Bulgaria

The farther one travels, the less one knows

Hank Garfield

I’m wrapping things up in Bulgaria. In a couple of weeks I’ll be going back to the United States, a place I haven’t seen or felt for eight months. A bus or a train will take me to Sofia, where I’ll spend the night before flying out. Lisa will ride a bus to Boston and meet me at the airport. From there we’ll take a train to Portland and a bus back to Bangor. No cars will be involved, except perhaps a taxi.

I haven’t driven a car since I’ve been here. My driver’s license disappeared on the Athens metro in January. When I get home I’ll have to get a new Maine Card from the University so I can ride the Bangor bus system for free again. I’ll get my bicycle out of winter storage. I’ll drive down to the coast to see my mother.

What an interesting part of the world this is. Bulgarian politicians are talking about the development of a new “silk road” trade route, linking the European countries along the Danube with China. (It was the interruption of this commercial pipeline that led to the European sailing voyages of the late 1400s and early 1500s and the colonization of the Americas.) The countries that comprised the former Yugoslavia are still working out their relationships with one another, and with the European Union. Languages, currencies and cultures seem to co-exist in a fragile balance that somehow works.

What have I learned? The title of this post is a lyric from a George Harrison Beatles song, “The Inner Light,” which first appeared on the flip side of “Lady Madonna,” when individual songs were released on 45 rpm vinyl records. The Beatles were popular in Bulgaria, as they were everywhere else. I’ve learned a Bulgarian song from the 1970s that references them.

But I haven’t learned nearly enough about this historically dynamic, physically beautiful, oddly introverted country where I’ve lived for most of a year. I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ve learned enough Bulgarian to order a meal or buy a bus ticket, but not enough to hold a real conversation. I don’t understand most of the customs and rituals, and I’m baffled by the politics.

And again, I’ve developed a deep empathy with immigrants to the United States, for whom every transaction is an effort, as it is here for me. The difference is that in Bulgaria, and throughout Eastern Europe, you can usually find someone who speaks English to help you out at the post office or a bank or almost any other place of business. A few signs are in English; the same is true of product labels. Occasionally you’ll hear English on the street and be able to understand a conversation in your native language. Immigrants to the United States have almost none of these advantages.
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Yet in eight months in Bulgaria, no one has ever berated me in public for not speaking the language, for failing to “assimilate.” Is it any wonder that ethnic minorities in the U.S. tend to congregate, to draw support from people who understand them?

Europe is a melting pot of languages, and this monolingual American is constantly amazed by how many people speak two or three or more of them. Why aren’t we doing that in the United States? Why aren’t we, at the very least, teaching Spanish in kindergarten? Why do we instead push for English-only legislation and the adoption of an official language? Why do we want to build walls instead of bridges?

Bulgarians seem surprised that anyone wants to come here, let alone learn their language. Two million Bulgarians have emigrated since the collapse of communism in 1991. Many of my students will work jobs this summer in places like Nantucket and Old Orchard Beach. A lot of them want to live and work abroad after they graduate.

But others tell me that they want to stay, and help lead their country into a global future filled with possibilities for people everywhere. I’ve written in this blog that we are living in the Late Automobile Age, the waning days of the mindset that we should all own cars and drive them wherever and whenever we please. Likewise, the world is witnessing the last desperate gasp of nationalism, the idea that we can wall ourselves off from one another and live by our own rules regardless of what happens on the other side.

Neither regime will go quietly, but go they must.

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Exploring Bulgaria by Bus and Train

Hank Garfield

I spent the week of spring break exploring some of the country I’ve called home for the past seven months. Bulgaria is beautiful. It has craggy snow-capped mountains, rolling wooded hills, historic cities, expanses of agricultural land, and a seacoast. I dipped my feet in the Black Sea, though it was too cold in March to swim.

There’s a narrow-gauge rail line that runs through the mountains southeast of Blagoevgrad. The train ride is slow and scenic. My friend Tom, an American who’s lived here for years but had never ridden this train, offered to accompany me, and also offered to drive to the train station in Bansko, about 50 kilometers from Blagoevgrad.

He later said that if he had thought it through, he would have left his car at home and joined me on the bus from Blagoevgrad to Bansko, which would have gotten us there in plenty of time for the train. But it’s hard to shake the American mindset of driving as the first, best option. More on this later.

Tom’s plan was to accompany me as far as Plovdiv, and then take a bus back to Bansko the next day to pick up his car, while I continued my trip to the Black Sea coast. We changed to a regular train in the town of Septemvri, and arrived in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city, in time to check in to a hotel and see the sun set over the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. He told me about a place on the Black Sea called Nessebar, an old fortress built on a peninsula that is now a tourist resort. He suggested that March might be a good time to see it, as it would be uncrowded. The next day he went back to Blagoevgrad, and the day after that, I boarded a bus bound for the coast.

One remarkable thing about Bulgaria is that you can take a bus just about anywhere. The major cities are connected by rail, but even the most rural towns have regular bus service. The buses are more modern than the trains. Several bus companies run routes all over the country and into the neighboring countries. It’s easy to get from place to place without a car.

I spent a night and a day in Nessebar, walking the narrow stone streets and looking at the boats, most of which were not yet in the water. Most of the restaurants were not yet open for the season, but people were out in the sun, working on both boats and land properties. It reminded me of a tourist town in Maine stretching its arms after a long winter slumber.
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At four in the afternoon, I took a bus back to Burgas, the port city on the Black Sea. There, I walked the beach, took in a public art exhibit called “Fishlove” (which featured photos of naked people posing with fish), had dinner, and boarded an overnight train to Sofia. A bus to Blagoevgrad left an hour after the train pulled in, and by nine o’clock Friday morning, I was back in my apartment drinking coffee.

The entire trip, back from a small town on the coast to a mid-sized city on the opposite side of the country, cost me 40 leva, or about $24. And it got me to thinking that if you can be a tourist in Bulgaria without a car, why can’t you do it in Maine? Instead of building parking lots, why can’t tourist towns like Stonington and Port Clyde and Southwest Harbor have daily bus service, even in the off-season? These are small towns, but so is Nessebar. And yet there’s an hourly bus to Burgas, with stops in a series of small towns, and people use it.

I talked with a few of my students about the American car-first mentality, and I observed that in Bulgaria it isn’t unusual not to own a car. The societal pressure to own one doesn’t seem to exist. But they said it does in Sofia, which, despite a modern subway system built in the last ten years, is choked with cars.

That’s a shame, because one of the worst things America has exported to the rest of the world is the idea of driving as a way of life. Maine does not have comprehensive public transportation, because most public officials own cars, and they consider the cost of bus service before the convenience. I’d like to invite them to Bulgaria and let them see that it can be otherwise.

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Luxembourg contemplates the luxury of free public transportation

Hank Garfield

When you live in Europe, you meet people from all over the world. One night in early January, I found myself in a bar in Athens, talking with a Frenchman and a Quebec Canadian, both of whom worked in Luxembourg. I tried my high school French on them, and though they complimented me on my pronunciation, we soon switched back to English, the lingua franca of most such international encounters.

We got to talking about traffic, and they told me that Luxembourg’s population swells by as much as a third during the work day. Huge numbers of people commute to work in the country’s financial centers from their homes in neighboring France, Belgium and Germany.

The only thing I knew about Luxembourg is that it’s small, and one of only two countries in the world with the letter “x” in its name. (The other one borders the United States.) But I learned that Luxembourg is a thriving business hub, and that cross-border commuters make up a sizable percentage of its work force.

This, of course, is a recipe for traffic congestion. Writing for BBC Capital earlier this year, Marc Auxenfants, a reporter at the Luxembourg Times, notes that Luxembourg has the highest number of passenger vehicles per capita in the European Union, and that more than 60 percent of commuters use their cars to get to work.  It sounds like a typical American urban area.

The Luxembourg government hopes that offering free public transport, beginning in March 2020, will entice people out of their cars, even if for some of them it means a slightly longer commute. How many American drivers eschew public transportation because it takes longer than driving? My friends in Boston complain that driving is slow but public transport is slower. They may be right. But you can read on a train, and trains are better for the environment and your frame of mind.

But traffic and pollution are secondary and tertiary reasons for initiating free public transportation. The primary reason, Auxenfants notes, is social: reducing the income inequality gap between rich and poor.

Like many Americans, I owned a car for much of my adult life, because I saw it as a necessity for getting to and from work. But I was spending a good chunk of my pay on all the costs of keeping a car: the price of the car itself, plus gas, insurance, repairs, maintenance and little incidental costs that seemed to come up when I could least afford them. Since parking is largely subsidized in America, I rarely had to pay to park, but cities and towns have to tax their driving and non-driving citizens alike to cover it. It was only when I gave up car ownership that I realized how much money my car had been siphoning from my earnings.
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The government of Luxembourg has rightly concluded that if lower income workers could give up their cars, they would have more money in the bank at the end of the month. They would have more money to spend on more beneficial consumer goods, and the entire economy would improve.

Luxembourg is one of Europe’s wealthier countries. But Portugal, one of the continent’s poorest, has recently embarked on a similar approach: boosting public transportation, especially in rural areas, where car ownership draws a stark line between rich and poor. And they are already seeing tangible improvements in their overall economy.

Americans tend to look at public transportation as a subsidy, sucking tax dollars from the car-owning majority to pay for a service widely seen as inconvenient and inconsistent. But public transportation is more akin to an investment, like Internet service and cell phone coverage. If you spread it to outlying areas and make it affordable, or even free, the return on the investment will be realized rather quickly.

But public transportation remains a tough sell, on both sides of the Atlantic, as Auxenfants notes near the end of his report. Liberals in the U.S, who may be all for solar power and clean energy and good environmental stewardship, seem to have a blind spot when it comes to cars. Electric cars won’t combat climate change if the electricity to run them comes from coal plants. Good, solid, scientific reasons abound for reducing the worldwide vehicle fleet. But from the perspective of the individual car owner, the economic case being made in Luxembourg and Portugal may be more compelling.

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