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Bucharest, Romania
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This place was Poor
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Meeting up with Neda, another one of Renee’s friends from Music School, provided a great end to our Balkans trip. Just like Tomaz in Slovenia and just about everyone else on our trip, she was an open and warm host who provided a big lesson on her country and culture during our short visit. Neda is an incredible pianist that went to Eastman School of Music in NY with Renee for a year. We made way to a café where she ordered Bulgarian pancakes for us, then turned to talking about her Sofia and Bulgaria. She explained how the surface of Sofia is fictional, and beneath it is the reality of poverty, corruption and many difficult problems. Sofia has had a facelift and life has improved for some over the last few years, but no one can afford to buy a thing at the boutiques lining every street, unemployment is widespread, making $100/month is very good, all of her friends have left to work in other countries, and the government is forgetting about the villages, focusing only on improving Sofia. A second election between the red Socialists (in reality, communists) and blues would occur the following week after no one turned out for the first election and Neda hoped that people would wake up to ensure that the Communists weren’t elected. Until I met Neda, my view as a backpacker traveling through Bulgaria and being away from Dova was different. I thought that Sofia is a beautiful, vibrant and rising capital city, with lots of young people, and, although the villages in Bulgaria seemed poorer than those found in Moldova, the infrastructure of water, gas, etc., to build on for a promising future. Neda reminded us to look deeper, below the superficial surface, to see how most live in Bulgaria and the other countries we’ll be seeing in future travels.
Posted
Jun 15, 2005
by criegler
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