Friday: Biser to Border
Biser to Sofia and beyond a bit – almost to the Serbian border, in fact
302km
In the vans from 10am til 5pm, with an hour’s stop for lunch
Autumn is here. We have felt the mornings grow colder, now we see it as we drive. Branches cling to crisp brown leaves, not relinquishing them for the flight to the earth. Other trees are so yellow they are like a field of sunflowers concentrated on one trunk. Some cluster in groups; others stand as solitary exclamations on the landscape.
It’s a fine time for a road trip.
The fields are filled with crops – tobacco, cotton, cabbages, the last tomatoes of summer, corn, short-stemmed sunflowers, yellow wheat, apples, grapes.
The villages display their own treasures. Perhaps handmade baskets in every imaginable shape. Or ceramics, lined up on the roadside. Or enormous bags of peppers for sale. Or a lady beside her tomato pyramid. EVERY village has pumpkins and squash, piled up in the sun.
Hillsides dotted with trees become thickly forested rolling mounds. The dark green is dusted with rusty red copper, a hint of the falling autumn.
We drive and drive.
Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, appears. It pokes out of the smog, impressing us with its many monuments, memorials, parks, old buildings, churches, cathedrals and cobblestoned streets. We have an itinerary written out for us by our friend, Elena in Biser, but the only parking we can find is in a no parking zone. We follow the example of the many cars already stopped there and pull in for a short while, but we don’t have time to get towed away, so we don’t venture far. We do, however, drive through the old town, thankful that it is traffic-jam-time, allowing us a leisurely look at the famous sights.
As we drive along, I contemplate a conversation I witnessed yesterday.
She was a Bulgarian wanting to leave. He was a Brit choosing to make Bulgaria home.
He was full of praise for the country, comparing it to the good ol’ days when he was growing up in England. She could not contain her scepticism. I did not know enough to contribute meaningfully, so became a passive observer.
In retrospect, it would seem, the bulk of her argument was that the few big cities in Bulgaria are too expensive to live in and the villages are dead – full of old people and too boring for young people to stay in for much more than a few months at a time, not to mention lacking education opportunities.
Viewing home education with favour and in particular having grave concerns about the current trend in the west to push children into all sorts of activities from an early age, the latter part of the anti-Bulgaria argument did not hold much weight with me.
As for the boring bit……well, she hit upon one of my hobby horses! What do you mean by boring? Lack of entertainment? Not enough *culture*? How about making your own entertainment? How about creating instead of simply observing? I remember watching young girls and ladies in Laos with their embroidery. They weren’t complaining of lack of opportunity or boredom. OK so not everyone wants to stitch, but surely it is possible to carve out a meaningful life in a rural setting.
I wonder if it’s a matter of choice. When you *have* to stay in a village, because the cities cost too much, perhaps you feel trapped. When someone else has something you don’t have, you feel denied. But having that extra whatever, is not necessarily going to bring contentment or quality of life.
What matters?
I thought about this as we passed the lines of people waiting for their orange tram, an identical orange to our own van, to ferry them out to the apartment-block suburbs.
And we drove on towards the border.
Tags: 2008/09, postcard: Bulgaria, postcard: RoadRace
rayres
[…] Friday: Biser to Border […]
*snicker* having grown up in small town NZ, i’d much rather live in a reasonably small city like our own! yes, the kids/teens would create their own amusement, but it isn’t necessarily what their parents would choose for them, and the rural kids were even worse! 😉 i’d much rather be able to take the kids to the museum or art gallery, and have access to a library where they aren’t constantly running out of age-appropriate books to read 😀 heh i’m hanging out in the field where the grass is greenest to me…
You can make your own entertainment for a few days while it’s raining, or even a few weeks on holidays. You can’t make your own entertainment for ten, fifteen, twenty years, unless you have very limited interests and are easily entertained (eg. if cross-stitching for thirty years keeps you entertained, then great, but that doesn’t work for a lot of people).
There is also a difference between the basic education an 8 year old needs as opposed to the advanced education a 17 year old, 21 year old or thirty year old might need. You can homeschool children. You cannot home-educate an engineer, doctor or psychologist.
I am not saying choosing a rural lifestyle is wrong. Not at all. But you can’t just brush off someone else’s legitimate objections to being, themselves, cornered into such a lifestyle. It’s like telling a computer engineer who gets stuck in a one horse town with no internet access to get over it and just choose something else to occupy themselves. Or telling a farmer who is stuck in a city of 4 million to just forget about his living-off-the-land preferences and find something else to entertain him.