Places | Migrations

Before You Leave for Bulgaria

My husband’s grandfather wrote an immigration guide called “Before You Leave for America.” We could have used one in reverse—for moving to Bulgaria.

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Before you leave for Bulgaria: Learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Pay attention to the characters that are shared by the Latin alphabet but pronounced differently. The letter now sounds like an ; is .

Before you leave for Bulgaria: Understand that spending what’s perceived as too much money—even if you get a better product or result—will lead some people to think you don’t understand how to navigate the country, where finding creative ways to get a discount is a national sport.

Before you leave for Bulgaria: Understand the scale of the bureaucracy. Picking up and sending out mail requires going to two different gisheta, or desks, at a neighborhood post office. Claiming a package that’s come through customs is a four-gisheta process.