suggested that the number of blue and yellow EU flags around was a ploy. An EU official is going to visit Sofia, see the flags and assume that Bulgaria has already joined and nobody noticed. The funding will, of course, follow.