I see the sun this morning, after spending the solstice at the bottom of a fog bank. It will set a little farther north tonight, and each night from now until May, when I will board an airplane and fly back to America.

Blagoevgrad is south of Bangor by three degrees of latitude, so the days aren’t as short as they are back home. I’ll be home for Christmas this year only in my dreams. When I committed to this adventure, I thought it unlikely that I would fly back to the States for the holidays, only to get jet-lagged all over again before the start of the spring semester. Maine is cold in December. So is Bulgaria, as it turns out, but cold is a relative thing.

When I arrived here at the end of August, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never been to Bulgaria nor known anyone who had been here. I didn’t know the first word of the language. I decided to enroll in a Bulgarian class, on a pass-fail basis, hoping that I could squeeze in the homework between my teaching duties. This post grew out of an assignment. It’s way past due, but here it is: Seven Things that have surprised me about Bulgaria:

1. People are outdoors, all the time, even when it’s cold. Restaurants have outdoor tables, but so do little coffee shops and even liquor stores, and in the winter people simply bundle up and continue to socialize at them.
2. The climate is more like California than Maine. I lived in the mountains east of San Diego, and the region around Blagoevgrad reminds me of it. A change in altitude means a change of several degrees in temperature. Snow in the mountains becomes rain in the valleys. Autumn was warm and dry. Summers are hot.
3. Children learn English from American cartoons and video games. By the time they get to college, most of them have been speaking English for most of their lives. They seem to appreciate my halting attempts at greeting them in Bulgarian, but they don’t expect their professors at the American University to know the language, or to try to learn it.
4. There aren’t many people of color. Maine, the whitest of the fifty United States, is more diverse than the parts of Bulgaria I’ve seen. The only black person I’ve talked to here was from London. The countries of Eastern Europe are among the least ethnically diverse in the world. Bulgaria does have minorities, including a Turkish population that was forced to change their surnames, and the Roma, who are often unfairly stereotyped as thieves and beggars, but don’t look substantially different from ethnic Bulgarians.

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5. Bulgaria still has a king, who is the last living person in the world to hold the title of “Tsar.” He was six when the communists sent his family into exile after the Second World War, and when communism fell, he returned to Bulgaria and briefly led a royalist party in parliament. Now in his eighties, he lives in retirement in Sofia, on an estate that was returned to his family after the end of Bulgarian communism.
6. The Cyrillic alphabet isn’t as hard as it looks. It’s phonetic, so once you learn the letters, you can pronounce the words. And Bulgarian contains a surprising number of international words, from “weekend” to “web design.” The alphabet has separate letters for the “ch” in “church,” the “sh” in “shoe,” the “sht” in “shtick,” and the “zh” in “Dr. Zhivago.” But it takes two letters to represent the “j” in “James T. Kirk,” and there’s no “th” as in “thick,” which is the way I feel whenever I try a conversation. After three and a half months, I can read the streets signs and take a stab at menus, but the spoken language, outside of short transactions, still baffles me.
7. Cars are considered desirable, as is the infrastructure to accommodate them. I hope that Bulgaria does not succumb to the commuter culture that has wrecked vast swaths of America. As of now, it’s cheaper for someone who lives in Sofia and works in Blagoevgrad, 80 kilometers (50 miles) apart, to maintain two places rather than drive back and forth each day. And many people don’t own a car and don’t want to. I’m not the outlier here that I am at home. So that’s encouraging.

The only conclusion I can draw from these disparate observations is that when you come to live in a foreign country, it’s best to leave your expectations at the airport.

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