We met the building's owner and decided to take one of the shops from 1 February. I went to BTC's local office with appropriate documents on 23 January to order a business line and ADSL internet service. I was told that we would hear within four days.
Mutro-baroque? Techno Rococo? Sleek Renaissance? Are you puzzled by the architectural jargon? Then take a stroll in Boyana, one of Sofia's most up-market neighbourhoods, and see for yourself. These are the buildings sponsored by the mutri, reflecting their taste and lifestyle. These constructions are to architecture what chalga is to music. They are like the stereotypical thick-necked entrepreneur of the post-Communist era, bedecked in a silk necktie and white tennis socks. Many Bulgarians think they epitomise the vulgar chutzpah that characterises the country's nouveau riche.
Catarina's first photographs - of herself and her brother - date from when she was about four years old. "We always had a camera in our hands, wasting film," she says, dismissing the suggestion that photography ran in the family. Her brother outgrew the childhood game but Catarina's passion for photography continued unabated.
I recently flew to Sofia to holiday with my Bulgarian wife and daughter. I'd spent a spell in London on business following a sojourn in Portugal where we had divided our time between Lisbon and the Algarve.
My night-time flight was diverted to Plovdiv because of fog. So I boarded a coach to Sofia, my irritability and fatigue lifted by cheery exchanges with skiers heading to Borovets.
It's nighttime on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, not far from the Turkish border, and the glowing circle of wood coals on the beach is like a miniature sun. An old woman in a red-and-white gown holds aloft a battered Orthodox icon depicting a man and woman. Her face in rapture, her feet bare as she stands inches away from the burning embers, she tells the story of the nestinari.
NOT EXACTLY BARBARIANS
"The Bulgarians are not savages and barbarians!" Georgi Dimitrov said rhetorically in his defence speech at the Leipzig trial in 1934, when he was charged with setting the Reichstag on fire. The man who became Bulgaria's first Communist dictator 10 years later, unknowingly expressed the oldest and most deeply rooted conviction of the Bulgarians, namely that they are an exceptionally gifted and civilised people who should not be underestimated.
We, the Bulgarians, believe ourselves to be the most industrious people on this earth. But if your stay in our country has made you doubt this claim, then last month may have confirmed your reservations. The red numbers in your calendar had prepared you for a break from work on 1 May, Labour Day, and on 24 May, the Day of the Slavonic Alphabet and Culture. According to the calendar, everybody had to be at their workplace on 30 April and 25 May. But they weren't. The whole working population was given two legal, government-sanctioned holiday breaks.
I grew up in Sydney: beaches, banana trees, lawn mowers. I vaguely remember my impressions of Bulgaria as a kid; it was one of those Eastern bloc countries that showed up at the Olympics. Good at weightlifting. A mysterious and shadowy country, imprisoned behind a wall of political and ideological differences. If you'd told me that one day I'd be living here, I'd probably have laughed.
It's a rock high above a meandering river on the southern Black Sea coast. It's located in an area declared a nature reserve, which has managed to protect it from the unbridled construction and entrepreneurship seen elsewhere south of Sozopol.