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.
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.
News that homeless Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants had been camping out in London's Hyde Park triggered predictable outrage in sections of the British media.
The Daily Mail informed us that the immigrants "pitch their tents in one spot for a few nights, then pack up and move to another. They say they are able to get away with camping in the park, which is technically illegal, because there are no wardens and they rarely see any police".
The article was accompanied by a flood of comments from readers urging the authorities to "kick out" the "campers".
Going back a few months now, I was in TsUM. You know the place. Bulgarian Harrods.
I don't hang out there or anything. No, honestly. I was looking for a reassuringly expensive trinket for a lady friend's birthday, or something. Anyway there I was, rotating a plastic Swatch display cabinet and looking dubiously at the cheaper models, when I witnessed an unusual exchange in a nearby cafe.
There was a family there. Mum and Dad, and two kids. Pale and podgy they were, with father and son sporting matching ginger nut spiky hairstyles and Manchester United T-shirts.