I see the sun this morning, after spending the solstice at the bottom of a fog bank. It will set a little farther north tonight, and each night from now until May, when I will board an airplane and fly back to America.

Blagoevgrad is south of Bangor by three degrees of latitude, so the days aren’t as short as they are back home. I’ll be home for Christmas this year only in my dreams. When I committed to this adventure, I thought it unlikely that I would fly back to the States for the holidays, only to get jet-lagged all over again before the start of the spring semester. Maine is cold in December. So is Bulgaria, as it turns out, but cold is a relative thing.

When I arrived here at the end of August, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never been to Bulgaria nor known anyone who had been here. I didn’t know the first word of the language. I decided to enroll in a Bulgarian class, on a pass-fail basis, hoping that I could squeeze in the homework between my teaching duties. This post grew out of an assignment. It’s way past due, but here it is: Seven Things that have surprised me about Bulgaria:

1. People are outdoors, all the time, even when it’s cold. Restaurants have outdoor tables, but so do little coffee shops and even liquor stores, and in the winter people simply bundle up and continue to socialize at them.
2. The climate is more like California than Maine. I lived in the mountains east of San Diego, and the region around Blagoevgrad reminds me of it. A change in altitude means a change of several degrees in temperature. Snow in the mountains becomes rain in the valleys. Autumn was warm and dry. Summers are hot.
3. Children learn English from American cartoons and video games. By the time they get to college, most of them have been speaking English for most of their lives. They seem to appreciate my halting attempts at greeting them in Bulgarian, but they don’t expect their professors at the American University to know the language, or to try to learn it.
4. There aren’t many people of color. Maine, the whitest of the fifty United States, is more diverse than the parts of Bulgaria I’ve seen. The only black person I’ve talked to here was from London. The countries of Eastern Europe are among the least ethnically diverse in the world. Bulgaria does have minorities, including a Turkish population that was forced to change their surnames, and the Roma, who are often unfairly stereotyped as thieves and beggars, but don’t look substantially different from ethnic Bulgarians.

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5. Bulgaria still has a king, who is the last living person in the world to hold the title of “Tsar.” He was six when the communists sent his family into exile after the Second World War, and when communism fell, he returned to Bulgaria and briefly led a royalist party in parliament. Now in his eighties, he lives in retirement in Sofia, on an estate that was returned to his family after the end of Bulgarian communism.
6. The Cyrillic alphabet isn’t as hard as it looks. It’s phonetic, so once you learn the letters, you can pronounce the words. And Bulgarian contains a surprising number of international words, from “weekend” to “web design.” The alphabet has separate letters for the “ch” in “church,” the “sh” in “shoe,” the “sht” in “shtick,” and the “zh” in “Dr. Zhivago.” But it takes two letters to represent the “j” in “James T. Kirk,” and there’s no “th” as in “thick,” which is the way I feel whenever I try a conversation. After three and a half months, I can read the streets signs and take a stab at menus, but the spoken language, outside of short transactions, still baffles me.
7. Cars are considered desirable, as is the infrastructure to accommodate them. I hope that Bulgaria does not succumb to the commuter culture that has wrecked vast swaths of America. As of now, it’s cheaper for someone who lives in Sofia and works in Blagoevgrad, 80 kilometers (50 miles) apart, to maintain two places rather than drive back and forth each day. And many people don’t own a car and don’t want to. I’m not the outlier here that I am at home. So that’s encouraging.

The only conclusion I can draw from these disparate observations is that when you come to live in a foreign country, it’s best to leave your expectations at the airport.

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Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria and Thessaloniki, Greece lie 154 kilometers apart, from the point of view of a pigeon. But a mountain range bestrides the route, which stretches the driving distance to 194 kilometers, or just over 120 miles. The trip takes two and a half hours, including a stop at the border.

I recently had a chance to ride down with two colleagues and enjoy the scenery along the way. The most beautiful part of the trip is through Kresna Gorge, a path carved by the Struma River on its way to Mediterranean Sea, and now under threat from the construction of a four-lane highway closing in from both sides.

The Struma Motorway – Americans would call it a freeway or a turnpike, depending on what part of the country they live in and whether or not they pay tolls – is under construction as I write this. When completed, it will link Sofia and Thessaloniki, and provide a high-speed route that will cut down the driving time by perhaps half an hour. The price European drivers will likely pay is the loss of a historical site just outside of Blagoevgrad, and the destruction of Kresna Gorge.

Kresna Gorge is home to bears, wolves, otters, and many species of bats, birds, butterflies, reptiles and amphibians. It’s also a Natura 2000 site – an area set up under a program by the European Union to protect the habitats of threatened species.

But sadly, Europeans seem just as willing as Americans to trash their environment in the name of expediency.

The winding, two-lane road through the gorge is notorious as one of the most dangerous stretches of highway in Bulgaria. Big trucks go through there, and so did the bus I took back from Thessaloniki. In the winter when it snows, the passage can be particularly treacherous.

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The motorway has already caused one major controversy, when the ruins of an ancient Thracian settlement were unearthed during construction near Blagoevgrad.

South of the gorge, the road links up with the divided highway that continues across the border and all the way into Thessaloniki. To my American eyes it seems almost empty. I’m used to our “if you build it, they will come” interstate highway system. But most of the traffic seems to be trucks, and the same is true of the completed section between Blagoevgrad and Sofia to the north.

A rail line also runs through the gorge, when made me wonder out loud why the highway is needed at all. Rail is, after all, a more efficient way to move freight and people. But I was told that the Greek government stopped funding international trains a few years ago, in accordance with EU demands that it reduce spending. So now if you want to travel by train between the two countries, you must get off at the last station in Bulgaria and take a bus to the first station in Greece, which can add hours to the trip. Meanwhile, the trucks keep rolling through Kresna Gorge.

After three months here, I’ve concluded that Europeans are every bit as car-happy as Americans (though perhaps less arrogant about it), and every bit as willing to compromise natural habitat to accommodate motor vehicles. Thessaloniki is a cluster of cars and motorbikes and overcrowded buses. Sofia has a beautiful, modern, clean subway system, and still the streets are choked with cars. I’m told that Thessaloniki made a few attempts at building a subway, but wherever they dug into the earth, they found an archaeological site. Such is the price, I guess, of living in a land over which wheels have rolled for millennia. Did Alexander the Great recycle his trash?

The stores here charge for plastic bags, and I see a few other signs of environmental awareness in a land that has had more time and less space to learn from it mistakes. But as always, change starts from the bottom up. It’s why I gave up owning cars, and why I started this blog. It may be too late to stop the Struma Motorway, but if enough of us move our lives away from car dependence, someone, somewhere, may think twice before building the next one.

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