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.

More on malls

In Slavenca Draclic's excellent book "Cafe Europa", the author describes an Albanian man who sits by the road, trying to sell one banana. His idea of economical progress is to get this banana sold, so that he can buy two bananas tomorrow, sell them the next day to buy three, and eventually becoming rich. This is not what street vendors look like i today's Bulgaria, but when you see some of them it is not difficult to imagine the scene that Draculic describes.

For Draculic, the banana selling man is a sad illustration of the void Albania fell into after the fall of commuism. That is not the way people get rich. (it is definitely not the way that today's rich Bulgarians made it). But that this banana selling man would be a perfect illustration to a book about classical liberal economic theory, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of the Nations.

These theories have a lot of flaws, but the crude economical life in the Balkans show that there is some truth in Smith's and his peers' philosphy. I have seen few places in Europe where Neo-liberalism has been carried out so consistently as in Bulgaria. What is more important, capitalism here began from a kind of tabula rasa that is the starting point for Smith's theories but has never existed in a country like Sweden.

Weak demand, poor customers and lack of capital have forced the Bulgarian market economy to develop into a small scale capitalism. Some might call this backwardness, others might say that is natural at this level of development, but it nontheless have some very positive sides for the customer. Bulgaria is sometimes like a capitalism with a human face - you buy the goods from the person in front of you, not merely have them handed over by a disinterested employee in a multinational corporation. That is not always nice, human face can laugh, cheat and be angry. A multinational corporation is always couldn't care less, even though they employ the best minds of our genereation to convince you that they do.

I have written about the Bulgarian malls before (here and here), but I have proably not understood them properly. In an earlier post I wrote that what is sold in the malls is not more expensive than what you can buy in the streets. This is true to some degree, but as a matter of fact stores in the malls are more expensive than most stores in the normal shopping street, while they are cheaper than the more eclusive stores on Vitosha Bvd. for example.

Mark my words... "THE stores in the malls are cheaper than MOST malls in the street". What is really significant about the malls is not the price, because next to the amazingly expensive Bennetton, there is always a Zara with a 50% discount, and a Kenvelo where clothes, at least for male clients are cheaper than anywhere else. In the street, on the other hand, there is still a myriad of small shops, with different kind of goods like hand made jewellery or more or less hand made clothes, different prices etc. This is exactly how capitalism looks in the school books, but the reality in capitalist countries differ.

This kind of stores hardly exist in Sweden. In stead you find the same stores in every town: H&M, Dressman and MQ for clothes, Cervera for kitchen utensils, Claes Ohlsson for tools etc. Interestingly, deragulation has done nothing to increase the number of small stores, rather opened up markets for international brands. The same brands, and the same prices everywhere. When small stores exist they position themselves as more expensive boutiques.

The economic reasons for this are obvious - it is difficult to sell clothes cheaper than H&M, tomake them by hand in Sweden is not realistic, and the rents in central commercial areas are expensive. The housing bubble has probably made them a lot more expensive.

What the entrance of malls in the Bulgarian economy really represent is this kind of Brand Capitalism, as I know it from home. In every Bulgarian town there will be a mall, with the same brands and the same prices. There are nice things in the malls, of course, but I think many find it more interesting to visit the smaller stores, where chances are you might be dissapointed or positively surprised.

The prices of commercial space in Sofia and other East European capitals have sky rocketed in the last years, and there is probably quite a lot of pressure on smaller entrepeneurs. In addition to existing malls, many new malls are projected It will for sure turn some of the current entrepeneurs into disinterested employees in multinational corporation.

Still, I can't see malls completely erasing the small scale capitalism, still visible in every Bulgarian street. Not all small scale vendors are nice, of course, and we could wish that the malls outcompete the crooks among them. But unless Bulgarian shopping habits, values change drastically I think people will support their local traders. You simply feel so much more important as a customer, when the the shop owner depends on your money to survive the day. Kenvelo does not.

The last two days I have been walking around in Sofia, and travelled to Pleven where I am right now, awaiting christmas. In Sofia I visited one of the many malls, where I eventually bought myself a Bulgarian novel for 4 EUR, and a good meal for a similar price.

A mall in Sofia but not Mall of Sofia. It is called Sofia City Center and is located right outside the city center...

During my first summer in Bulgaria (2007), a Swedish journalist was here, to file an article about the new EU capital. he was quite as disappointed as he expected to be I think. Also he mentioned the then newly built Mall of Sofia, that he profoundly misunderstood. He saw the luxury inside, remarkable when compared with the misery that can easily be found outside, and from the fact that most people in the streets looked poor to theis Swedish observer, he draw the conclusion that only the mega rich Bulgarians visit the malls. Which is not true.

There are some mega rich Bulgarians, but their numbers have fallen drastically due to the financial crisis. There are also worrying many people who describe themselves as very poor - 13% in a survey I saw in the socialist newspaper Sega. Also their numbers have increased due to the crisis. But the great majority of Bulgarians,around 40% in the same survey, are neither very rich or very poor. In terms of income they are probably poorer than most Swedes, but in terms of living standards the differences are much smaller than one would imagine from official numbers, in which Sweden's GDP is about ten times that of Bulgarias. (2007)

Malls is a major phenomenon in Bulgarian city architecture today, even in smaller cities like Pleven. Prices inside the malls are generally not higher than in shops in the streets - as a matter of facts most of the shops are the same. The visitors are exaclty this group of quite well off middle class people, who have a little extra money to spend, and make it an all day event. It is exactly the place you might expect to meet someone you know, if you work in an office for 500 EUR a month.

One of Pleven's two malls.


Another place where you might meet them, of course is the train or bus station, where everyone living in Sofia is more or less often. For some reason I find myself travelling all the time while in Bulgaria.

Whereas the traffic in Sofia has been horrible for days, and it can not only be the snows fault, the bus trip to Pleven went very smooth. Sure enough media has reported about delayed busses and trains due to the snowy weather, but in fact the problems have been very small in Bulgaria compared to continental Europe. I think Bulgarian media sometimes exaggerate the negative news, and they are quick to use words like "chaos" and "a little hell", about a situation that is awkward but normal anywhere.

Today's videoclip is from central Sofia, where some young lads were snow boarding. Idyllic... Yes, my new years resolution for 2010 will be to learn to shoot better films ;)