Britons living in Bulgaria. Guide to Bulgaria, Sofia and Varna

'Mum, why is everything so ugly?' - guardian.co.uk

guardian.co.uk

'Mum, why is everything so ugly?' guardian.co.uk, UK - Jul 4, 2008 by Kapka Kassabova Britons don't face too much grief when travelling abroad. Everyone has heard of Britain; English is almost ubiquitous and in times of ...

'Mum, why is everything so ugly?' - guardian.co.uk
But it's always been free, the bewildered neighbours protested. But what I have often found particularly striking about the Balkans is that its nations tend to know less about their immediate neighbours than they do about France, Germany, Britain or Russia. Even for those wielding power, the system had become meaningless.Ordinary children generally knew that bureaucracy made life more awkward in eastern Europe than on the other side of the iron curtain. Everyone has heard of Britain; English is almost ubiquitous and in times of need, most of us can manage a bit of Spanglish or Franglais to see us through. Furthermore, the immigration into cities happened late in Bulgaria (mostly in the postwar period), so most Bulgarian children had one escape - to their relatives in the countryside. He didn't miss the opportunity to point out that I came from a country that wasn't a real country, but a character in a children's story called 'The Wombles'. He had wavy blond hair and a rugby-player's jaw, and presided over a court of lackeys who laughed at his jokes. He was charging people for parking their cars in our communal carpark. I watched my mother wash the pram from top to bottom every time we returned from an outing, because the mud managed to get even on to the pram's roof ... In Phys Ed, Jamie mocked my cheap canvas sports shoes from the height of his bouncy Puma trainers. Living conditions were less cramped, and her grandparents and other relatives were delightful, so she had a greater sense of normality in a place in which local gossip was much more important than learning Marx or Dimitrov by rote. More important, it meant that they had access to the vitamins and protein that were so miserably absent from an urban communist diet.Kassabova's relations also offered her a psychological escape. Pay up or piss off.' And he cracked the joints of his enormous fists ... People sold contraband cigarettes and suspect alcohol mixtures straight from their underground cellars. She finds it shattered: and even the shards of her previous life that she comes across here and there can cut and scratch unexpectedly. She has also demonstrated, without indulging in self-pity, how hard it is to be one of the tens of millions who have been compelled in the past two decades for one reason or another to up sticks and reinvent their lives elsewhere. She learned early on, after moving to England in her teens in 1990, that her Bulgarian heritage bred not interest among her classmates but contempt: "The chief heart-throb, Jamie, was also the chief bully. She senses that Bulgaria after the fall of communism is becoming a very different place, in some respects much more interesting, but in others even more dangerous than before. The Communist party didn't really give a damn what went on in the countryside, assuming, quite rightly, that the peasants were never likely to revolt. The grotty high-rise reflected Bulgarian society - neglect and hypocrisy were eating away at the foundations of lofty ideals rendered senseless through ritual repetition. They look like shit.' Jamie's lackeys sniggered. This afforded them the opportunity to run around a bit and experience a half-normal childhood. Tiny cafes and shops had mushroomed among the panels. We've parked our Moskvich here for years. While most people in Europe have heard of Bulgaria, very few can claim to know anything about it, its culture and its people. Yesterday's bully was today's entrepreneur."There are similarities between Kassabova's stories and those in Vesna Goldsworthy's Chernobyl Strawberries.