Bulgaria lies in the southeast of Europe. Boasting both sun-bathing at the coast by summer and skiing in winter, Bulgaria has a great deal of potential for - and increasing interest from - tourists. That's not all, though. I discovered that aside from the great natural beauty, there's also a healthy dose of history and some of the warmest people I've met in Europe. And so far as those I met in the tech sector go, they're not just warm, but also smart.
On the other hand, I know full well if I lived there I'd spend life with a perpetually sprained ankle; there's no shortage of cracks in the pavement and things to fall over! As one Bulgarian friend joked with a visiting Russian, "we show our tanks every so often, like you do in Moscow...but we can only do it every two years, because it takes us that long to fix the road after the first time!" And some of the city center roads (and a lot of the driving) leave a lot to be desired. But, I suspect that's more a sign of recent history that the country is leaving behind - and hey, the people and the sights more than make up for the quirky infrastructure. Just take it in your stride and enjoy.
Bulgarian is a Slavic language, and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. A quick glance over grammar guides a few discussions soon told me it's one of the quirkier Slavic languages: it loses a lot of the complexity of case declension that is so common in many Slavic languages, but makes up for it with more complexity in its verbs.
I found the Cyrillic hard to read, having been used to that found in Russia and Ukraine; turns out they use various characters you'd find in Russian and Ukrainian Cyrillic when written in italics as the standard forms of letters. Which means if you're lazy like me and only learned they normal, non-italic forms when learning to read Russian words, it's gonna come back and bite you.
I found it easy enough to get by with English in Sofia - it seemed like the larger hotels and most restaurants had English speaking staff and menus. Outside of the capital, I'm less sure; the time I did leave the city, it was with a Bulgarian friend.
