Marco A certainty of this trip: the rain.
I like people watching in the city, to see faces, understand what they do. I find it hard to understand what they say here, but observe their movements helps me a lot.
In a city fascinate me the relations between people: they run, walk, talk, laugh, how they behave with each other?
This to me is a sign of social life, the interaction between people tell me so much of the way to live. When I arrive in a new place the first three days are totally messy. I try to orient myself, to grasp the uses. I try to figure out how to move and how to interact. I like to learn some local word. The first words that I try to memorize are “thanks” (blagodarya) and “you are welcome” (molya). The numbers in Bulgaria are similar to the languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia, so I understand them quite well. It Change only the accent.
The further difficulty for me here is to read the Cyrillic, but I’m not so awful now. Few more days and I’ll read fluently, I’ll have just to understand what does it means 🙂
Meeting people is my main job on this trip. Wednesday I went to the meeting organized by the site couchsurfing with Balkan Mafia group. As always we talk a lot and you know interesting travelers.
I walked a lot among the great boulevards of Sofia, legacy of the communist era. The city is tidy, but at certain times of the day the traffic is congested. Nothing different from any big capital with more than a million inhabitants. The technology is the king here. The internet conection is one of the fastest in Europe and the specializations related to the digital world in universities abound. Combined to this the cost of life is below the European average and it is turning the area into a small Silicon Valley.
