EMIL skilfully negotiated a couple of large potholes with the elan of a slalom champion, geared down to power-drive between a large bus and a flimsy Trabant, and throwing a glance over his shoulder to see if 1 was still upright, asked what hotel I was staying at.
"One star, two stars?" he inquired when I told him, and shrugged when I replied that it had three. "Bad water, gypsies will take your luggage," he predicted darkly, suggesting one of the large international hotels in the centre of Sofia as an alternative. Pessimism, it emerged as we talked, is deeply ingrained in his character.
He is not alone, as Bulgaria is at the stage in its economic transformation at which all the joyful expectation at the overthrow of communism almost years ago has run out, leaving the potholes of an exhausted economy that has so far failed to deliver jobs or a sense of security.
The centre of Sofia is a monument to transition. Brightly-lit shops and American eating places, some discreet restaurants where the food is of a far better standard than in many other former communist states and interspersed with these, someone's stock on the steps of a house - a few boxes of elderly oranges, bananas and apples, bunches of cheap literature on trestles; a handful of beggars, desolation etched on their faces.
For Emil, an engineer by profession, driving his ricketty old Lada for dollars on the airport road is a better way to earn a living than working in an office. "There are eight in our family: only two have work, myself and my brother who works in a store.
He points at a large building, shrouded in scaffolding: "They were restoring that when the communists fell. Money was provided by a company to finish it, and it was eaten up by inflation. The job's still not done."
Elitsa shares Emil's pessimism, but without his resilience or dynamism. She was standing outside the hugely ornate Alexander Nevsky Memorial Church, built to commemorate the 200,000 Russians who died in the wars in the 1870s in which Bulgaria won its independence from the Turks.
Earlier I had watched hundreds of people, young and old, queuing up with candles in their hands to receive a few sweet-smelling leaves from a priest and then bending or crawling under a table and kissing a crucifix. It was, Elitsa said, a Good Friday tradition in the Orthodox church: the herb was zdravetz, known as the health flower, and people crawled under the table as a sign of humility.
She was in her early 5Os and worked as a research scientist. She was also a royalist - "unfortunately there are not many of us" - and was looking forward passionately to the visit in May of Simeon II, the son of King Boris whose death in 1942, allegedly by poison administered by the Russians or the Germans, drew Bulgaria definitively into the maelstrom of the second World War. Simeon would like to stand in the presidential election later this year.
She spoke quietly, in precise German, about the events of the last seven years, about the mass demonstrations, the people with tears running down their cheeks for joy or apprehension. Then suddenly her own eyes filled with tears. "You know," she said, "since the communists were returned to power at the election, our nerves have been destroyed."
IN some ways it was even worse than before, she claimed, because there used to be certainty. "We were all poor, apart from the people in the party, but not everything was bad." In the old days, Elitsa earned 350 leva a month when the official rate of exchange was one lev to a dollar, and she managed to travel a bit. Now she earns 8,500 leva, with 78 to a dollar, and there is no possibility of going abroad.
"We pay Western prices and have Bulgarian salaries." Energy reforms mean the price of home heating, for example, is due to go up by 48 per cent on May 1st.
There are winners as well as losers at a time of harsh economic change. Many large fortunes have been made by people on the inner track, and a cushion is provided by the reformed communist government for pensioners and the very poor.
This, as Nikola Kitsevski, the deputy editor of the independent newspaper Trud, explains, has led to some decisions which may affect growth. The government is planning a new 40 per cent tax on investment by Bulgarian firms, levied on the total amount, including customs duties and VAT, and retrospective to January 1st.
"Why do they do that?" he asks. "They take from some and give to others. It will ruin the economy, and put many workers on the street. It will be much better for people to go to a holiday resort than invest their money.