It would be masochistically interesting to see how we'd get by without Aleks, who's been expertly handling our interactions with almost anyone here. Very few of the people we've met speak English. Since Aleks speaks Russian -- the closest any of us can get to Bulgarian -- he's basically taken over all of our communication with ticket offices, taxi drivers, random passersby, and the like. It helps that most of the older generation who grew up during the Soviet era are familiar with Russian (English and Western European languages are becoming common only among the younger generation, we're told).
Here's the thing I wasn't prepared for: the language barrier isn't just verbal. Head nodding and shaking, for "yes" and "no," are entirely reversed here. As we've found out, nodding means "no," while shaking your head side-to-side means "yes." Bulgaria is apparently one of the only places in the world that does this. We initially saw this firsthand at the bus station (pictured), when the ticket lady was answering a question about buses to Rila or Dupnitsa for the following day. She answered "da, da, da," but at the same time shook her head vigorously. The disconnect was really jarring, the first time I saw it. Later, I asked a woman at an electronics store if she sold CompactFlash memory cards (for my camera), and she nodded her head as if to say yes, but closed her eyes and solemnly repeated "ne, no, no." The younger the person, the more conscious they tend to be of this around foreigners. I asked the man at another electronics store -- probably in his mid-20s -- the same question. He said "no" and started to nod, but then saw my confused face, stopped midway on the downswing, and quickly began shaking his head to the side.
No worries, though. Occasionally, the language thing gets pretty funny, too (to us, at least). Several of the bus companies like to announce new bus routes on the signs above their ticket booths, and "new" in Bulgarian translates to "novo." In the Cyrillic alphabet, though, the Latin "N" looks like "H," while the Latin "V" looks like "B." So to us English-speakers, the signs look like they're advertising "HOBO!!!"
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