The Grants' Bulgaria Blog.

Uh-oh.

It’s been too long between blogs! We beg your collective pardon. We promised not to let our blog ‘fizzle out’ so hopefully we can get back on track!

It’s 10 weeks until we leave Bulgaria! That’s an attractively short period of time, to us. One of the other missionary families asked us if we were looking forward to leaving. We diplomatically answered that we were looking forward to getting home, rather than leaving Bulgaria. It’s true; as the time for us to leave gets closer – amidst continuing feelings of homesickness! – we are also beginning to imagine some of the things we’ll miss when we come home.

That’s the topic of this blog: things we’ll miss about Bulgaria, and – on a slightly less upbeat note – things we’re worried about in relation to returning home.

1. The price of things: we normally loathe talking about money with our language helper, Mirem, since it makes us feel so awkward. By which I mean ‘rich’, of course. But today we had an interesting discussion where we started comparing the differing prices of things in Australia and Bulgaria. It started with the price of the internet. We explained that our sharehouse prior to leaving Australia was on a AU$70 per month plan (between 5 people)… whereas we’re paying BGN16 (AU$13) per month here for 4 times the speed and no download limit. Bread is AU$3-4 a loaf compared to 80st (AU$0.65); tomatoes AU$6-10/kg compared to BGN1-2 (AU$0.80-1.65). Mirem was horrified. We explained that people earn more in Australia. I think we gave the figure of AU$1500 per month which, on reflection, would be below the minimum wage. Mirem suggested that the average wage here is BGN240 (AU$190) a month. On top of that, David recently told us that unemployment rises to around 40% in the mahalle during winter. Actually, facts like that kind of put any whingeing I might have had about how expensive everything is in Australia into perspective…

2. The Lada: what can mere words say?

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3. Dodginess! I remember writing about this from Istanbul before we’d even made it to Bulgaria last June. There’s a completely different attitude here to things like safety, efficiency, hygiene etc… Chainsawing firewood in a kindergarten playground during recess? Yup, no worries. Postal clerks going about their business merrily ignoring a room full of people wanting to get their letters stamped? You betcha! BBQ chickens on a set of rotisseries with raw chickens dripping onto cooked ones? Absolutely. We saw equally good examples in both Turkey and Romania, too – obviously it’s just we uptight Australians who worry about such things. Ok, so I’m not about to ignore everything I know about preventing salmonella outbreaks, but there’s certainly something liberating about not worrying so much!

4. Snow: ok, this is more relevant to right now where it’s minus 6 degrees outside and steadily snowing! It’s been cold all week but it’s only just started snowing again. It makes all the frostbite worth it. I went for a (short) walk after dinner just so I could kick around in the crazy stuff. Did you know that when it’s this far below freezing the snow on the ground behaves like very fine sand? And you have no hope whatsoever of making it into a snowball? It’s like dust!

Well, I’ll be uncharacteristically succinct and leave it there for now. I had some much longer and more boring thoughts to share with you, but hey, I’ll leave that for another time since it’s late and you’re all about to start waking up and checking all your favourite blogs, right?

Cheers,

Stu.

Tags: Bulgaria, culture shock, food, Lada, snow, weather

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 12:15 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.