VAGABOND FEATURES

The elderly woman smiles at the blonde girl standing in the small park with her grandmother. "What's your name?" she asks. "Ivana," the child answers. "Oh, like the singer?" the old woman asks without a trace of irony in her voice. "Yes! I want to be like her when I grow up," the girl replies as proudly as any Italian teenager named Luciano would, when talking about the opera singing lessons he is taking. "She is very good. She sings in the children's choir," her proud grandmother boasts.

For 45 years the Communist state kept the lid very tight on every aspect of social life, including music. When Bulgaria was invaded by the Soviets in 1944, the local Communist apparatchiks were quick to denounce any Western influence Bulgaria had enjoyed, jazz being but one example, and to promote its own folklore, often imbued with nationalist or "New Life" undertones.

The operating table has been disinfected and polished to a shine before the next patient is laid upon it. Dr Sashka Vitanova and her assistant prepare medicine, syringes, and bandages. The assistant holds down the patient, as his claws and sharp beak might be dangerous.

You can almost feel the sap rising in the grass, flowers and foliage in the meadow. Spring is at its height and summer is just around the corner. The crust of the spit-roasted lamb is brown. The fat dripping onto the flames returns to the air as aromatic smoke, which mixes with the hubbub produced by the crowd who have gathered in the open to celebrate 6 May in the same way as their ancestors did – with songs, dancing and roast lamb.

As Helmut Schmidt – the former German chancellor, managing director of Die Zeit and a heavy smoker for many years – can attest, since smoking was banned on airplanes, air travel has become an agony that nobody has managed to transform into pleasure.

If you are in Bulgaria in the week beginning 13 April, you can easily tell that Easter is approaching. Preparations for the festivities begin with a couple of rituals that everybody strictly observes.

If you are in Sofia at the weekend, you can't fail to hear the bells that mark the beginning of services in the St Aleksandr Nevskiy Cathedral. Their mighty tones echo throughout the city centre and, some say, even further, provided the weather is calm.

A light breeze ruffles the surface of Koprinka Dam, creating a ripple of tiny waves in its wake. Some ducks land on the water, skidding unceremoniously to a halt. A fisherman sits motionless on the shore, waiting for his luck to change. Away to the north the majestic escarpment of Stara Planina stands sentinel to this idyllic Bulgarian scene.

Lord Sandwich's sandwich, the melba dessert of Dame Nellie Melba, the Beef Stroganoff named after Russian aristocrats – history records the recipes and names of these culinary legends.

No one, however, knows how the printsesa, or princess, was born. Or the strandzhanka, or woman from Strandzha, for that matter. Both refer to the same thing – a slice of white bread grilled with minced meat. Other variations include toppings of kashkaval, or yellow cheese, or a thick mixture of cheese and eggs.

If in the first week of April you suddenly feel faint, sleepy, lose your appetite, your sense of coordination and get a headache, don't blame your boss, the kids or your partner. What you should attribute these symptoms to is the lack of sleep caused by the turning of the clock forward by one hour. Summer time in the EU, including Bulgaria this year falls on 29 March, and makes the day longer at the expense of getting up earlier in the morning. In the opinion of doctors and biologists, the human body takes about a week to deal with the stress caused by changing time.

Winter in Bulgaria wouldn't be complete without the endless name day celebrations, quivering slabs of slanina, or salted pork fat, and litres of rich red wine. In January and February alone you'll be required to do damage to your liver and waistline on Vasilyovden, or St Basil's Day; Yordanovden, or St Jordan's Day; Ivanovden, or St John's Day; Antonovden, or St Anthony's Day; Atanasovden, or St Athanasius's Day; and, of course, Trifon Zarezan, the winegrower's holiday on 14 February, which many people also celebrate on 1 February.

The Get-To-Know-the-Fatherland-To-Fall-in-Love-With-It slogan perhaps made sense at some point – back when Bulgaria's natural environment was still relatively unmolested, and potholed roads led to places of breathtaking beauty. Bulgarians getting to know their homeland today run the risk of wanting to disappear rather than fall in love – especially when exploring the Black Sea coast.

No matter where you are – Los Angeles, London, Paris, Moscow, Bangkok or Tokyo – 14 February is celebrated in the same way. Crossing cultural and religious boundaries, Valentine's Day everywhere includes red hearts, chocolate, champagne and Mariah Carey singing "Without You."

If you happen to find yourself in Pleven's central square on 10 December, you might think you've stumbled into a historical film. Men in copies of 19th Century Russian, Romanian and Ottoman military uniforms pose with sabres and Berdana and Martini rifles against a backdrop of cannons and bayonets – the fence surrounding the Mausoleum, one of the city's prime tourist attractions. This re-enactment of the Ottomans' surrender to the Russians at Pleven in 1877 after a five-month siege is a set, not for a film, but for the city's traditional liberation celebrations.

"If you don't learn to savour the upsides of living in a foreign country, the downsides can drive you crazy," observes Mark Stevens, director of British defence and aerospace company BAE Systems in Sofia. His words capture the attitude shared by many general managers of large international companies in Bulgaria.

I am sitting in the courtyard of the unnamed eatery in the village of Leshten, on the western slopes of the Rhodope. The view before me is magnificent – the sun is setting over the Pirin, and its last rays colour in dark red the nearby mud-and-wood houses. The home-made rakiya I've tasted is probably the best in southwestern Bulgaria, the shopska has been made with hand-picked pink tomatoes, and the white cheese is simply fabulous.

A man of perhaps 80 slowly comes up the path to the restaurant. “Hi,” he says.

There are no avider postcard fans in the world than German tourists. When they arrive in a new place, they waste no time seeing the sights, but rush to the bookstores where they wrestle with other German tourists to lay hands on the best local postcards and write greetings to all their acquaintances, aunts and distant cousins "at home." Then they quickly resume their journeys, without ever bothering to take a look at the towns they've been in. For them postcard writing is a fulltime job.

To complicate the problem, you are no longer on home ground, you are now part of the Bulgarian dating market, so now you not only have to contend with the fact that your good looks faded long ago and your confidence diminished the minute you labelled yourself "a bad mother," but you also have to search for a date in a marketplace that doesn't speak your language or understand your culture.

In the mid-1980s when I was a student in Dresden, then in the GDR, I received a strange letter. It arrived in an ordinary envelope, postmarked and addressed, but it was empty; it appeared to have been opened and then inexpertly resealed. Upon closer inspection, a folded grey sheet of paper fell out, which turned out to be a signed and stamped official form. East German customs informed me in their inimitable style that "one item of printed material cut from a capitalist media source containing content hostile to the GDR's civic order" had been removed from my postal package.

Sometime during the 1930s, the underage Hollywood star HoH Shirley Temple decided to watch her newest film in the movie theatre. She had become famous long before her 10th birthday for her touching performance as a child who had lost one of her parents. Yet as Erich Kästner describes in his novel Lottie and Lisa, Shirley wasn't able to watch her own movie – children weren't allowed to see the film. She was old enough to act in it, but not old enough to watch it.