The weather has been strange today, one minute it is sunny and the next there is lightening and thunder

June 2, 2002

The weather has been strange today, one minute it is sunny and the next there is lightening and thunder. I am blaming this strange weather on the strange occurrence that happened outside of our block.

I was returning to our block after a short walk and some people who live in my block were standing outside the block and looking up at the sky. It was sprinkling as I was walking up the stairs and was greeted with “Why don’t you have a umbrella Katie?” My answer to this question was “ I have a rain coat.” All it took was for one of the neighbors to address me, and all of them moved a little closer to see what I had to say. The next question was “ How much longer do you have in Bulgaria?” To this I replied, two more weeks. There were nodding of heads, remarks that I must be missing home and that volunteers usually stay for 2 years and go. We have been living in this block for two years and today, today was the first day that I was really spoken to and questioned openly by some people in my block.

You might be wondering why. In Bulgaria it is not really customary to carry on a conversation with someone you don’t know. It is perfectly acceptable to stare, but not to greet someone that you haven’t been introduced to. So the longer you stay the more acceptable it becomes to converse.

You might think this is strange that we didn’t go ahead and just introduce ourselves from the start being the always smiling American’s that we are, but when we first arrived we were still learning the language and our energies were drained from simple trips to the grocery store and all the joys of living in a foreign country. We introduced ourselves to the people who live on either side of us, but there are quite a few people in our block that know who we are but keep to themselves.

Our first step at communication was beginning to nod at one another, this stage lasted about 5 months. Then gradually we began greeting one another with a hello or a good afternoon, which lasted for the rest of our first year. This year sentences were started being exchanged. But today was the day where I felt like we had the first conversation. I got to hear about one woman’s trip to Austria, where she didn’t know the language and wanted to return to Bulgaria because of it. I heard about a man’s son who is playing in an orchestra in Germany and I even got let in on a bit of the block gossip like which children are noisy with balls and how they don’t enjoy the feeling of the block and the dirt. I didn’t say much but all of the words were directed at me. I shrugged my shoulders, smiled in all the right places and took my leave after I was told by one of the neighbors that I should go to rest after a hard day at school.

Each culture has its ways of greeting and communicating. Neither is the correct way and it has been interesting to compare the differences. So whether you are in America greeting almost everyone you see with a hello and a smile or here in Bulgaria following the step by step process we are all interested in one another getting past the initial steps take hard work.

-Kate