Happy Holiday, Bulgaria 🇧🇬

I visited a few iconic places today to celebrate the national holiday.

The Nevski Cathedral, St. Sofia with the eternal flame, and King Samuil’s statue.

This is King Samuil, watching if you click like.

The other cathedral, St. Nedelya (we have two), the Largo with the St. Sofia statue in the distance, and the president’s office with the guards.

Vitosha Boulevard, The Palace of Justice (The Court House), and The Parliament, with the Horse, an ancient TV truck, and the Cathedral in the background.

There will be fireworks in the evening. I hope we have a chance to go and watch them in person.

Bansko

Bansko is changing.

It used to be a small town with an old city. Then the ski zone came with thousands of new hotels, growing faster than the infrastructure. It had lots of people in the winter but was a muddy ghost town in the summer. Now the central area is expanding with paved walking streets that make it a summer resort as well.

The digital nomads and hipsters have found it. It has multiple co-working spaces. An abandoned hotel turned to a co-living space. The central square has daily events. People everywhere.

The success infected the nearby villages as well. Banya has multiple 4 and 5* hotels with mineral water.

I can see us going back with the goal to climb Vihren again. Not sure when. The summer season is over.

Elections Time

Tomorrow is the election time in Europe and double election time in Bulgaria. We’ll vote for a national parliament on top of the EU one. Elections bring political discussions into daily life and expose the divisions we have. I’m unsure about the proper way to handle that. My country’s society is very divided on many topics.

  • Shall we send weapons to help Ukraine
  • Was Communism good or bad
  • More roads or higher pensions
  • Are immigrants good or bad
  • Shall we adopt the Euro

And the list continues. Any random person I meet can hold extreme beliefs on any of the subjects, and learning about that, or exploring it, can lead to changing the perception of that person, or them changing their perception of me if I express extreme beliefs.

For example, a plumber comes home to fix something, fixes it, and drops that whatever random thing has been bad for 35 years, implicating it was good before that, and before that was communism. I immediately recognize this person is radically in the “Communism Good” camp, while I’m in the “Communism Bad” camp.

Over the years, I have slowly learned that the best strategy for me is to avoid the subject outside of the family. It may not sound right, but it is the best strategy I’ve found so far.

Today I posted a comment about politics on some random blog and feel like I swam in poop. I posted it in the Reader and didn’t realize it’s some conspiracy blog. It’s a good reminder to me to not engage in politics until I find a way to engage without feeling that way.

In any case, it’s the peak of politics talk for the year for us. Time to vote.