Elen Koleva is young, but she's already won the National Film Centre's best female role award for her performance in Shivachki, or Seamstresses (see Vagabond No. 14). Despite her age, she has no illusions: Bulgaria won't see the likes of Hillary Clinton anytime soon, thanks to the simple fact that Bulgarian women are not treated as equal to men.
“The predicament faced by teachers here seemed outrageous to me from my very first days in Bulgaria. Apparently, the powers that be don't consider education an asset. For a country to be able to function well, it's essential to prioritise its education system. It's the young, well-educated and qualified people who can shape a country's future,” says Arnaud Joanny, a teacher at Sofia's Alphonse de Lamartine 9th French Language School. “In France, the situation is completely different.
In the summer Bulgaria became the latest EU country to introduce tougher legislation to curb what many pundits have dubbed the ongoing “War on the Roads”. Under new regulations, drivers who speed will have to pay heavy fines (up to 300 leva, or over £100) and risk having their driving licence suspended for up to three months.
Anyone who has sat behind a steering wheel in Bulgaria will supposedly heave a sigh of relief as – at least theoretically – the new measures might indeed make Bulgarian roads less dangerous. Yet many people have expressed doubts.
Changing street names might be an odd elections tactic, at least seen from a Western standpoint, but Bulgarian politicians won't stop at anything, not even digging up grandpa's grave, to discredit a political opponent. In October, the Sofia City Council, acting on a proposal by a councillor for the ruling BSP, or Bulgarian Socialist Party, passed a resolution to re-rename one of the few pieces of green in central Sofia – the square acre surrounding the Sofia Theatre.
On one of the hottest days of the summer an English friend and I went to Burgas City Council to get the forms needed to “regularise” some plumbing work in the garden of his newly acquired home. After some time in Bulgaria my friend had acclimatised to the system's eccentricities. But he was still genuinely surprised – even shocked – at some of the finer details of Bulgarian etiquette.
All of us know the rules. In fact, you'd have to be like the Peter Sellers character in Being There not to realise the scam. But, in case you're housebound, mentally retarded or a pauper, here's the routine. Even little bills are quickly rounded up in cafés and restaurants. The waiter will take a five leva note, knowing that they owe you, say, 60 stotinki. They then shuffle off, never to be seen again or, alternatively, give you a perfunctory look in the eye beforehand to gauge your determination – or gullibility. In other words, explicitly request the change or forget about it!
You're in a prefabricated, concrete-housing building, furnished with the standard, ugly wallpaper, carpeting and lamps from the era of “developed Socialism”. It's the kind of home few Europeans aspire to in 2007. Indeed, until 1989, thousands risked their lives to leave this type of apartment and the drab uniformity that stretched far beyond interior designs.
There's been a certain amount of excitement in our street of late and it all centres around one thing: a road. And no, I'm not referring to some earnest debate that we've all been having about better links with our new European neighbours, but a simple tarmac thoroughfare that will save us all a bit of time and inconvenience.
For those people embarking on a change of lifestyle in Bulgaria, whether they are ditching the conventional rat race in their thirties, or planning to retire, the reality of moving abroad is selling up lock, stock and barrel and heading off into the sunset with no plans to return.
No big deal if you've done your homework you might say. True, but if Bulgaria doesn't live up to their expectations for whatever reason, expats will soon find the Balkan grass is no greener than the one they couldn't wait to leave behind.
Official statistics from KAT (the traffic police) show that 207 people died in traffic accidents in Bulgaria and 1,971 people were injured in the first quarter of 2007 alone. These statistics, in a nation of just 7.5 million people - and not that many cars - are truly shocking.
If we analyse the figures we find that 34.4 percent of the fatalities were drivers, 27.3 percent were passengers and 38.55 percent were pedestrians. More than a third of those killed were in the 18 to 24 age group.