In the middle of the summer, the lead story on BBC1's Ten O'Clock News was a report on baby smuggling in Bulgaria. Presented by Sangita Myska, it used a hidden camera to expose a child trafficker operating out of the popular Black Sea resort of Varna.
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!
Ask acquaintances about their hobbies or leisure activities. They'll go blank for a moment as they think about what they do in their free time. After a few seconds, most people will offer a vague answer: “listening to music”, “reading”, “watching movies”. A few folks do have real hobbies, like paragliding, or collecting pre-World War II shoelaces, whatever.
He was a humble Bulgarian waiter. I was a jet-setting Westerner working in the film business. But we fell in love and ended up in a remote village in the Balkan countryside.
One of the most popular images associated with Bulgaria is the Tsarevets Hill in Veliko Tarnovo. Proud Bulgarians regard it as one of the important symbols of their statehood – to the point that they have made it the centrepiece of a sound and light show. It served as the capital of the restored Bulgarian kingdom from the time of the liberation from Byzantine rule until the Ottoman conquest, a kingdom that at one point stretched between three seas.
Visitors to Sofia's Nevsky Square will be familiar with the small embroidery market staffed by middle-aged women. But some of their designs have changed...
Needlepoint lace, colourful blankets and finely embroidered linen squares form the mainstay of the product on display. The artefacts represent a connection with Bulgaria's folk roots as well as a great opportunity for tourists to pick up a few light gifts. But such brief exchanges, haggling over a few leva, leave little time to uncover real lives and personal histories.
There was a lack of female leaders. Women were working outside the home, but still tied to their traditional tasks of cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Female students seemed to lack initiative.
When one Bulgarian housewife wants to insult another, she doesn't accuse her in public of neglecting her garden – Bulgarian gardens grow tomatoes, not honeysuckle. She simply calls her a zagoritendzhera, a “woman who has burned her pot”.
The LUKoil garage in Zapaden Park told me only Shell and OMV sold vignettes. The OMV garage in Knyazhevo said they only had weekly and monthly vignettes in stock, not yearly ones. The Shell garage at Dragichevo said the State Roads Agency, responsible for printing and distributing the vignettes, had stopped printing yearly ones. The OMV at Dupnitsa said it was nothing to do with them.
His fans have acclaimed his fiction – a sex manual replete with lewd and titillating examples – as a hilarious “up yours” to political correctness. His critics claim his writing is coarse, vulgar, offensive and shallow. One British reader said she was reminded of her country in the 1970s when some “misguided mediocrities” championed Carry On movies and Adventures of a Taxi Driver as the best Britain had to offer.