FORUM

There are two things about Bulgaria that are so closely entwined that you rarely see one without the other: wild dogs and rubbish. The two are an integral part of Bulgarian life, although it's safe to assume that both their days are numbered.

Being kept awake during your first few weeks in Bulgaria is a rite of passage that only the luckiest of expats manages to avoid. Once you've become accustomed to the nightly dog fights and howling, your only reminder of the nuisance comes via bleary-eyed house guests who complain about the incessant racket.

For some, this is not an empty question. The going rate is about 16,000 pounds, if you're looking to buy. A mother can expect to see about 1,000 pound of this, according to an article published in The Sunday Times last month.

In "Revealed: Bulgaria's Baby Traffickers" a female journalist posing as a childless Western woman looking for a "fast and easy way" to adopt a child goes to Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second largest city. There, in a Roma neighbourhood, the baby's grandmother offers baby Kalinka: hers for 11,000 pounds.

The Muslim month of fasting called Ramadan, or Ramazan in Turkish, began on 24 September. Muslims believe that on one of the days toward the end of the month - the 25, 27 or 29, it is not known exactly which - the Prophet Muhammad received the first revelations of the Qur'an from Allah.

Sitting here with my purple foot resting gingerly on the terrace chair, I look back on my first month or so in Sofia. While reflecting on my experiences here in my attempt to get my head round the place, I find that the more I try to come up with a word to sum up the city, the more I can only come up with "almost, but not quite". OK, that's a phrase, but it kind of works. Sofia is a well-cut Kenzo suit... with white socks. It's a land of contrasts.

As a preliminary test of my Orange nationalism I went to watch Lokomotiv Sofia play against Feyenoord Rotterdam. I was pleasantly surprised that I felt very good about the goals scored by the Bulgarians, although my local teams in Holland and Bulgaria are Ajax and Levski.

But what about THE BIG GAME? The question remained: should I back the Dutch favourites or dress in red, white and green and cheer for my new brethren?

My first brush with Bulgarian bureaucracy was at the Bulgarian consulate in Greece. My partner and I happened to see different consuls and were each told we needed a different set of paperwork for our Bulgarian visas. What! Surely there must be one set of criteria that everyone must follow?