Babylon

Despite the fact that it's been three weeks since I came to Varna, I still don't really know the city. Moreover, we have our own names for some streets, like "Big Road #1", "BR #2" and "BR #3". Today I stepped just a bit outside of the usual walking zone and first thing I found was a book store with books in Bulgarian, English and Russian. Finally bought "Generation P" by Pelevin, that I tried to find in Riga, but didn't succeed. I think I need to explore at least couple of streets every day, there's still a lot of interesting stuff, that is out there somewhere.


However, not everything should be explored, for example on Friday I accidentally found myself in a Turkish store, where 3 Turkish women were staring at me as if I was an alien. Probably, they are not so open-minded like my friends from Turkey that I studied together in Sweden.

The great thing about Varna is that on Friday after lunch they showed me the Russian store, where I can buy all the stuff I missed the most in Sweden and that my mom was bringing to me, like Russian cheese, candies, hematogen, curd snacks, and many other things. The most surprising was to find Latvian drink - kvas and Latvian fish - shproti. You never appreciate these things, until you go to a place where you can't find them. And when you do, it feels really nice.

Yesterday in the restaurant we were trying to ask for a glass of white wine, "аз искам една чаша вино, бяло, не сухо". For me it sounds almost like Russian, but for my rommies doesn't make any sense. Here I'm even more happy that I am Russian, because at least I know Cyrillic and have some basic knowledge of Bulgarian. But even this not always helps. See some confusing examples below:

Bulgarian	Russian
Булка	Невеста
Ролка	Булка
Майка	Мама
Тениска	Майка
Дыня	Арбуз
Пъпеш	Дыня
Направо	Прямо
Вдясно	Направо

That's why despite the completely unknown words, sometimes I don't understand even the words that are clear, as the meaning is totally different.

Multicultural environment is not easy. Despite of the differences in languages, we also have different mentality, culture and might be even value system. This is what we need to remember 24/7 to avoid the Babylon...