Ellis and Jodie's Bulgarian Adventure

A Bulgarian traffic policeman pulls over a car for speeding. "You were driving with 60 km/h, and there is 50-km/h limit here!" the officer tells the driver. "No, I was driving 40 km/h," the driver starts arguing. "I can show you what the radar detected!" retorts the officer, already getting upset. The driver's wife speaks from the back seat, "There is no point, officer - when my husband is drunk it is really no use arguing with him!" From the Sofia News Agency .

A Bulgarian woman is talking to her fiance. "Honey, my eyes are blue like the pretty sky, right?" "Umm, yeah...," said her beloved man. "And my lips are like the blossom of a rose, right?" "Aha..." "Oh, dear, how much I love it when you say such romantic, poetic things to me." From the Sofia News Agency .

A middle aged Bulgarian family. The wife starts shouting at her husband at 2 in the morning: "I left two bottles of rakia in the fridge! Why is there one bottle left?!" "Because I didn't see the second one," explains the husband. From the Sofia News Agency .

Jodie and I have been living in Sofia, Bulgaria, for a year and a half but our knowledge of Bulgarian is still very rudimentary. You would think that we would be able to conduct a simple conversation in the language, but that is beyond our capabilities. Jodie is an expert at ordering taxis by phone, and giving them directions to our home or to the office. And we can order food when a restaurant menu is only in Bulgarian. But other than that, we're pretty stuck. Why is this the case? Everything is just excuses of course, but listed here are the Top Ten Reasons We Never Learned to Speak Bulgarian . 1. The Cyrillic Alphabet = Even after all this time we read words slowly, especially getting confused with the letters that are the same in English but have a different sound in Bulgarian. 2. We work in English. 3. Young people in Bulgaria speak English, so in most cases there's someone who can help you in stores. 4. When we manage to say something correctly in Bulgarian, even if it...

A lost foreign tourist approaches two Bulgarian police officers in Sofia asking them for the directions. He first asks in English. The cops, who don't speak any foreign languages, fail to understand anything. The tourist then asks in French, in German, in Italian, in Spanish... Still nothing from the policemen. Frustrated, he walks on. "We should really start studying foreign languages...," says one of the Bulgarian policemen. "No, we shouldn't, they are totally useless," goes the other,"Look at this guy! He knows so many, and they still got him nowhere..." From Novinite.com

The Rough Guide to Bulgaria lists fields of sunflowers as one of the "30 Things Not to Miss" when visiting the country. We saw endless fields turned towards the sun on our drive home from Veliko Turnovo.

As I (Ellis) was riding in a taxi to a meeting in the center of Sofia yesterday, the taxi driver, whose knowledge of English was very good, complained about the maintenance level of the city's streets. "There are potholes everywhere," he said. "And where there are none, the municipality is making sure to dig new holes."

Seen in Yuzhen Park in January.

We actually learned about this breaking news story after it was reported on television in Israel. But we have been aware of the many stray dogs on the streets here for a long time. They all appear to be from the same breed = a cross between the Cananaanite and a German Shephard. We had never given these dogs, which sometimes run around in packs, too much thought. But now they are in the news. The director of Sofia's zoo says a pack of stray dogs killed 13 of its animals. Zoo director Ivan Ivanov says an unknown number of dogs leapt through a fence and attacked eight mouflon, four fallow deer and a doe. Associated Press, January 30, 2010 The mouflon, by the way, is a subspecies group of the wild sheep Ovis aries. According to the zoo director, the recent cold temperatures and hunger drove the usually placid stray dogs into the zoo on their attack. But according to Novinite.com the Sofia News Agency , " veterinarians discovered six rabid dogs in the moat of the fallow deer space...

A police officer tells a colleague about a lengthy special operation for the arrest of highway robbers that took place in parts of Southern Bulgaria. "So those gangsters managed to get away at first, and made it to the mountain villages... hiding there... It was terrible... We had to chase them around for an entire week. And the worst part was there was nothing to drink - no beer, no wine, no rum, no cognac..." "What about water??", his colleague asked. "What do you mean - "water"? We didn't even think about showering in such a kind of tense situation!..." Sofia Morning News

Pernik, December 27, 2009.

Recently there was an announcement that the Sofia Municipality will begin collecting abandoned cars from the sidewalks and streets of the city. Most of them are eyesores and interfere with walking, however, some have developed a certain charm about them. Sofia, November 2009.