"Show me your cemeteries and I will tell you what kind of people you have." Applying Benjamin Franklin's witticism to Bulgaria's most emblematic graveyard – the Central Sofia Cemetery – will make you stop and think. Instead of ending up in the welcoming country advertised by the Bulgarian State Agency for Tourism, have you landed in some frightening place better suited to a Bram Stoker novel?
The wind of change does not blow with equal force everywhere. When you replace your old Walkman with the latest iPod, you make a small change in your standard of living. When someone who is not Spanish or Greek begins using Mañana or σιγά σιγά when talking business, this is a change in their way of thinking. However, when you change your religion, this fundamentally alters your whole life – the new religion is a new way of viewing the world.
FRANCE
Small City Theatre Behind the Canal, 2 Madrid Blvd FRANCE
According to the dust-cover blurb by Salman Rushdie, Solo is a novel of "exceptional, astonishing strangeness... confirming Rana Dasgupta as the most unexpected and original Indian writer of his generation."
An Indian writer? Writing about Bulgaria?
The sun was slowly reaching its zenith, but the streets and the squares of Samarkand were still cool. This coolness, coming from the gardens and the vineyards, from the channels crossing the town with their emerald waters, was what the Iranians, the Turks, the Maures, the Arabs, the Armenians, the Greeks and the Jews breathed in, in order to fill with their shrill cries the Sand Place or Registan, as they called the cloth market in the ancient part of town.