Sofia bikes

Before heading south to Plovdiv I've spent a little less than 24 hours in Sofia. It was relentlessly hot, and to a large extent everything was as I remembered it. Lots of shabby houses still standing around, several new glass and steel buildings int he outskirts, and building sites everywhere which gives a sense of a constant work in process.

Besides from the better looking park in front of NDK, two things impressed me, though. One was the boom of small stores/bars/restaurant with a dedicatedly alternative and green image. The second thing was that it seemed everyone has bought a bike since I was last around.

(Picture grabbed from the  Among the Birds blog) (c) 2010 Zona Urbana

There are a lot of cool places to go nowadays for those living in, or staying in Sofia. A bunch of alternative water holes present themselves on this lovely cartooned map of Sofia. A must for anyone who wants to visit the best of Sofia. This kind of places, the common ground between them might be a shared clientèle, and shared values like alternative life style, small scale and environmental thinking. It is vegetarian restaurants, bio-shops, and craft stores producing jewelery form recycled material.

As a Swede, it is not without envy that I watch such places appearing one more and more street corners. In my home town, Lund, the development seems to be the opposite - small stores are rapidly pushed out of market by big retail chains and the shopping malls outside the city. It is curious how the numerous malls in Sofia has not yet managed to destroy this market for small scale commercial activities.

Two reasons are obvious - more and more young Bulgarians have developed a taste for this kind of things, and also some money to pay restaurant bills with. And due to the still rough state of many buildings in central Sofia, rents are still far from what they are in Western Europe, even in a place like Lund, which makes it easier to make money on small businesses. If I was a Sofia politician, I would think a lot about how to improve buildings in the center, without raising rents too much. Too many cities have made their centers tidy but boring. Sofia still has a chance to avoid that.

So for the bikes. When I was living in Sofia, some people did bike, but they were very rare. It was perfectly possible to go an entire day without seeing a single bike. Now, bikers are still a minority, they are a very visible minority. In almost every crossing you would see one biker navigating between cars.

Which is probably one clue why so many people do it. Biking is green, cheap and fashionable as in Western Europe, but except for that it seems to be the absolutely fastest way to move through central Sofia. Cars are usually stuck in two lines, buses and trams as well, but a daring biker find his way in between. A Swedish biker probably wouldn't, let's say that the bicyclists in Sofia bike pretty much as the drivers drive.

I look forward to coming back to this city twice a year for the rest of my life, and this is the kind of things I hope to see more of. Which reminds me of my everyday life back home... it is definitely time for me to buy a new bike.

Walking the dog

I have been spending christmas and new year with my fiancee's family in Pleven, Bulgaria, and to some extent become part of this family. As such I needed a task in order to feel needed and beloved. My task: to walk the dog. (The dog is a food loving cocker named Beki)

Regularly taking walks in the socialist architectured housing area that like so many other in Bulgaria is called Drujba (friendship) has provided me with plenty of details that highlight the differences between Sweden and Bulgaria. The Darkness at the Edge of Town, the other dogs and the other people.

The darkness is a very striking feature if you go out after sunset. Not that it is completely dark, but the street lights are positioned further away from each other, somehow. It all gives a vey spooky impression the first night, but after a while you feel at home in it. After all, a human being feels better when it is dark at night, than in fabricated light. And what can be cozier than the lights coming from windows when the outside is almost black?

The dogs are always an issue for a foreigner in Bulgaria, but when you are walking a dog (that is not even yours), you are carefulle watching out for what other dogs are around you.

These can be divided into three groups. There are of course some who are owned by individuals, who usually are with them. This kind of dogs are plenty in Sweden and pose no problem. Unless you are in the mountain where the shepherds dogs are half wild, big as bears, and often very far from their owners. But that is another story.

The second kind of dogs is a kind that I really miss back home. It is dogs who are taken care of collectively by a group of people. It could be the inhabitants in a block, or the people who work in an office building - those who see the dog every day, who feed it, caress it and talk to it. No one takes the dog home, and it sleeps where it pleases. These dogs of course do not get violent, since they have everything they want and people take care of them.

I think this arrangement does so much for a collective of people, and I think that these dogs live as well as any dog, so why couldn't it be like this everywhere? Still I have only seen it happen in Bulgaria (I guess it happens in other countries outside the western world, as well).

The third group of dogs are those who live completely wild. Since Drujba is located where Pleven ends, right next to it begins a small forest that probably is perfect for wild dogs. From there they can make detours into the housing area looking for food (read: garbage), and then go back to sleep unthreatened at night. Human beings tend to avoid them. For all I know they live well when they live, but you often see them with broken legs and similar signs of a dangerous life style.

Stray dogs, picture from Wikipedia

My heart always starts beating faster when I see these wild dogs. They have not been violent with me and Becki, but since they are probably quite suspicious of humans, I try to avoid them. I have no idea how they and Becki would interact, and I did get bitten once. That is also another story, a really great one, actually.

The other people could not be easily divided into cathegories. They are rather a large collection of indiviuals. In Amos Oz's novel A Tale of Love and Darkness someone says about Jerusalem's population that 10% are very rich, 10% very poor and 80% very odd. That would be a very good explanation of street life in a Bulgarian city as well. And ther are lots of people. If you walk a dog in a housing area in Sweden you will not meet many people, and those you meet are unlikely to talk to you.

I remember saying hello to a dog in Sweden, whereupon its owner looked suspiciously at me and asked: "Do you know her?" Here you don't need to know a dog in order to talk to it, or to its owner. When I walk Beki, I hear all kinds of hellos and compliments of the dog.

The most shocking for me was the day before christmas when some middle aged guys sipping rakija asked me if it wasn't about time to slaughter it for christmas. What would you answer to that?

Not much, I just walk the dog home, shocked and slightly amused. Once I got home and sat down with a cup of coffee I looked out at the identical rows of houses and thought that the houses might be dull but their inhabitants not.