Well, Silistra seems to have gotten a lot more cosmopolitan in the last week. Last Wednesday I was having drinks and chatting with a friend when two overly-boisterous Germans came sidling up and introduced themselves in solid English. One of them is working on the landfill just outside of town and the other works as a conusltant in a local factory, I gathered, although his English was a bit fuzzy, and since they were so overly-boisterous, I wasn't really hunting for details.
They seemed like they could be nice enough guys when they weren't trying to figure out their bill with the waitress in their non-existent Bulgarian and her non-existent German or English, but the amazing thing was that I hadn't seen them before. They've apparently been here for a year, and since I've been here for a year and a half, well, you'd think we would have run into each other. But I suppose these things happen. Hopefully, if one of them manages to remember why he wrote my name and number on a sheet of paper, they'll get in touch with me. But I'm not optomistic.
Germans aren't exactly rare around here. There are far more German toursits coming through Silistra than there are of any other nationality. But it's always interesting running into any outsiders around here, it makes the city seem bigger, and more important, I suppose.
A greater curiosity sprang up at the disco last night. Not a place I love to go that often, but the group went, so I went along. From our table we had a view of the person that had the whole room (and it was a pretty big room) keyed up and edgy. There was a black guy in the disco! Let's put this in context: For most of the people there, that was probably the first time they'd ever seen an African outside of television or in the movies. The edginess wasn't from any kind of prejudice, but just looking at an Unknown for the first time.
I went down and introduced myself, assuming in my American bluster that he spoke English, and learned that he's a Nigerian here in Bulgaria to play soccer. I didn't get the details in this case either. It was in a disco, and as bad as I am at talking to native speakers in discos, talking to someone with broken English is near impossible. I did, however, learn that he was in Silistra for two months. Which means we'll almost certainly run into each other again. He was there with two Bulgarians, and they were mostly just chilling on the side of the room.
After the short conversation, I went back to my group's table and answered the the hundreds of questions everybody had about him. I told any Bulgarian that could speak English that, if they were so curious, they ought to go down and politely introduce themselves, too. But, perhaps understandably, there were no takers.
Small steps here and there, I suppose. After a year and a half here, even I still feel like an alien a lot of the time. The times when things are most natural comes when I'm talking. Just talking in English helps, but speaking in Bulgarian instantly makes me part of the team, usually. Sometimes, it just makes me a greater oddity. Sometimes it's frustrating, but, then I think and remember what I'm doing here. That usually makes it better. Sometimes.
Posted by Rob at February 20, 2005 08:11 PM