Accepting & Adapting

A former colleague worked at an English language school in the UAE that only employed Bulgarian teachers. He said that this was because Bulgarians could be relied upon to find a way to cope with anything - no computers, no textbooks, classes of 30 with seats for 10, listening exercises without speakers, reading exercises without texts – anything. He was proud of this, which I understand; it’s an admirable character trait. But it’s a negative trait too. When you accept whatever you’re given, no matter how unreasonable, without refusing or complaining, nothing will ever change and you will inevitably be exploited.

Submitting Documents

An administrator might reject your photo (‘it makes you look too young’), cite the deadline (‘too early, we’ll lose it before it’s due’) or suddenly decide that something innocuous needs a notarised translation. Their primary task is to get rid of you before you can make them do their job. Your primary task is to make it easier for them to do their job than it is to turn you away. This means preparing responses to all conceivable objections and considering variables like the length of queue, how close it is to 5pm, and what kind of mood they’re in.

Tower Blocks

A brutalist landscape of crumbling concrete dominoes. Yes, they look ugly - the weather-stained balconies cluttered with junk, the patchwork of discoloured cladding, the exposed spikes of rusting support rods, the graffitied walls and linking electricity wires drooping from roofs – but, for a precious ten minutes at dusk, the concrete glows orange and pink and the sunset is reflected in all those windows. At night the shadows obscure the imperfections and you realise that they’re villages in the sky, complete communities with thousands of lives going on behind the squares of light that form patterns of pixels across the city.

Classroom Key

At my previous Bulgarian school, I once accidentally took home the classroom key. It was the talk of the whole school – much more significant than when I overlaid and missed a lesson, when I confused my timetable and let students leave 40 minutes early, or when I muddled up the children at parents’ evening. A few days later, the key vanished again. A security guard pulled me out of my class and led me by the arm to the director for questioning. It turned out the cleaner had it. They had to use one of the spares until she arrived.

Mozhe li (може ли)

This means ‘may I have’ and is what you use when you’d like to buy something so it’s invaluable. It’s also nice and polite, not as blunt as iskam (искам) which is ‘I want’. You just have to say mozhe li followed by whatever it is that you’re requesting (you’ll have to sort the article/gender out though – or you could just point), tag a mola (моля) on the end as a thank you and you’ve got a sentence going. You just need to hope that the shopkeeper isn’t wowed enough by your amazing fluency to try and start a conversation.

Cuban Coffee Pots

Moka pots or stove-top coffee makers - you can get them for about 10LV from most all-purpose household tat shops. Although they’re quintessentially Italian, Bulgarians call them Cuban because that’s where they imported them from during Communism. There’s a satisfying steampunk element to making Cuban coffee, none of the faff of filters or capsules, and you don’t need an instruction manual, just the pot, the coffee, some water, and a source of heat. The taste is far superior to the scalded tar you get from permanently re-heating filter machines and the pretentiously named foam that dribbles from expensive chrome gadgets.

Giving advice

When someone is digging up a road or tinkering under a car bonnet, you’ll invariably find several people gathered around them who will be full of advice – not actually helping, just telling them what they should be doing. Even if you think that nobody’s seen you delicately manoeuvre your car into a precious kerbside gap on a residential street, someone is still quite likely to shout down from their balcony: ‘can you move back a bit so you’re not outside the entrance’ or ‘can you move forward slightly because the woman whose car is behind you is a terrible driver.’

Ayran

A drink made from Bulgarian yoghurt. Bulgarians are very proud of their yoghurt as it’s the only one in the world that contains a particular type of bacteria (lactobacillus bulgarius). The nearest equivalent would be Greek yoghurt but that’s more liquidy and has a sourer taste. The first time you try ayran, you’ll think it needs some kind of fruit flavour but you lose this perspective quite quickly. It’s sold for about 1LV in any shop that has a fridge but is pretty easy to make at home: two thirds Bulgarian yoghurt, one third water and a dash of salt.

BBC John

A colleague on a training course here in Bulgaria. Mid-fifties and British, he looked a lot like Nigel Farage, a former schoolmate of his. He was one of those businesspeople who only talk to you if they think you might be useful - every social event is a networking opportunity, every conversation has an agenda. He used to be a BBC radio presenter and his diction and voice reflected that: ‘I am speaking now, listen to me speaking, hear how important I am.’ His default attitude assumed British superiority and that everyone in the world wanted to be like us.

Zashto? (защо?)

‘Why?’ You can shorten it to the more slang ‘shto? in the same way as kakvo? turns into k’vo? There’s a logical simplicity to the answer you give as there’s no separate word for ‘because’. Instead, you add a definite article to the end so it becomes zashtoto (защото) which I suppose is the equivalent of: ‘the why’. Definite articles are always added to the ends of words and they’re different depending on gender. There will also be three other endings for each gender’s plural and three more depending on whether the plural is a specific number or just mnogo.

Name Days

Bulgarians love designated celebratory ‘days’ and they punctuate the year wonderfully. There’s Baba Marta, Flowers Day, Wine Day – there are even phrases for ‘happy first snow day’ and ‘happy new haircut day’. Most Christian names have a specific day and, as with birthdays, you give chocolates to your friends and colleagues when it’s yours. Some have additional foods or gifts associated with them such as carp on St Nikola’s day as he’s the patron saint of fishermen, or St George’s day – which is on a different date here - when you eat lamb because he’s the patron saint of shepherds.

Carp

This is traditionally eaten on St Nikola’s day on 6^th December but it’s also what you’ll most likely get if you ask for a generic ‘fish’. Carp has all the usual difficulties of eating fish - digging around for meat, picking out bones, not looking it in the eye - and none of the rewards. There are bits that look as though they might be tasty but they’re just slimy flaps that slip around in your mouth until you can gag them down. At best, it has no discernible flavour, at worst, it has an earthiness that’s like eating sludge.

Shopska

Named after the Shopi region around Sofia, this is the country’s ubiquitous salad and the perfect accompaniment to rakia. Tomatoes, cucumber and sirene – Bulgarian white cheese which is similar to feta but saltier and less crumbly. Don’t be deceived by the apparently simple ingredients, keep in mind that vegetables actually have proper flavours here. Even the substandard dregs you find in Billa (the equivalent of Tesco) are tastier than the high quality organic produce you can buy in the UK. Before I came to Bulgaria, I didn’t much like tomatoes and I could never really see the point of cucumbers.

Panagyurishte

This was a key area in the 1876 uprising so you might expect it to be a quaint old village with traditional houses but it’s just an ordinary town, the Bulgarian equivalent of Huddersfield. That said, there were a surprising number of death notices everywhere. An afternoon is more than enough time to explore Panagyurishte and I think that’s what most people do – bussing in on day trips to visit the history museum. Our hotel was in a residential district named ‘Optikoelectron’ after a big local factory that makes vision equipment for the police and military (‘We see the invisible!’).

Elections

These are held on a Sunday, either because it doesn’t interfere with people’s work or because of a government conspiracy, depending on who you speak to. I picked up a communist leaflet that had pictures of all their candidates and they look exactly how you’d expect them to. It seems murderous stares and chiaroscuro lighting are still popular with voters. There were also a quite a few friendly uncle types that work as ‘security consultants’ and several who had arrived directly from the 70s: totalitarian moustaches, helmet haircuts and brightly patterned jackets with lapels that you could go hang-gliding with.

Ticketing Clerk

We’d given her our booking number for two tickets to Sozopol, six times. ‘No, that’s for one ticket to Vratsa,’ she said. The man before us had collected one ticket to Vratsa. There was a point where I think she realised her mistake – a flash of panic in her neutral expression – but she pushed through it. ‘You don’t have seats. You can’t book now’. My wife went so ballistic that the clerk’s supervisor came over. We gave our number to her and she found the tickets instantly. ‘That’s a different number to the one they gave me’, the clerk said.

The love of flags & parades

This is something that Bulgarians and Americans share and the English do not. The national flag is everywhere here – flying from balconies, painted on electricity substations and bins, even the climbing frames in playgrounds are layered white, green and red. There’s none of the faint embarrassment that an English person feels when the St George Cross is displayed, none of the uncomfortable nationalistic overtones that are associated with it. Likewise, a parade is taken at face value as a straightforward celebratory event without people feeling like they need to gravitate towards the back and mask their awkwardness with smirking cynicism.

-15°

It stabs at your bladder, creeps into your bones and makes the moisture in your eyes sting. You need thermals, good boots and specialist winter gear to deal with it - which is why coat racks are always a prominent feature in homes and restaurants. It’s not just clothing though, there are other preparations you need to make too. You have to watch the weather reports carefully, leave your heating on all day, consider and manage the time you spend outside and pull your scarf up over your mouth so you’re not taking the cold air directly into your lungs.

Mnogo (много)

Not everything in Bulgarian is hideously complicated, some elements of the language are simpler. For example, once you can read the Cyrillic alphabet, you can have a halfway decent stab at pronunciation as the letters are all phonetic. There isn’t anything that’s really confusing like ‘through’, thought’, and ‘tough’ in English – or ‘Pacific Ocean’ that has three C’s, all pronounced differently. Neither does there seem to be countless ways of expressing large quantities that change depending on the context (‘much’, ‘many’, ‘lots of’, ‘very’ etc.). As far as I‘m aware, you can get by with saying mnogo in every situation.

Museum of Socialist Art

It’s in three parts: the garden where they’ve collected the statues that were removed when communism fell, a gallery (exhibiting student posters when we went), and a video room showing old newsreels to provide historical context. This room seemed decidedly ‘pro’, as did the two elderly staff and the souvenir cabinet selling Stalin mugs and Lenin keyrings. It’s interesting to visit alongside someone who remembers what life was really like – the red scarves, the youth groups, the formal salute when submitting schoolwork, the party terminology, the secret jokes, and the many ingenious ways that Bulgarians found to circumvent the rules.

RZI Declaration form

I had COVID quite early when the Regional Health Inspectorate (RZI) wasn’t yet overrun and they were still logging individual cases. Bulgaria locked down very hard and the RZI insisted I signed a declaration form, a threatening legal document stating that under no circumstances whatsoever would I step outside the apartment for the next 14 days. If I broke the conditions, the penalties were a large fine and possibly jail time. An RZI representative dressed in a lab coat, mask, face shield and glittery silver chalga pumps turned up with the declaration. She made me go outside to sign it.

Boza

This is a breakfast drink that you have as an accompaniment to banitsa. It’s made from fermented millet with an alcohol content of about 1% and isn’t very appetising to look at – extremely thick and resembling clay dredged up from a riverbed. It doesn’t taste too bad if you have a sweet tooth though, you can probably sip at it. Imagine making a bowl of muesli from the dust left over at the bottom of the packet and then adding half a kilogram of sugar. The sludge of milk left over at the end would taste quite similar to boza.

Milko

A chalga star in his sixties with a Borat moustache and permanent grin, he’s exactly the kind of person you’d see on one of those Clive James shows from the 80’s that ridiculed ‘funny foreigners’. His lyrics mainly describe things that are happening in his videos: ‘Now I’m sitting on a rock eating a pastry and there’s a cage of girls over there’. I’m convinced he’s self-aware and laughing at himself but my wife is sure he’s totally serious and simply can’t believe his luck at getting paid for cavorting with botoxed, implanted and tattooed young women in string bikinis.

Megapark

The name, logo and slogan (‘meet tomorrow’s standards today’) seem as though they belong to a ruthless dystopian corporation in a lazily conceived action film. The building hosts multiple companies in a maroon coloured, 15-storey tower sitting between a McDonalds and a shopping mall by a highway on the outskirts of the city. The ground floor canteen is white and plasticky with counters along one wall selling slightly different foods from metal trays and the wipe-clean tables in the central seating area are scattered with universally standardised office workers in security lanyards scrolling phones as they pick at their lunches.

Edno (едно)

This is the number ‘one’ but, because it’s Bulgarian, it’s not as simple as that. There are different ways of saying ‘one’ depending on the gender of whatever it is that you’re referring to. Everything has a gender here – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs – and there are three of them: masculine, feminine and neutral. Edno is the neutral version, edin (един) is masculine and edna (една) is feminine. There’s no equivalent of ‘a’ in Bulgarian so ‘one’ is used as an article. This is probably the most common error for English learners and even the most advanced students sometimes slip up.

Government Hack

A couple of years ago, the personal data of five million citizens was stolen from a government database and uploaded online. This was a surprise to me as I didn’t know the government had any databases - my visa applications were all done on sheets of paper plucked from walls of ring-binders. These were some comments made by the minister responsible:
– ‘Don’t worry, we still have the originals.’
– ‘Well, if we didn’t use electronic data, this wouldn’t have happened.’
– ‘Who resigns over just one incident?’
– ‘We’ve arrested a twenty year old Bulgarian. This proves we have a great education system.’

Shkembe

If rakia is the national drink, then shkembe is probably the national food. They kind of go together anyway as shkembe is popularly regarded as a hangover cure. It’s tripe soup - ‘peasant food’ as all tripe dishes seem to be. I remember my grandpa eating tripe, a flaccid, waffle-like slab slathered in vinegar. The tripe in shkembe is easy enough to deal with – it sinks to the bottom so it’s easily avoided – but the liquid is unbelievably rich and is eaten with so many spoonfuls of crushed garlic that it makes you wonder if anyone really likes the taste.

Horse Chestnuts

On October mornings the parks and pavements are liberally scattered with shiny, mahogany coloured horse chestnuts. I always want to pick them up - not just because they’re such beautiful things, but as an instinct left over from when I was a kid. The evenings spent in parks trying to find big ones hanging from low branches that could be dislodged with a thrown stick, the arguments in the playground about suspected tampering, the sore knuckles after your opponent has missed a shot. They don’t play conkers in Bulgaria so those gorgeous orbs are generally just kicked or thrown around.

Knowing a bit of Bulgarian

People you practice on usually appreciate the effort - they might even reward you with a rare smile. However, you often end up starting conversations that you can’t continue. You can renew your travelcard by saying: ‘can I have one month, please’ and then they ask you something and you have to resort to hand gestures. Or at passport control when you show off by saying: ‘good evening’ to the guard and then panic about your visa when he starts talking to you, standing there frantically searching your pockets for paperwork until he rolls his eyes and waves you through.

Roads

The quality of the roads declines as soon as you’re off the main carriageways. The surfaces there are a patchwork of different repairs - squares of tarmac of various shades and heights punctuated by yawning potholes that make it seem as though they’ve been recently shelled. Parking is also an issue. Inside lanes will often be blocked and, if a suburban pavement is wide enough to almost fit a vehicle on, someone will leave their car there. When you drive the same route regularly you’ll soon develop muscle memory, instinctively finding the best road position to avoid the extra obstacles.

K’vo? (к’во?)

This is a shortened version of kakvo (какво) which means ‘what’ and is generally used as a way of saying ‘pardon’. In terms of slang, k’vo? is one step further on from that - the equivalent of saying ‘wha?’ to someone. It’s practically the only thing I can say with an authentic sounding accent and, because it’s so colloquial, it’s pretty much guaranteed to get an easy laugh from native Bulgarians when someone says something I don’t understand. I once forgot myself on a plane and said it to a posh elderly woman which didn’t go down quite so well.

Mount Vitosha

It’s visible from practically everywhere in the city so you can use it to orientate yourself -  even in built up areas, glimpsing the angle of the peak between buildings will tell you approximately where you are. Like the sea, it’s also a constant reminder of nature. Approaching weather is revealed in the gathering clouds that obscure clefts and ridges and the colours on its slopes proudly display the seasons: green in the summer turning to rusty orange in the autumn. In the winter, tracks of white spread downwards, gradually swallowing the forests and clinging to the peak until June.

Lili Ivanova

Bulgaria’s number one diva. Her age is often a source of joking and, while nobody seems to know exactly how old she really is, she must be in her eighties as she’s been around for as long as Cliff Richard. Unlike Cliff Richard, however, she’s held in some esteem and is still producing new music that changes with the times and continues to sell well. She sings in a kind of breathy, melodramatic croon, has the figure of a swimwear model and a face that’s had so much plastic surgery that she looks like she’s being suffocated by a balloon.

Sveta Sofia

A gold and black statue on a 50 foot pedestal in the centre of the city that looks a bit like a sex robot from a 60’s film. She has an impressive décolletage, visible nipples and, surprisingly for a Christian saint, is depicted with three pagan symbols: a crown, a wreath and an owl. She replaced a statue of Lenin in 2000 and represents where the city got its name – except she doesn’t, Sofia was named after a church. Apparently, her face does look a lot like the face of the wife of the mayor who commissioned the project though.

Rakia

Flavours include apricot, fig and plum, but the best is unflavoured and made from grapes. Unlike most hard liquors, you drink it at the start of a meal when it really enhances the taste of a salad. It doesn’t go with any other food - or when it’s drunk on its own. You get a happy, confident buzz almost immediately but when you attempt to walk, you’ll find that your sense of balance has disappeared. Many Bulgarians make their own, which is stronger than the usual 40% proof, and in villages they have community stills where you can book timeslots.

Bansko

It’s cradled in the Pirin mountains which have plenty of hangover-curing woodland walks whatever the season. As you approach the town, you get the accommodation blocks and ski lodges that back right onto the pistes and in the centre, the countless traditional restaurants, each with its own tout that latches on to you if he hears you speaking English. The narrow backstreets weaving away from the main street are where you find the oldest buildings with tiny doorways designed to make the occupying Turks bow when they entered. In the winter everything is cloaked by the soporific aroma of woodsmoke.

Hambara bar

It looks like the kind of place where 16^th Century plotters would meet to discuss a revolution and is hidden away at the end of an alley off a side-street that’s impossible to find again. It has a door that only opens from the inside, no windows, stone walls and fittings made from ancient wooden beams – the boards of the mezzanine floor creak alarmingly and contain shadowy gaps that make you tiptoe to the bar like a ballerina. There’s no electricity, only candles. The barmaid periodically stops serving so she can go around and replace the ones that are guttering.

Coach driver

Beer-bellied, sweat-stained and builder-arsed, he leaned by the luggage hatch as everyone - frail old people and immaculately manicured young women alike - wedged in their bags as best they could. He offered critiques like: ‘how long are you going for, a century?’ and, if anyone complained, he shrugged and told them to ‘buy a car then’. He started shouting when he saw how badly packed the compartment was. At the one break in our eight-hour journey, he kept us all waiting for fifteen minutes outside the locked coach in shadeless 33 degree heat while he finished his meals in HesBurger.

Social Situations

When you don’t speak the language, there’s a tipping point in the number of people present in a social situation before you start feeling like an outsider. That tipping point is five. Any more than that and the native language is too dominant for people to speak English and the poor sod who’s acting as translator can’t possibly keep up. Only then do you feel your foreignness, sitting there quietly while everyone else is chatting and laughing. Young kids and dogs are always your friends on these occasions – they’re outsiders too and they don’t care that you can’t communicate verbally.

Smelly Bugs

Khaki or bright green beetles about the size of a one pence piece with shield-shaped shells and an underside that looks like the scuttling hand-type creature from Alien. They try to get inside at every opportunity and fly haphazardly so they’re constantly bumping into you. You can’t squash them because they give off a horrible smell – and I suspect they’d crunch anyway – but they’re lethargic and very slow-witted so you can deal with them easily enough. After you’ve flicked them off the window or door, they’ll sit there for a few minutes pondering what the hell’s just happened to them.

Blagodaria (благодаря)

‘Thank you’. You can usually get away with merci but that’s pretty informal and obviously not properly Bulgarian. Thank you is always the first thing I try and pick up in any language but this word is hard for English ears on first hearing – it sounds like the speaker has a mouth full of cotton wool. They compress the vowels, the R tumbles and there’s the Bulgarian L pronounced as W thing. It sounds like: ‘bwogurderea’ but spoken very fast, almost as if it’s one syllable. Even after four years, I’m still not entirely sure that I’m saying it right.

Chalga

This is a musical genre. I don’t properly understand it, mainly because it’s so god-awful, but also because it’s so contradictory. Its roots are in traditional music (chalga means ‘pop-folk’) yet it seems to be a celebration of tackiness – two fingers up to anything regarded as culture. The music sounds middle eastern with lyrics that are largely concerned with money or devastating sexual prowess, and the videos are full of gold and product placements to imply status. Chalga women tend to be more plastic than flesh and the men have precisely shaved facial hair, body-builder physiques and an unintended campness.

Banitsa

Almost every metro station has at least one banitsa kiosk – it’s the equivalent of a pasty in Cornwall or a hot dog in New York. It’s more than just street food though, each family has their own particular recipe. It comes in slabs or in coils and is made by layering extremely thin sheets of pastry between different mixtures of fillings and then baking. The most popular and traditional filling is crumbled sirene (Bulgarian white cheese) but there’s also leek and a sweet version that has chopped pumpkin. It works with mince as a kind of bechemel free lasagne too.

Driving

Every Sofian knows their vehicle’s length to the nearest millimetre. Part of their driving test must be to accurately assess the size of a gap in under a second and many cars are fitted with advanced four-wheel drives that allow them to dash sideways like frightened crabs. Indicators are used when the movement is already in progress or just afterwards so the effect is less like a warning and more like gloating. This is undoubtedly because if you do signal and wait, you’ll be completely ignored - they’ve probably never seen it happen before so don’t know how to react.