Coffee in Bulgaria: my day changer
When traveling in Europe one experiences many different cultures and many different languages. Europe is a continent in which its historical cities with their architecturally intriguing buildings lay all over and satisfy even the inexperienced eye. But how does one travel in Europe without knowing the 24 different languages there are?
You might think that the answer is obvious: “one can speak English, everyone speaks English!”. But what if they don’t? And what if you need to catch a train but you can’t read the time table because it appears like this “Отправления” and you can’t communicate with anyone because no one around you speaks English?
That is when you have a bit of a problem!
This August I decided to take a month off life and go around Europe with an Interrail ticket.
I started my journey in Italy, went up to Switzerland, continued into France, from Lyon to Paris, and then started heading east: Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland. So far, so good. Everyone spoke English, except a couple of French people who insisted on speaking French with me, although I kept repeating that I “ne parle pas francais”. Thankfully, my Italian mother tongue being so similar to French allowed me to follow the one-sided conversations that these were having with me. Things started getting complicated when I flew down to Greece. Athens and the Greek islands weren’t a big problem, but getting the train from Athens to Sofia, in Bulgaria, was a typical east-European adventure.
The end of August was approaching, and the weather was just perfect: nice and warm during the day and slightly chilled at night. I left Athens on a night train heading to Thessaloniki. From Thessaloniki, I took another train that took me to Strimonas, a tiny village at the border between Greece and Bulgaria. From there I left the train and took another bus to the other side of the border, in Kulata. In Kulata the train station was a simple one rail track, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The only people waiting for the train were a mother with her two daughters from South Africa travelling Europe, an English man who had spent his last 30 years living in America, and had decided to go on early pension, sell all his belongings, and travel the world, and a middle-aged woman who’s nationality or reason for travelling I never understood because of a language barrier, but seemed to be moving with her stuff from Greece to Bulgaria. The woman had many suitcases and would ask me in Bulgarian if I would help her with her bags between each bus and train change. I understood her only because of the gestures that she would apply while asking.
The train station in Kulata will always be in my memory. It was such a peaceful place, poorly built, but people seemed calm and happy. At that point, after a whole night spent sleeping in two different trains, and a bus journey that none of us were sure was going to happen, I was in extreme need of caffeine. I plucked up the courage and started looking around this deserted train station. A police officer happened to be walking back and forth in front of the train track and seeing me so lost and confused started asking questions in Bulgarian.
You should know, dear reader, that I have no knowledge of Bulgarian, I never studied the language and I didn’t even know that the country used the Cyrillic alphabet until a few weeks before the start of my adventure. When the police officer started asking questions in Bulgarian, I was baffled. Yet I was able to communicate and find my coffee. But how?
I spoke Russian or the few words that I still remembered, with the officer. I had studied the language a couple of years before at University. Having some knowledge about languages and the different language families that there are in Europe, I understood immediately that Bulgarian was a Slavic language and when the police officer spoke to me, this sounded almost Russian to my ears. The police officer didn’t speak English, therefore I attempted speaking Russian, hoping that it would be similar enough to the language.
It was a success, and I was able to ask where I would have to go to buy coffee. The coffee was amazing, and the feeling of having been able to communicate because of the linguistic knowledge that I had achieved some years before left me feeling very proud of myself.
I wanted to share this experience to let others know the importance of learning languages other than English, and how amazing it is to be able to communicate with someone because of this extra skill that we have.
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed my story 😊
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