Rules

There are two attitudes: 

a) Strict adherence to the exact wording of the rule, regardless of the actual intention behind it. This is useful for people like administrators who want to get rid of you and traffic police looking for bribes. 

b) Infinite flexibility and creative interpretation. Useful for administrators who want to get rid of you and driving in Sofia traffic.

Which attitude you adopt depends entirely on what benefits you the most at that particular moment. It’s also quite normal to use b) while simultaneously using a) to criticise other people for doing the same thing as you.

Parking Enforcement

The truck arriving has the same impact on the neighbourhood as the first tank of an invading army. They call it a pyek (паяк) which translates as ‘spider’ because of the appearance of the crane on the back that lifts cars onto a trailer and takes them away. Despite the standard of parking in the city, vehicles are seemingly targeted at random - generally from patches of ground with bays outlined on the tarmac that don’t have any ‘no parking’ signs. Coincidentally, the cars that get removed often happen to be near food stalls where city workers congregate to eat. 

Highways

They’re the equivalent of dual carriageways but the speed limit is 140kmph. Of the two lanes, the inside is often crumbling and peppered with the kind of potholes that people get rescued from - probably due to the extremes of weather and the high volume of lorries. The outside is treated as a racetrack, particularly if you have an Audi or Mercedes or any brand of SUV. If you can’t overtake in the inside lane, the preferred technique is to blast up to the driver in front and get as close to their bumper as possible while flashing your lights.

Fear of the Sack

On my first day at my first Bulgarian school, I was trying to clear my classroom of teenage debris when the cleaner entered and shooed me away, panicking I would put her out of a job. This fear is most prominent in the older generation so I can guess where it comes from (although it’s much too easy to attribute every character trait to living under Communism) and people will even stop others voicing opinions in case of collateral damage. The attitude is to show total deference to authority, complain in secret, then find creative ways to adapt to problems.

Waiting Staff

It’s not their responsibility to help you enjoy your meal. Nor is it any of their concern if you like the food. Their role is strictly delivery. The sequence of the delivery is not necessarily important either – if you make the mistake of ordering your whole meal at the same time, your main will probably come together with the starter or, quite often, before. There’s a phrase I’ve heard several times, a kind of half-joke: ‘don’t embarrass us in front of the foreigner’ but of course, concentrating so hard on not messing anything up means they’re much more likely to.

Rubbish Containers

There are no dustbins or bin days, you take your rubbish out to containers on the street which are emptied daily (usually at 2am). This system works well; there’s very little litter. I often wonder if the character of Uncle Bulgaria was based on insider knowledge of the country as these containers serve as small eco-systems for the community. Gypsies clop by on horse-drawn wagons to pick up anything sellable and plenty of others dip into them too: builders working nearby, drunks coming home from the bar - even people in business suits and youths wearing branded sportswear and airpods.

Not quite right

The bed linen set without pillowcases. The cool-looking retro flip calendar that’s missing a 29. Taps with hot and cold the wrong way round or light switches that turn on unexpected lights. Administrators handwriting your name as ЗЖЪРВИС on documents with ДЖЕРВИС printed at the top in big, bold letters. Hexagonal paving slabs on pavements outside construction sites that are smashed under the wheels of trucks then replaced by other hexagonal paving slabs that are about a third of the size - which are then smashed again the first time a truck goes over them. You get used to it.

Supermarkets

Thankfully, Sofians haven’t adopted a supermarket shopping culture (yet). They’re generally used for popping into for small things rather than loading up on a weekly ‘Big Shop’ and the freezer section – if there is one at all – will be very small. Ready meals aren’t a thing here. People will make or grow their own produce whenever possible and use small, independent and walkable shops for the rest. These kinds of family run local shops are continually assessed for their quality and proprietors will often tell you not to buy their own products if they feel they’re not up to scratch.

Smiling

I’ve been told that under Communism, if you smiled too much it was assumed that you were either stupid or hiding something. This still applies - the default expression for Bulgarians is neutral, some would say stern. If you watch any kind of talent show, for example, it’s impossible to tell what the judges think of the acts. Official bureaucrats, administrators and anyone in authority tend to go one stage further: they start off with a defensive and confrontational attitude, as if you’ve insulted them or called them useless before you even speak. This, I suppose, at least saves time.

Central Heating

Apartments don’t generally have their own individual heating systems, each building uses the same one and these buildings are in turn linked up to a hub that covers the whole district. This means that you have very little control over your own radiators and even if yours aren’t on, you’ll still pay a percentage of the district’s overall consumption. In the winter, the central authority turns on the heating after three consecutive days with an average temperature of less than 10° and, in the summer, there’ll be several weeks of maintenance work when your whole area is without hot water.

Queuing

It’s not instinctive for Bulgarians. Traffic brings out the absolute worst in Sofian drivers and you can’t queue at the Migration Directorate without someone asking to cut in because they’ll be ‘really quick’. (Bulgarian bureaucracy is never ‘really quick’). Apparently, there is a system to Bulgarian queuing though: you ask who’s last and then use that person as a marker to see when it’s your turn. After that, you’re free to stand whenever you want. This is agonising for British people who, even when they’re alone, naturally stand at the head of where they’d logically expect a queue to form.

Air Flow

Whenever someone asks if you can open a window, you might manage about ten glorious minutes before someone else asks you to close it again. Or, if you’re fortunate enough to have a classroom with air conditioning, expect to spend a good five minutes at the start of each lesson farting around with the controls until the majority are satisfied. Open a window on public transport and you’re taking your life in your hands. You might think that a nation that’s so hyper-sensitive about catching colds would be extra vigilant about mask-wearing during the pandemic, but you’d be utterly wrong.

On Buses

Sofia’s buses are in the process of modernising with Oyster card type scanners, but previously you had to buy a book of tickets. For each journey you stamped one in a kind of hole punch that was mounted at head height. The tickets were numbered so that if inspectors got on, they could check your stamped ticket against those left in your book to make sure it was in sequence. You would always see some tickets left on seats for others to use - these were the final tickets from books which meant that inspectors couldn’t check them for verification.

Family Meals

There must be a Bulgarian version of: ‘Your food is wonderful, but if you keep giving me more of it, I’ll end up in hospital’. You need something assertive enough to be clear, and polite enough not to cause offence. The trick is to leave enough on your plate to pick at without it appearing that you’re running low. This is more difficult than you might think as drink is also an issue. If your glass is anything other than overflowing, you need to guard it vigilantly because if you turn away for a second, it will have magically refilled.

Parking

In a car park, the foreigner’s car will be the one facing forwards. Even when a car is parked entirely on the pavement or is blocking you in, it will have been reversed there. The logical reason for this could be to make a quick getaway, but that would suggest the kind of foresight which isn’t born out in the general driving style. Lane hopping, red light jumping, ignoring one-way systems if no-one’s looking – Sofians drive as though they hate being in their cars and are desperate to get out of them, rather than taking extra time to reverse park.

Too Good Is Not Good

In terms of outlook, this phrase goes even further than the ubiquitous British response: ‘not bad’. At least ‘not bad’ holds something in reserve – a reluctance to fully commit to anything actually being positive – whereas ‘too good is not good’ is actively against any good things that might happen. This enables you to maintain a gloomy and cynical disposition in every possible situation, regardless of how wonderful it might be. I’ve also seen people pretend to spit after giving a compliment to imply they didn’t mean it, just in case you were likely to take a compliment as ‘too good’.

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.

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.

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.’