A Little Bit about Myself and More about Bulgaria

Having lived in this country for almost fifteen years, I am on my way to becoming American. I speak English freely, shop, and drive a white coupe Solara with a sunroof, but not on the motorways because I’m still afraid of the speed. Sometimes I inadvertently use British English (motorway hasn’t yet become freeway, and petrol hasn’t changed into gas) because that’s how I was taught English (and French before that) back home in Bulgaria, bred to mingle and make friends in high places, and also because I did live in the UK for about six years where I met and married my handsome American husband John. He is a physics Ph.D. and we worked together in a research lab at the University of Edinburgh. It was an international affair.

It still goes on. He loves Bulgarian cooking and dirty sex jokes and puts up with a slew of bad Bulgarian habits, gradually dismantling them, helping me to get rid of: annoying flippancy, offensive directness, propensity for issuing orders, interrupting… (The list sometimes can get quite long.) And I, for my part, endure elucidations about the thermodynamics framework applied to the general principles of the theory of relativity, while helping him to adjust back in place a silky blond curl behind his left pierced earlobe, usually on weekends at Starbucks idling in the Californian morning sun, enjoying the good coffee, blissfully thinking of….

It all started one rainy November morning when I arrived by the night bus in Scotland with three suitcases, fifty dollars, my twelve-year old son, and a signed contract to work at the university.

Before that, I lived in communist Bulgaria.

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