The Quirks of Eastern Europe – Part 2

Here are ten more weird things about Eastern Europe in no particular order. If you haven’t already, you can read the first ten here.

11) There is no concept of a shower screen or curtain. Instead, the entire bathroom floor is treated as the floor of the shower. This means that EVERYTHING in the room gets wet — often including toilet paper! In one hostel we went to, the shower head was almost directly above the toilet seat. On the other hand there was been many times when the only place I could find to store my dry clothes & toiletries was on top on the toilet bowl (lid down of cause :-P).

12) Everybody has a mobile phone. At first, this sounds normal to us. But here, people will buy a phone before they will fix the hole in their roof, or fix their leaking sewage. This photo of a man riding a horse and cart while talking on his mobile phone says it best! I wonder if you could get booked for that?

13) All food is sold by grams In Bulgaria & Romania every menu and sign will state the weight of the meal. This is awesome when ordering a meal at a restaurant, but is really weird when buying an ice-cream cone. The three of us ordered 1-scoop ice-cream cones while in Sofia and the cost of each of our cones differed by about 60c. It was just like buying 4 pieces of ham from the deli — you have no idea how much it will cost you.

I’ve heard of two possible reasons for this. 1. That it’s a requirement of being a part of the EU to keep trade fair. 2. That it is left over from communism, where food was limited to rations so how much something weighed was important.

14) They still use 1 and 2 coins, and they are completely useless and annoying. The ice-cream I mentioned above came to 2.02 lev, so I gave the girl a 2 lev coin. Although, she insisted that I give her the extra 2 stotinki. She then took ages to sort through her coins so that she could give me exact change. What a waste of time! Also, Romania uses 1 lei notes (about $0.37 AUD) which leads to a LOT of notes in your pocket.

15) Food is awesome! Especially salads. Food might contain more fat, but it is far less processed. My bowels are going to be sad to head back to Australia.

16) You usually have to pay to use a public toilet. I wouldn’t mind if the toilets were well maintained, but usually they are much more disgusting than free Australian public toilets! All of the public toilets that I’ve been to in Romania have been smelly squats, and you only get a very small amount of toilet paper. I recommend holding on until Macca’s or your hostel!

Yes, I had to pay to use that!

17) Milk… haha… yeah… If you can find it. If you can it could be out of date — so make sure you check the date Stu. Oh, and it usually comes in a bag, or a uht container, and won’t taste fantastic.

18) Mobile phones are cheap, well the phone itself will cost you about the same, but call rates are much cheaper. In Romania, it was cheaper for me to use my Bulgarian SIM card (with global roaming) to SMS an Australian number than it would cost me to SMS an Australian number from Australia using my Australian SIM card.

19) Speed limits are pretty much ignored. The minibus (called a maxi-taxi here in Romania) didn’t slow down for towns and villages. He (and every other car) just kept driving through the tight village streets at highway speed. I’d hate to know what would happen if a kid jumped out onto the road.

20) Haskovo Zoo (In English: Haskovo Animal Prison). To waste some time we went here for a walk. Apparently some foreigner recently paid the zoo a lot of money to have a large bear (that was living in a cage there) moved to a more humane location. I think somebody should do the same for this poor lion :-(