Finding Myself in Bulgaria

So you’ve been wondering (or not) about the title of my blog. ‘Tuk ne e Amerika’ (Here [Bulgaria] is not America’) is a phrase I used to hear a lot when I first arrived in Bulgaria and was confronted with the realities of trying to get seemingly simple things done, like mailing a letter or paying a bill. Instead of mailing a check – the check has never been a method of payment here – you actually stood in line at the post office (telephone bill) or at a payment center (electric) to take care of the monthly ‘zadulzheniya’ (obligations or debts). So I would reach the front of the line and, sparked perhaps by my obvious ‘otherness’ or my ineptness with the Bulgarian language, the exchange with the cashier would almost invariably include some reference to the fact that things here are, well, different.

Sometimes it was ‘Tuk ne e Amerika, na li?’ The last words turned the phrase into a well-meaning question with an inflection suggesting sympathy for my supposed suffering in a strange environment. If I had a complaint, it was ‘Vizhte kakvo, tuk ne e Amerika!’  – an all-purpose explanation or excuse for the way things stood, offered in lieu of an apology that nothing could be done, usually because ‘ne zavisi ot men’(it doesn’t depend on me); or it was served with a side order of ‘kakvo iskate, 500 godini…’ (what do you want, 500 years…) All of these statements had so many hidden implications, of a feeling of undeserved inferiority or subservience, of a national history of oppression (500 years under the ‘Turkish Yoke’, then 50 of Communism, now 20 of Transition), of a feeling of disorientation during the early, surly years of the Transition to Democracy. Their message to me was that I, a priori as an American, had unreasonably high expectations that needed to be shelved, discarded, or at least rethought to conform with ‘Bulgarskata deistvitelnost’ (the Bulgarian reality)

One of the thematic threads of Bulgariana, Randall Baker’s engaging account of living as an ex-pat in Bulgaria, is that so much that is so typically Bulgarian – and so different from what we experience in the US – is actually showing us how misguided the American lifestyle really is. Baker's narrative is infused with that hopeful sense of embarking on each new day in Bulgaria as a fresh adventure, of relishing in the small – and usually pleasant – surprises that you are sure to encounter here.  As an American living in Bulgaria, I share a similar MO, and see it not as a set of survival skills, but as a redefining of who I am and what my life can be, both on a short- and long-term basis. Here I have learned that the real nature of a situation is determined by how you choose to look at it ('zavisi i ot men!'); that great joy can be derived from things that from another perspective would have gone unnoticed; and that the concept expressed by G. B. Shaw (or was it Anonymous?) that “life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself” is worth embracing.