Migration Directorate

There are two booths assigned for foreigners’ visa applications and it’s obligatory that at least one of them is staffed by someone who doesn’t speak a word of English. These booths are right by the door, the entranceway intersecting the queue which is sandwiched between the information desk and the kiosk where you pay so you need to stand firm to hold your place. In this swirling maelstrom of people, you can hear the same stilted and vapid small talk between new foreign arrivals and the Bulgarian handlers that their employers have assigned to them to help navigate the paperwork.

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.

Easter Eggs

Instead of gorging on chocolate, you colour hard boiled eggs. The shops are full of paints and dyes and your Facebook feed fills up with photos of elaborate designs and advice about techniques. You decorate them on the Thursday or Saturday before Easter Sunday and make sure that the first one is always red. This egg is saved for a year. On the day itself, you ‘battle’ by holding an egg in your fist and hitting it against an opponent’s - first the top, then the bottom. You win if yours doesn’t crack. You then eat egg salad until June.

Easter

There’s a televised event held at Alexander Nevsky Cathedral at midnight and, if you’re in the centre at around this time, you’ll see lots of people carrying candles home from it. Like Christmas though, the main tradition at Easter is for families to get together for a big home cooked meal and the city empties as people travel back to their home towns and villages. The meal they eat consists of rice mixed with chunks of lung, and lamb. Lamb isn’t commonly eaten here - only on special occasions such as Easter or St George’s Day which follows soon afterwards.

Melnik

A tiny town close to the Greek border that has historically been swapped between the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Ottomans. What looks like a dried up river slices right through the middle but this is actually a flood defence that peters out at the top of the only street. Numerous hotels and restaurants back onto the sand pillars that loom over the town and provide the ideal conditions for locals to cut wine cellars into them. Most people in Melnik have a sideline in selling wine which they produce from their own patches of vineyards in the surrounding fields.

Swifts

They nest in the eaves of apartment blocks and wheel around the skies at incredible speeds, changing direction suddenly and dipping at impossible angles between buildings and electricity lines. Dusk is the busiest period, but you can hear their constant squeaking throughout the day and there’s often a frenzy of activity at random moments. They arrive in Spring and, if you’re fortunate enough to have an open balcony above the height of about the fourth floor, you can spend hours on early summer evenings watching them as they zip by, often close enough to hear the beats of their wings.

Level Crossing Maniac

We’d been waiting at the level crossing for about ten minutes, which is an eon for a Bulgarian driver, so inevitably those queuing behind us ignored the red light, pulled out, and drove around the barrier. Just us and the silver Corsa on the other side of the tracks remained. Another five minutes passed. The Corsa driver got out of his car, checked for trains in both directions, got back in, and crossed. As soon as his wheels had left the tracks, the train rattled past. He stopped next to us and wound his window down. ‘Train’s coming’ he said.

Podobno (подобно)

This is one of those really useful survival words. The literal translation is ‘similar’ but it can also be ‘same to you’. This means that – with a certain amount of foreigner’s blur - you can use it as a response in a variety of situations. At Easter, for example, it’s common to say Hristos voskrese (Христос воскресе) which means ‘Christ is risen’. You’re meant to reply with voistina voskrese (воистина воскресе) ‘truly, he is risen’, but I feign ignorance and go with podobno instead. Watch out for serving staff saying ‘enjoy your meal’ though (I’ve made this mistake several times).

Renewing A UK Passport

Dealing with Bulgarian bureaucracy has conditioned me to expect a quagmire of arbitrary complications, but the process was totally straightforward. Most of it was done easily online, I had regular emails guiding me through things, and the new passport came in about two weeks. However, for those two weeks, I felt like more of an outsider here: short-tempered, cynical, and far less tolerant of everyday Bulgarian quirks. It was the subconscious knowledge that I couldn’t escape. I have no desire to leave Bulgaria but knowing that I couldn’t – even in an emergency – gave me an underlying sense of being trapped.

Giving Flowers

As well as people selling flowers on pavements, you’ll find at least one flower shop on every shopping street and in most metro stations. It’s always a joy to see stern commuters furtively carrying bunches upside down on their way home. Flowers are given on numerous occasions: to teachers at the beginning and end of the school year, to female relatives of people who have birthdays, and on ‘days’ such as Flowers Day and Ladies’ Day. To avoid bad luck, it’s crucial to give an odd number of flowers - florists won’t even sell them to you in even numbers.