21) Bulgarian ATM’s give you 10 lev notes most of the time. You wouldn’t believe how awesome this is! But Romanian ATMS give you 100 lei notes — very annoying! But they are only worth about $37 AUD .

22) Most people seem to live in Communist issue flats. These are usually big, plain, concrete, flats that are built together in one place. Since they fit a lot of people into a relatively small space, a city of 100,000 takes up less area than an Australian city of 40,000. It means that there are a lot more people walking the streets at night.

23) In most toilets you cannot flush your toilet paper. Instead, there is a bin next to the toilet bowl for you to dispose of your freshly dirtied paper. Surprisingly it doesn’t smell bad, as most of the paper is scented. Luckily, I’ve never been the person who had to empty the toilet paper bin. :-)

24) Overtaking is scarey!. Every overtake seems to be made with “only just” enough room. Most minibuses will start the overtaking process before the car coming the other way has gone past, which turns a two lane road into three lanes. And if you are merging lanes, just make sure sure that there is a gap 10cm longer than the length of your car and go for it! Dangerous? YES! I’m so gratefully to live in a country with good drivers.

25) Tailgating is epidemic. I don’t think anybody has ever heard of the 2 second rule. You know… the rule about being no closer than 2s to the car in front. If there was a rule here, it’d be more of a 0.5 metre rule — even on the highway at 100km/hr. Yes, it is scary being a passenger!

26) Coffee… haha… Most coffee is sold as espresso, or medium-blacks. And there you were thinking that I wasn’t going to mention the coffee situation Don’t bother ordering a milk based drink — it’ll either be Nescafe, or have super-terribly frothed milk.

At least it’s cheap. You can buy a rather average take-away shot in a clear plastic cup for 30 stotinki (25c). On the up side, we went out a few times for coffee and cake, and it only cost about 10lev (~$9AUD) for the three of us. So worth it! Although, I think my snobbiness for a good cup of coffee has disappeared. I’m sure it won’t take me long to get it back though :-P

27) “Quality” — Bulgarian goods. I bought an expensive (for Bulgaria; but only $35 in Aussie dollars) ski jacket to keep me warm. But, the first time I wore it, two bits of it broke. Building materials are also dodgy — we stayed at a newly renovated hotel, but all the fittings where already falling apart. I kept wanting to go around the room with a screwdriver and re-tighten every screw.

28) Rubbish is everywhere! There doesn’t appear to be the concept of “you bought it in? you take it out” that we have in Tasmania. Don’t look at the side of any highway — it’ll just look like a tip. Even in Turkey, rubbish was along every walking track we walked along and in every rock cave we looked in. I’ve always heard people comment about hoe clean Tasmania is. I guess I didn’t realise what dirty was until then :-)

29) Bulgarian fashion is funny — well at least stuck in the 90’s. Crimped hair, and pleather (plastic-leather) are currently the rage. And Elly would definitely want me to mention what she calls “nappy pants”. I’ll let you ask her about them :-)

30) Nobody seems to care about pollution. A shopping complex we went to in Romania was built across the road from a fertiliser factory. It didn’t smell very good. Also, everybody has these coal fire places in their houses. If you thought wood smoke pollution was bad in Launceston, you should smell the coal smoke pollution in Eastern Europe!

THE END

Well, I’m now about 25 mins off landing in Australia, so I better head. Bye!

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 :-(

1) EVERYBODY smokes EVERYWHERE. Cafes, pubs, restaurants, the street, toilets, and everywhere STINKS like cigarette smoke. My clothes consistently smell of the stuff. I wonder what their lung cancer rates are? I definitely won’t miss being able to go out for a coffee and not have to breathe in 10 peoples cigarette smoke. Oh, and it seems totally ok to smoke in front of children!

2) Beer is CHEAP, generally of a better quality, and can be bought anywhere — The supermarket, KFC, the fridge at the backpackers hostel, corner shops, and just about anywhere. It’s often cheaper than water, and always cheaper than Cuke! Of cause, there is (apparently) a much bigger problem with alcoholism here. I wonder why?

It’s great to go out to some trendy place and be able to grab a pint (~500ml) of some tasty European beer for less than $1AUD. Wine is cheap too. A couple of nights ago we were drinking a fantastic pinot noir that cost about 12 lei ($4.71AUD) for a 1.5 litre bottle. Although it’s not as cheap for the people here (who have a much lower average wage than us Australians). Here’s a picture of a German beer sitting on a supermarket shelf.

3) Power points don’t have on/off switches. Every time I plug in my computer I get a big blue arc!

4) Music in Bulgaria is terrible! 50% of the music Bulgarian cafes, pubs, buses, etc play is the English music from the 90’s. On the plus side Romanian have a good taste in music — I’ve heard Coldplay, Franz Ferdinand, and The Living End (Yes, Australian music in Romania!).

Actually, this leads into a funny story: Today, we walked in a shop and we all heard Eskimo Joe playing. After we all commented on how cool it was to hear Australian music in a shop, we realised that I had accidentally hit the play button on my phone!

5) Wires go everywhere. Nobody seems to hide wiring inside cabinets or walls. The installation of internet at Elly & Stu’s flat involves an Ethernet cable hanging down the side of the apartment complex from the roof, and coming into the flat via a freshly drilled hole. Here’s a picture of a bunch of wires that are right next to the front door of Elly & Stu’s communist flat.

6) Electric buses — YES you heard me right. They look like normal buses, but have big arms that reach out to the overhead wires. I’m still yet to catch one though. I wonder what happens if they decide to not follow the wires and take a different street.

7) ATM’s don’t appear to charge fees. I could be wrong, but none are appearing on my statement except for the ones that my bank charge :-)

Internet is cheap as chips. Yes, I’m serious! You could get a months worth of internet here for less than a bag of seaport chips. I was talking to a Bulgarian about how ridiculously expensive Australian internet is. It was quite an effort to explain the concept of a download quota. They all just have unlimited downloads here.

9) Pedestrian lights & zebra crossings don’t mean a thing. They more are just a suggested place and time for you to considering crossing the road. Most cars ignore zebra crossing completely, and it’s not uncommon for a car to run a red light and almost knock over a few good looking Aussies.

10) There are just 3 kinds of cheese — yellow, white, or blue.

So that ends part one of the quirks of Eastern Europe. I have a list of about 20 more, that I hope to finish putting to together over the next couple of days. So keep posted. And remember to comment or I’ll shoot you in the head with a quality Romanian paint-ball gun :-P