Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
I’ve been here just a week, but I’m starting to learn my way around. I can now get seamlessly from my apartment to the main classroom and office building at the American University in Bulgaria, and to the residential campus, a few blocks away. I know where to buy food, and I’ve managed to find a left-handed guitar.
The names of the streets are in Cyrillic but also transcribed into the familiar Roman alphabet. Many of them are named after people with long, unpronounceable names. I can attest that it’s easy to get lost.
The streets are busy with cars and pedestrians in roughly equal numbers. The major intersections are roundabouts, which keep traffic moving smoothly. I have seen nothing I would characterize as a traffic jam. Drivers stop for people crossing the street. You have to make sure they see you, but then they will wave you across, and it helps to politely wave back. No one seems to mind the few seconds this takes.
Some streets have red and green lights, like in America, and others have stop signs. But again, there seems to be sort of an unspoken give-and-take. Cars are not dominant, and drivers don’t exhibit an attitude that the roads exist primarily for them.
There are also a lot of bicyclists, almost none of them wearing helmets, and the occasional horse-drawn wagon, moving in the same traffic lanes as the cars. The wagons have car-style tires, and the horses move along at a pretty good clip. My guess is that these horse-drawn vehicles have come into town from surrounding farms and villages. In any case, the roads, even the major ones, seem to be shared, with little animosity between users of different forms of transportation.
I haven’t explored the local buses yet, but they are very much in evidence, and they run in the evenings and on Sundays.
People are out walking at all hours. Little kiosks are all over the place, selling food, newspapers, coffee, cigarettes, candy bars, and beer. You can buy beer almost anywhere. On my second day here, I bought a bottle of beer from such a stand, intending to drink it on the small balcony attached to my hotel room. The woman pulled out an opener and removed the cap for me. No one seemed to care if I drank it on the street.
And yet I’ve seen no public drunkenness. It’s safe to walk at night, even for women walking alone. I’ve seen little evidence of crime (though I’m told pickpockets abound, targeting foreigners), and minimal police presence.
Another thing I haven’t seen is any homeless people. I mean none. I’ve seen no people camped out on the street with all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart. This has become such a common sight in America that it’s sort of shocking when you don’t see it. But everybody seems to have a place to get inside at night.
Stores are small and compact. They’ve got everything you need, and they provide hand-baskets, but the aisles are narrow, the checkout counters small, and the stores numerous. No matter where you live in this city of 70,000, there seems to be a place to buy the basics of day-to-day life within walking distance.
And although people do drive and own cars, I’ve seen no huge parking lots. Some apartment buildings have attached garages, but cars are parked along small side streets and alleyways. Some of the sidewalks are interrupted by construction, and people simply walk around, into the street itself. Drivers seem to accommodate them.
It’s a vertical city, built between mountains, with few lawns and fewer stand-alone single-family homes. I’ve managed to rent a beautiful apartment on the top floor of a six-story building, with a wraparound deck that offers a 270° view, for the equivalent of around $250 a month. American dollars go a long way here. I’m five walking minutes from my job, and I can stop for groceries on my way home. Some of my colleagues live out of town – a few live in nearby countries – but commuting to work is a lifestyle choice, not a necessity.
A week is too short a time in which to draw any conclusions. Whenever I think I’ve figured something out, I discover something else that proves my first impression wrong. But next week I start a course in basic Bulgarian, offered to new teachers as well as students. In these first few days I’ve been doing a lot of pointing and pantomime and thumbing through my phrase book.
All I can say at this point is that the concept of “from Away” has taken on a whole new meaning.
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