After a night of eating cheap, delicious Bulgarian food at a cafe (a positive trend throughout my experience in this country) and getting to know my new host at her place, we got up pretty late. It might have been after noon, which became a strange pattern for my four days in Sofia. Here is what I wrote early in the day, reeling after my arrival, later reflections interspersed:
Raia's apartment is undergoing renovation.
I remember stress about the workers coming every day, communicating with the family and not being able to go out as much as desired. She has beautiful views of the city and mountains. Last night, she left her cell phone in a cab, but we came home and drank some homemade wine to make up for it. I feel really good right now. Good as you can feel after surviving and even enjoying a 2-day bus ride across Western Europe to the East, and having someone to greet you, put you up, feed you and show you around a city that you've wanted to visit for years. Good as you can feel wandering this city in late spring, with all the green trees in bloom and the air clean and fresh and the sprinkles of rain coming and going between the warm sunshine. Good that I will learn about the activist movement here, small as it is, and not get the whitewashed touristy angle. Good that very soon I will leave behind the city life for 3 weeks and I will be in Greece again! Tonight Raia is taking me to a debate on the Roma and tomorrow, I will see the social center.
Some of the things I've learned: it's possible to be vegetarian, but vegan is harder. The left is constantly under threat from the fascists, much more so than in the U.S. or France. There is rampant anti-Communism, seen publically in the tags on old Communist monuments, but Communism seems to have been replaced by neoliberal, pro-capitalist tendencies, which continue to marginalize "real" dissidents.
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