Never A Slave To Fashion in Bulgaria

A good tip I learnt since coming to Bulgaria and that is not to become a slave to fashion, especially in the home. As an expatriate there are habits that take a long time to get rid of. Wearing shoes in the house, saying please and thank you to everything, eating as fast as you can and stopping only when your plate is empty, using a knife to name a few. Most if not all habits I feel are better here than the old habits I used to have, but the main difference is the habit of being a slave to fashion in the home.

Things look nice, but they are nicer if they are trendy, up to date and fashionable. This is what I was forced to believe in the UK. Here, there are things that are used in the home that are twenty thirty or even fifty years old and work just as well as they did when first bought. If things do have to be replaced, they are replaced with the cheapest they can find, even if it means shopping for weeks to find it.

A classic example is a table cloth that was replaced. The old one was at least 30 years old and the cheapest around at that time. It was a plastic table cloth with some flowers decoration on it that had faded over the years. The problem that arose was that there were a few holes not in the tablecloth and Galia had seen some very cheap plastic material so bought form the second hand market with the table clothing in mind.

The point was that this tablecloth was in mind for being replaced but it had taken around two months for a bargain piece of plastic to be found. No new table cloth, a sheet of plastic that would be turned into a tablecloth with a bit of sizing and cutting. This is a habit that stands out in Bulgaria, their one minded resourcefulness to get something replace at the cheapest possible price, yet still let it do the job very well.

We now have a new table cloth, but that's not the end of it. What happened to the old tablecloth? Simple it was cut up, the holey bits were thrown away and smaller table clothes were made for other tables that plants were placed on. These will now last at least another 30 years, possibly forever.

It hasn't taken me long to catch up on to this habit of finding the cheapest and recycling the old, it was always in my blood, which has a green streak in it anyway.

Kind And Generous Bulgarian Baba

Baba is of the old Bulgarian school and a very funny person with it. However, she does get stressed out at the smallest of things. A hole in a jumper is a major problem and she's on it with repairs even before you can take the jumper off! Just missing a phone call sends here into a panic worrying that the call was the utmost importance. She will spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out who it was and what they want question everyone until the mystery caller that was missed is solved.

Now 85 years of age, she is full of aches and pains with the colder weather during night now upon us this mid November. Even with the aches, she never attempts to put the newly installed air-conditioning system on when she is at home on her own.

There are two reason for this, the main one is, she’d rather stay cold than use up the electric, she often goes to bed at 7:00 before the system was installed to save energy. The other reason is that she just can’t understand the air conditioning controls. Even though the on/off button is the biggest and the only one coloured pink. No matter how many times we try to teach her, it goes in one ear and out the other.

The other day she had us all in stitches with a typical incident. She said that lunchtime she had lost two teeth; one fell in her bean soup she was eating and other she accidentally ate. That was it! The story was a two liner. The funny thing was that we all couldn’t understand how on earth you could lose teeth eating soup! She repeated the story time and time again and it remained as funny each time as she herself had trouble telling it from the fits of giggling.

Baba always puts other people before herself, even if she was starving, she would make sure others ate before her. She sneaks out of the house without telling anyone sometimes and brings back basic food such as bread bought on her measly pension. She knows we usually shop everyday after work, but feels that she has to contribute something to the dinner table. That’s Baba; they just don’t make people like this anymore - even in Bulgaria. Looking after here is our duty in the family house, but it really is a case of her looking after us.

So what is the point of this particular blog?

Bulgaria is changing so fast that it has left many behind, Baba is one of those people. She just doesn’t know what has hit here with the changes over the last ten years. It is now an unfamiliar world she is living in, along with many others of her generation. It becomes even more unfamiliar to her as each day goes by, I see that very clearly.