Koprivstitsa House in Red

I went to Koprivstitsa a few weeks ago with friends from school. This is the town where the Bulgarian April Uprising of 1876 started and it’s well known for its classic architecture of the Bulgarian National Revival.

Koprivstitsa is like a right rite of passage.  All Bulgarians tell you that you must go (and you must) and then they want to know what you think of their town.  The only proper answer is that you loved it (and you will).

I think you’re obligated to go to Koprivstitsa if you come to Bulgaria for more than 10 days.  In fact, I think they ask you at the border when you’re exiting the country if you’ve been to visit and if you haven’t they don’t let you leave.  That’s really how great this town is.

Cozy little town

Going to Koprivstitsa for a weekend was a wonderful time. The weather was warm enough for a person (me) to enjoy walking about in a jacket in the crisp and cool day.  It was really the perfect weather for wandering around.  This is important because it’s clear that Koprivstitsa is meant to be wondered around and through at a leisurely pace.

A Bright Blue House

A house near our rented house

This is also a great town in which to stock up on preserves. I bought my fair share of jam and honey.  The jam here is some of the best (I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: the jam from Koprivstitsa tastes like sunshine.  I am not kidding. This stuff is great.)  The honey is good as well.

If it’s not clear by now I’ll be more direct: I love the town. And I think that everyone should visit it. I’ve been three times now.  Normally, I wouldn’t be very keen on going more than once or maybe twice to the same town but this place is lovely.  In my mind, it’s not very often that a place is nice in summer, fall and winter but I think that Koprivstitsa is one of those towns.

Streets of Koprivstitsa

And frankly, I think that after you learn how to say the name of this town you have to go a couple of times to as they say: get your money’s worth.  Hey, it’s not like Koprivstitsa is a name that just rolls of the tongue.  It really not that easy to say.  Oh and it looks even harder to say in Bulgarian: Копривстица.  Yeah, try to say that three times fast as a new comer to the Bulgarian language.

White House and Apples

So that’s that. Come to Bulgaria. Visit Koprivstitsa. You wont be disappointed.  I know that this isn’t a touchy-feely post but it’s direct and I don’t think you need much more.

After watching a commercial for the ump-teenth time for time Tornado chips, I saw them at the store today and decided to buy them.  I have this problem. I watch a commercial or see something advertised on every billboard around town and if/when I actually see the product in person, I decide I have to try it.  I know that this is what advertising is for but I hate that I have such a hard time resisting it. I am better in the States at resisting.  I am not sure why.

But a snack named after a weather pattern like a tornado–how’s a girl to say no to that? Doesn’t that imply powerful yet scary flavor and crunch? The kind of snack that sneaks up on you, grabs a hold of you and then spins you around and around? I mean this is how Dorthy ended up in Oz…  so I gave it a go.  My review: ho-hum.

Tornado Paprika Chips!

So I bought these chips that are aptly named Tornado because guess what shape they are!? They are like little tornados. I had two choices: paprika or original.  I bought the paprika.  I was looking for some flavor.

The thing is I am not sure what flavor paprika is supposed to taste like but these didn’t taste like much.  I imagined that paprika would taste either peppery and spicy or smokey with a hint of sweet.  In fact they just looked red-ish and tasted like an overgrown more airy handful of corn chex cereal. Whatever flavor paprika is I wasn’t blown over by it (get it?! that’s a tornado joke.).  But this does bring up an interesting point of difference between American and Bulgarian culture.  Paprika is not a flavor that stands alone in the States. Sure we have paprika but you sprinkle it on deviled eggs or you add a dash or two to soups, stews, beans or maybe chicken.

Flavor aside, the packaging is pretty hip–with the name in a spray painted graffiti style and like a CD there’s a parental advisory in the lower left hand corner for explicit taste. It kind of makes you feel young to buy them. But these things don’t really make up for lack luster taste.

Oh and after eating a few I was reminded of the American snack: Bugles.  Hum. Sneaky.  The shape isn’t so different. The corn flavor is about the same and they crunch the same.  Only these Bulgarian snacks (if they are in fact Bulgarian) aren’t made by General Mills.

I’m having visions of every blond joke I’ve ever heard running through my head.  (And being blond my whole life, I’ve heard a few.) I’ve just had a hell of a time changing a couple of light bulbs.   So of course the joke that is playing on repeat is the one about a blond and a light bulb.

The troublesome light fixture

Q: How many blonds does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Five. Two to get a chair, one to get drinks, one to get a radio, and another to call daddy for help.

A: One. She holds the bulb and the world revolves around her.

A: One. All she needs to do is ask the first guy she sees to change it for her.

A: One. But she has to be pro-conservation and willing to exchange her old, energy-guzzling regular bulbs for energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. Who said blonds are stupid?

Well for this blond it took: me, the internet and some major minutes standing on a chair. It all started a couple of days ago when one light bulb after another started burning out.  Within 36 hours, there were four light bulbs that I needed to replace.  Sweet.  So when I came home last night I more or less found myself in the dark.  This morning I knew that I had to do something about the lighting.

I climbed up on a chair to get the light bulb out so that I could take it with me to buy a new one. Only I couldn’t get it out. It wouldn’t twist out. It wouldn’t pull out.  Standing on the chair trying to figure out what to do, bad blond jokes started mocking me.  I couldn’t see how to get the bulb out.  This is a problem when you have nearly half of the light bulbs in your apartment to change.

But I am a smart girl. I am not going to let a light bulb get the best of me.  I can open jars of olives by myself–no men required. I can hang pictures by myself. I can move furniture. Still somehow, I can’t get a tiny light bulb out of the socket. Gerr. Major gerr. I was determined to show the light bulb who was boss.  So I stood on the chair staring at the bulb, surveying the situation and trying everything I could think of. No luck.

Finally I decided I needed to google the problem. Yes. I resorted to googling There didn’t seem to be too many other options. I googled: How to change a light bulb.  This wasn’t very helpful and it made me feel silly. I know how to change a standard light bulb but I didn’t know what was keeping my light bulb in.  A few searches later I realized that I might need to push in and twist the light bulb at the same time. Wala! I finally had it out.  But here’s the embarrassing part. It took me at least 30 minutes to get the first one out.  Luckily the others were much, much faster!!

New Light Bulbs

I had no problem buying the light bulbs.  I asked: do you have this? and revealed and old light bulb. Yes. Okay, I want four. Four? Yes. 15 leva later I was all set.

Now there’s light in my apartment again! But at what cost?! The real problem isn’t that I had a hard time getting the light bulbs out of the light fixture. The problem now is that I can’t get the blond jokes out of my head.  Oh well.

I got my Bulgarian Type D–Long Stay Visa today! Phew. I can cross that off my to do list.  It’s nice to have the visa.  First, it means that I can say past next Sunday which was going to be the date that my 90 days as a tourist expired and second, it means that after I apply for my lichna karta I don’t have to worry about my status in country for at least a year. Super.

I made to and from Thessaloniki in two days. Just barely. I thought I’d missed my bus this afternoon (or gone to the wrong station).  I waited in a parking lot for over 90 minutes for my bus.  In a sort of gray parking lot.  But I got to see lots of people coming and going from the bus station. I also got to tell plenty of people that I don’t speak Greek.  The whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about this phrase: it’s all Greek to me.  Luckily my bus came and I got home tonight just a few hours later than I thought I was going to.

Any how, I am back now! Hello, Sofia!

My recent posts about the Berlin Wall, Communism, kitsch, history and Bulgaria have given me an opportunity to think seriously (and not so seriously) about Bulgaria. Today it’s about nostalgia.

It’s apparently gotten my readers thinking as well. Yesterday I quoted from my graduate school friend Robyn’s blog about kitsch and communism in Budapest and Berlin.  Today it’s my dear friend Bridget who spent hours upon hours with me in German classes in college (for the record, her German is better than mine but I have a hunch my Bulgarian is better than hers).  It’s as if she read my mind. Yesterday I said to myself: hey, you need to write a post about nostalgia in the post-socialist block.  Apparently we’re on the same wave length because this morning when I was reading my blog comments I was pleasantly surprised to read her comment and realize that she’s written the perfect introduction to my newest post.  So, Bridget lived in Germany for two years after college and wrote this thoughtful comment on my post Communist Kitsch:

I think, for (East) Germany at least, it’s a mixture of kitsch and actual nostalgia for the era that is past. The younger generation idealizes a time period they never experienced, with the Trabis, Ampelmaennchen, Spreewald pickles, etc. And of course all these things are marketed in various forms, as capitalism has emerged from the wreckage of the GDR. But some people who remember communism had it much better back then (or at least think they did); they remember a time when unemployment was practically zero, all their needs were basically taken care of, and maybe they didn’t have a choice of products in the supermarket but they had enough. So the German concept “Ostalgie” is a combination of imagined and real nostalgia, I think.

I agree. Actually, I couldn’t agree more.  Bridget’s comment catches the push and pull between kitsch and nostalgia.  The current hipness and cool of the Trabis and Ampelmaennchen these things–Eastern chic–seem to represent a glance backwards while also a push forward into the capitalist 21st century.  Not everything from the socialist past is bad.  There’s a layer of gray being introduced into a dichotomy that at its most basic was once something like the west is good and the east is bad.

That’s the problem.  Right? This dichotomy between good and bad, west and east, democracy and socialism–there’s no room for gray.  There’s no room for the in between. There’s no space for nuance.  This dichotomy doesn’t provide any room for compromise.  The dichotomy suggests that a complete break from the past is necessary and condemns the socialist past.  It’s here that nostalgia sneaks in.

Nostalgia is a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.

The present doesn’t provide a space for a past that is complicated, nuanced or multiple.  I think this is where a yearning for a time that has passed comes from. It’s the intersection of nostalgia and memory.  A longing for a past that no longer exits.  A past that we can no longer access.  This longing and yearning helps us edit our memories and our past.  It’s a time that we cannot return to and as such it holds some power for us.

But in this process we edit.  We edit the good and the bad, we edit our emotions, we edit our memories and our past. And we edit our interpretation of these events. We rescue and we banish an all the while we name and rename these things and experiences. It’s in this interpretation that we attempt to claim power over the past. Does this make nostalgia dangerous? In its sentimentality and melancholy does nostalgia hurt us?

I am not sure.

I hear Bulgarians say things like: It was different then.  Everyone had jobs. But their intonation suggests that they know what the cost of this was. Young people lament the cost of living today in Bulgaria (for good reason).  And Bulgarians of every age speak about pensions of the elderly and their words hang heavily in the air.

I get it. There’s something seemingly unspeakably unfair about the whole thing.  The promise of the west was that things would be better without socialism, without communism.  The reality of things is that this hasn’t always been the case. Enter: nostalgia.

It leads me to wonder: what markers are there of nostalgia and “Ostalgie” in Bulgaria?

Kitsch is cool.  But I wonder: what kind of a sense of humor do you have to have to laugh at communism? What kind of perspective do you need? What kind of space and time is necessary for communism to become kitsch in Bulgaria?

My friend Robyn (a former Fulbrighter living in Budapest) wrote this yesterday and she got me thinking about Bulgaria.

As an American in a post-Communist country, I got plenty of cheaper prices and Commie kitsch: you could enjoy Trabi-spotting in my Budapest neighborhood (or sit in one at my favorite bar) or buy candles in the shape of Lenin’s head at Statue Park. When in Berlin last March, tour guides dressed as East German soldiers sold visas with faux GDR stamps and Sometimes, it all felt a little slimy: are we laughing at what happened? But then, another part of me wondered if the “laugh” wasn’t a good thing: doesn’t the fact that people have turned the oppressor into kitsch become an act of defiance and freedom from the old order?

It got me thinking and asking myself lots of questions.  Where is the kitsch in Bulgaria? Why haven’t we comodified communism yet? Could it be that communism isn’t cool or chic enough to be kitsch yet? What does it take for the transition to happen from fact to frustrating to creepy and then to kitsch? Isn’t 20 years enough?

Okay, we don’t have the East German Ampel Mensch, Lenin, Aeroflot, Marx, Red Square, or any major popular (but failed) uprisings but this doesn’t mean Bulgaria should be left out of the “post-communist county capitalizing on communist chic/communist kitsch” market.

But I don’t see it. I can’t think of any place in Sofia that is marketing kitsch. What does it mean that Bulgarians seem incapable of  poking some fun at their communist past while making some money off of it? Is it too real? Is it too present? Is it too painful? Or is it somehow just not funny?

But that’s the thing.  Communism is kitsch.  It was known for it’s cheap mass-produced objects, for appealing to the masses (what ever that means), for being superficial–for hardly scratching the surface.  Aesthetically, it’s unoriginal and void of self-expression.  At its heart it’s kitsch. So why do we deny it? Why deny communism it’s rightful place? Do we somehow feel that we are pandering to the past? What’s at stake here and now if we comodify Bulgaria’s communist past?

Well it seems like there’s plenty to work with.  While we don’t have a park of statues, the Berlin Wall, Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square or a failed uprising, Bulgaria still has a serious communist past. We’ve got the Communist Party, the Pioneers and their scarves, Georgi Dimitrov, the Central Universal Store, plenty of little red pins with gold stars, Cyrillic street signs, Todor Zhivkov, socialist architecture and statutes, and we even have cookies that are still being produced and sold in boxes not unlike their communist counter-parts.

So what’s keeping us from making and selling communist kitsch t-shirts, coffee mugs, postcards, and gift baskets? Or replica Pioneer scarves and Communist Party buttons? Why not plaster the faces of Zhivkov and Dimitrov on posters, buttons, bookmarks, corkscrews and/or any other available surface? Isn’t there something cathartic in the act of reclaiming, subverting and repurposing these images and artifacts of communist propaganda?

Maybe the problem is that to be able to do this and to be succesful in the act, you have to be able to look back at the past with a critical eye.  But having simply a critical eye is not enough you also have to identify sites for the expression of dark humor–places that ooze sarcasm, irony and witt.  Ultimately, I guess it’s the double-ness that is required to make the communist kitsch both funny and absurd that makes the task a difficult one.

The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago today.  I was 8 years old. (I am 28 years old now. Go figure.)  I heard about the wall.  I knew that it was important.  I saw it in the newspaper, on tv and I heard people talking about it.  But to me at that moment it was like magic.  It seemed to have just happened over night.  One day there was a wall.  The next it was coming down and people were jumping on it.

What's left of the wall today

At eight years old, I didn’t get that it was a process.  No one said to me: Carolyn, there have been signs that something like this was going to happen for a long time.  No one told me about the East Germans crossing to the west through Hungary. No one talked to me about glasnost and perestroika. I didn’t know about Reagan’s demand: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

All I knew was the wall that had divided Germany since the 1960’s had come down.  My eight-year old self was relieved that these people who spoke the same language, shared the same culture and had once lived in the same country were reunited and free.  But the freedom thing was secondary.  I really liked that they were reunited.  These lucky Germans.

Looking back now, it seems like this event sparked within me a long standing interest in Germany. I wanted to know more.  I read lots of novels and I am pretty sure that I thought for longer than I should have that Anne Frank was German. I didn’t have the whole World War II thing straight yet.  I studied German in high school when all of my friends made plans to learn a serious language–a useful language and picked Spanish.   Then I studied German for four more years in college and began to piece together the modern history that I lived but didn’t actually know.

If you’d told me then that I’d be living in Eastern Europe now, I wouldn’t have believed you. In some ways I still don’t. I could imagine Germany.  It’s a place that I know.  A place that I could imagine myself.  Bulgaria on the other hand isn’t a country I ever dreamed of.  I had no illusions of shopska salads dancing through my head or bowl upon bowl of tarator soup.  I knew nothing about rakia, aryan or boza.  More over, when I made the crazy decision to throw my lot into Eastern Europe I couldn’t even read the Cyrillic alphabet.

There was something unknown, mysterious and attractive about Sofia–in hindsight I think that in the beginning this adventure was so attractive exactly because it was unknown.  I knew the basics Bulgaria had been a communist country. A serious communist country.  It bordered Greece, Turkey, Romania, Serbia and Macedonia.  Both communism and the changes had been difficult on the country and the people.  Aside from the basics, I knew very little.  I was here to figure out the rest, to live first hand in a rapidly changing country and to teach English.

Today I find myself in Bulgaria 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  At eight the furthest I could dream was to Berlin.  At 28, I’m dreaming in Sofia.  Not of Sofia.  I live here.  In this country.  I write a blog about my experiences.  I try to make sense of the things I see and do as well as my frustrations and joys.  All in all, like it here. Some days I like it more than others but on a whole I like it more than I dislike it.

But of course that’s the thing, if at some point I dislike it more than I like it, I have another country I can go to. I have a country to return to–my country.

Often it’s hard for me to even believe that I am actually living in a post-communist country.  I don’t know what life in post-communist country is supposed to feel like but I didn’t imagine it would feel like this. And as a result, sometimes I get the impression that Bulgarians think I am just playing at this–that I am having fun living here, that I am gathering stories and experiences to retell later to yuppie friends, that I study Bulgarian because I can not because I have to and as such my being here is somehow frivolous.  Sure, I can see it but I’d be a crazy person if these were the reasons I was living here, learning Bulgarian and traveling around the country–it’s a recipe for disaster, homesickness and heartache.

Still sometimes I think I am living here because I can.  And this in and of itself is a remarkable thing.  Tonight I can’t escape the thought: it’s the damn wall.  Twenty years ago and a world away–the wall came down. The politics and economics of Europe seemingly changed and at eight my eyes were open to all of it.  The difference now is that 28 I no longer believe that anything changed over night; I don’t believe that a single US president is responsible for the fall of the wall; and I believe that the progress we heralded as positive has been a mixed-bag for many.

So here I am.  Eyes open in Eastern Europe.

Interestingly watching footage today from 1989 the world looks grayer than I remembered.  The graffiti covering the wall is not as bright as I would have sworn it was and the twenty-somethings are wearing jeans and dark jackets.  There’s something exciting but stilted about the footage.

I think in part that’s why I am here.  There’s something exciting about a demonstration like this–even today.  About the wall coming down. About young people protesting and celebrating.  About change.

So twenty years later, I am writing, living, teaching and trying to make sense of my life in Bulgaria. And I couldn’t be happier.

I love scones. Love them. I spent a couple of days looking at recipes online. I have a love hate relationship with finding good recipes that work with the ingredients I have access to in Bulgaria.

Scones in Sofia.

Here’s what I did to make the Apricot Almond Scones:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup oatmeal
• 1/3 brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• ½ teaspoon each of cinnamon, ginger and powdered vanilla
• 125 g/8 tablespoons cold butter,
• ½ cup total of chopped almonds and dried apricots
• ½ cup milk and 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350 F/170 C; rip a pice of aluminum foil for the cookie sheet and don’t forget to grease this. Whisk flour, sugar, baking soda, and spices/powdered vanilla together in a large bowl. Cut butter into small pieces and incorporate into dry ingredients with a fork.  Stir in almonds and apricots with a spatula or large spoon.

Then stir in milk until fully incorporated (add about 3/4 of it to start, and add the rest a little bit at a time, if you need it, until the dough comes together, but is not too sticky. The amount of milk required varies with the humidity). Turn dough out onto a well-floured cutting board. Shape into a 1 to 1 ½ inch thick circle and cut into eight equal triangles. Place scones on cookie sheet and bake for about 15-20 minutes, or until scones are golden brown.

Yum, Scones

All I want to do is eat scones.  In fact, that’s about all I’ve done today.  These are easy-peasy to make and you can really mix anything you want into these–dried fruit, nuts, blueberries, pumpkin… you name it. Yum. Scones.

Well it’s official. We wont be teaching for a week.  We’re in the middle of a little crisis.  A swine flu crisis.  The whole thing’s a little strange but that’s that.  No school. The Bulgarian Health Ministry has declared a national swine flu epidemic.

It means that my time has opened up a little bit.  I’ve got some papers to grade, some Bulgarian to study and now I think I’ve got some travel plans to make as well.  There’s also a piece of me that’s pretty glad I was sick last weekend.  Funny, I never thought I’d say that.

Anyhow, that’s the big news: no school for one week.

We had a meeting today at school about our health insurance. The good news is that we have an excellent world wide plan. I of course am hoping that I will only have to use it for routine things rather than for anything major. The representative who was leading the meeting went into much, much more detail about things like medical evacuation than I ever imagined I’d need to know.

She said that for Sofia probably the closest major western hospitals to be evacuated to would be either Vienna, Thessaloniki or Athens. Um. Okay. I am not about to say that these aren’t good hospitals but she wouldn’t stop going on about how good the facilities are, what high quality they are and how fast they could get us there.

It was also explained to us how we can get coverage in the States and how we can seek and pay for health care abroad. Of course, the key is having itemized receipts or bills. Itemized, itemized, itemized. Nothing new here. Oh and they’ll accept them in any language. And the best part, you don’t have to provide a translation. Phew.

Then we heard a few stories about people who’ve forgotten their insurance cards at home only to need them. Moral: take your card every where with you. (No really!?) Followed by a couple of stories about seeking reimbursement for medical expenses. Lesson: sign your name on your form. She chased these tales with a pair of medical evacuation stories–one based in Krakow, Poland and the other on the Croatian coast. The take away? It seems to be something like: no matter what country (or situation) you get yourself into if you need first rate medical care you’ll get it–even if it means evacuation.

Well the whole thing seemed kind of absurd to me but I listened attentively. I mean, I don’t want to not pay enough attention and have something happen to me. Or just not be able to fill out all of the forms for reimbursement.

After the meeting, I ran into another colleague who was also there. We talked about how sort of fear-mongering the representative had been.  We laughed about having to be air-lifted somewhere and that’s when I made the bold claim: i’d be happy to have a bone set in Sofia or even my appendix removed.  (I mean Madeline survived her appendectomy in Paris and has a children’s book to show for it? Why not me in Sofia?)  My colleague looked at me with big eyes and said: I don’t know about an appendectomy.

That’s when it struck me.  Was that a crazy claim? So I’ve been thinking about and reconsidering my claim all evening.  Here’s what I’ve come up with. I think appendicitis is a fairly common condition, the surgery is pretty straightforward, doctors in Bulgaria are well trained and the hospital food can’t be any worse than in the States.  Given these factors, think I would be comfortable have my appendix removed in Sofia.  I also hear that it’s a very, very painful condition and I have a hunch that if I ever had appendicitis I would want it out of me as fast and as quickly as possible.

I guess the one thing that I can’t control would be the quality and cleanliness of the hospital. But it’s not as if there aren’t standards here in Bulgaria.  I think the scariest thing would be not speaking the language and not knowing what’s going on around me. However, if you’ve been reading my blog long enough you’d know that this isn’t a new feeling for me–I regularly don’t know what people are saying to me.  I guess what this all comes down to is that I’d rather not have an appendectomy in Bulgaria (heck, I don’t one period) but I’d rather have it here with my current network of friends and colleagues than while on holiday somewhere I don’t know anyone.

In conclusion I would like to say two things. First, I remain thankful for my good(ish) health and the fact that I am luckily enough to have access to high quality medical care.  Second, I want my MoM to know that I am not planning on testing out my insurance any time soon.