Last week I spent 3 amazing days in London.
I’ll leave aside the joy of meeting people you know from home in a foreign country (I love the “Meet you in front of Big Ben/Victoria” moments!) and I won’t even try to describe the beauty of sunny London, seen from the London eye. Surprisingly, these few days in the English capital allowed me to understand better the Bulgarians.
Bristol, which happens to be my city in the last few months, is the second home of only 200-300 Bulgarians. London, on the other hand, is much more cosmopolitan and with the 300 languages spoken there, you can hear Bulgarian more often.
I was quite lucky, because it I was staying in Stratford – a neighbourhood where there are more Bulgarians than usual. Every time I heard someone talking Bulgarian, I couldn’t hide my surprise. Of course, as speaking my own language with someone live is more than a holiday for me in the last months; I couldn’t help, but talk with some of the Bulgarians I met.
The funniest moment was when a guy was about to start swearing me, because I tripped over. He said in Bulgarian: “You could at least have said “Sorry!”” and was ready to continue his thought, when I stopped him and started talking Bulgarian. He was so shocked! So was his 17-year-old wife.
Apart from him, all the other were really nice to me. And all of them warned me “not to deal with Bulgarians abroad”. I’ve heard this before, but I thought it was just a myth.
It wasn’t until I asked two boys in the underground for the directions that I realised that this is not exactly a myth. Don’t get me wrong, they didn’t abduct me!
The guys were really nice and we spend a couple of hours walking around London and talking about life. Thanks to these talks I found out the reason for the “don’t deal with Bulgarians abroad” attitude – in the everyday struggle in a foreign country it’s easier than ever to ask for help a fellow Bulgarian. It is also quite tempting to put yourself in front of him. It might not be something so big – just a couple of everyday situations, but when they start occurring more often, it might turn into a problem.
I came up with three categories of Bulgarians abroad. I believe that they apply to every nationality living abroad, as my German friends are behaving exactly in the same way:
1. The ones that communicate only with fellow Bulgarians and fail to explore the new culture.
2. Those who are open to all: people from their country, locals and people from the rest of the world.
3. The ones that try to avoid talking with people from their own country and sometimes “forget” their mother language.
I fit in the second group, but I know people from various nationalities, fitting in all three of them. However, neither the first nor the third categories are a behaviour I can pursue at the moment. But one never knows what will happen in the future 😀
As for the two guys with whom I explored London at night… even they told me that it’s dangerous to talk with them. It appears to be not normal to stop someone in the underground and accept their invitation to show you London. Surprisingly, I knew that. But I just listened to my intuition and it said that they are good boys.
My intuition never lies.
tea story box 