Think again! Communism with the highly ritualised rules for social behaviour its omniscient apparatchiks generated may be no more, but the system that followed it, referred by Bulgarians as the ongoing Transition, failed to change the way the former apparatchiks, many of them now businessmen and entrepreneurs, thought.
Before he came to Bulgaria, Stephane Moisset, who describes himself as being 100 percent Parisian (meaning born and raised in Paris), lived five or six different lives. He went to a school of journalism and then to law school. He studied history of art. He lived in Spain, England and the United States. He worked as a press attache for the Israeli Embassy in France. He created an art auction house, the first in Luxembourg, and then a PR agency, both of which he sold. Then he started the first "luxury house" for dogs – which was later bought by a former neighbour, Gerard Depardieu.
What was the last Bulgarian, or non-English language, book you read? Don't feel uncomfortable if you cannot answer. Only three percent of all books published annually in the United States are translations, and fiction accounts for less than one percent.
Anyone wanting to stay in Bulgaria for longer, either professionally or for pleasure, will sooner or later end up in a meeting with a bunch of Bulgarians and will likely be befuddled by at least some of the local ways. No, I am not talking about the fine differences between the various brands of rakiya and why it should be taken as an aperitif, preferably with a Shopska. Helping yourself to copious amounts of the local liquor and doing it exactly as the locals do is easy to learn.