wshaffer

So, here's the part that everyone really wants to know about: what did I eat while I was in Sofia?

Bulgarian cuisine has two major focal points: salads and dairy products, especially cheese and yogurt. This is possibly my idea of culinary heaven, but your mileage may vary.

Bulgarians really are crazy about salads. The archetypal Bulgarian salad is shopska salata, made with tomatoes, cucumber, bell pepper, onion, and a white feta-like cheese called sireneh. You can also get more ordinary green salads, Caesar salads, and so on. I frequently had some kind of salad at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Shopska salata is even the traditional food to eat when you are drinking rakiya, Bulgarian brandy. (That struck me as a bit odd, considering that in most parts of the world, the traditional boozing-it-up food is usually salty and/or fatty. I suppose a shopska salata can be both if you load it up with enough cheese, but still...)

Besides the salads, some other traditional Bulgarian dishes that I sampled were:

• Tarator, which is a cold cucumber and yogurt soup. Very refreshing on hot summer days. Many places will also serve it in a mug as a beverage.


• Katok, which is a sort of dip or spread made with yogurt, sheep's milk cheese, walnuts, and roasted red peppers. You can eat it on its own or spread on bread or slices of raw tomato. I need to learn how to make this - I could happily eat it every day.


• Moussaka, clearly related to the Greek dish, but in Bulgaria it is most commonly a dish of diced potato and ground pork with paprika and other spices, topped with cheese and baked. It's traditional to pair this with tarator.


• Kyufteta, sauteed pork meatballs, which I had with a roasted red pepper sauce.


• Mishmash, this is just scrambled eggs with peppers and onions. But seriously, how can you not love a dish called mishmash?


• Bob, which is a bean and sausage stew.

For dinner, I frequently had a piece of grilled chicken or fish with some grilled vegetables on the side. Simple, but tasty.
( More ramblings on foreign cuisine, sweets, and booze )

I thought I should take a moment to post a bit about my trip to Sofia, Bulgaria. I have to say, it's a very different experience travelling to a foreign country for business rather than being a tourist. I actually had very little time for doing anything other than working, eating, and sleeping. On the other hand, I spent most of my time working and eating with locals. So, I came back with fewer pretty pictures, but maybe a better understanding of local culture - or a very particular slice of local culture.

But let's start with a few pretty pictures:
( The Alexander Nevsky Church )

Working in our Sofia office was interesting. The Technical Publications team there is very tight-knit. Almost all of the writers work in the same large room, at open desks without even so much as cubicle walls separating them. It's also a very homogeneous and rather young team - many of the writers went to the same high school and/or university, and the experienced old-timers are *maybe* my age, plus or minus a few years. Despite being so tight-knit, they adopted me as one of the group pretty effortlessly. It actually made me a little embarrassed - I'm not sure that we in Palo Alto are so thoroughly hospitable to team members from other sites who visit us.

I was really pleased that my efforts to learn a little bit of Bulgarian paid off in ways both expected and unexpected. The expected benefit was that it did help me communicate, and it was also very psychologically reassuring to me - I find the idea of being unable to communicate very scary.

The unexpected benefit was the amazed and delighted reaction I got from many Bulgarians when I spoke to them in their language. Even surly cab drivers would break into gleeful grins when I uttered a simple "good morning" or "thank you".

My primary resources for learning Bulgarian were the Teach Yourself Bulgarian Conversation CDs, which I played on my commute to and from work for a few weeks before going on my trip, and the free Bulgarian Survival Phrases podcasts. Neither will make you fluent, but since they do concentrate on vocabulary that is useful for the tourist or business traveller, you'll get a lot of bang for your buck. I recommend both.

Well, this is getting long, so I'll stop here. Look for a future post in which I'll talk about Bulgarian food, the Evolution of Technical Communications conference I presented at, and visiting Koprivshtitsa. With more pretty pictures!

Apologies for the radio silence around here - early tomorrow morning, I'm getting on a plane to go to Sofia, Bulgaria for eight days. I've been scrambling to get various things done before I leave, and updating LJ has gone a bit by the wayside.

This will be my first real international business trip - I'll be working out of my employer's Bulgaria office for a week and presenting at a technical writing conference we are hosting. I'm not sure how much opportunity I'll have for tourism, but I'm hoping to visit the open air book market, and possibly do some hiking on Mount Vitosha.

I have expanded my repertoire of Bulgarian phrases to include useful items such as, "My baggage is not here," "I do not speak Bulgarian," and "Can I use a credit card?" (That last is roughly, "Moga li da ispolzvam kartnata kredita?" I now know why Bulgarians speak so fast - the only way to get through one of those consonant clusters unscathed is to go in with some momentum.)

At least in theory, I'll have near constant internet access while I'm in Sofia, so you might even see some updates from there.