Number reasons why Noun is Adjective

I dunno about you but the number of times I have seen the headline formula above, I thought I'd use it as a somewhat absurd title for an article. It's going to be a list article, yes. I can't be bothered naming how many items I am going to add, I am just going to make a list.

For Noun, substitute "Bulgaria". For Adjective, substitute "Awesome".

1. Everyone in Bulgaria prefers not to do things through official channels, and checks are laxadaisical.

   If a cop stops you when you are driving in this country, they probably are looking for a bribe. They get cranky when you make them do paperwork, and they are happy with less than what the fine plus the inconvenience would cost you.

   Cash is much preferred in all cases. Contracts that involve laws and bureaucrats are very unliked in Bulgaria, though in one area, thanks to EU rules of registration, unfortunately that one thing is rental agreements. But you still can get a fairly good deal. Rental prices are half or less than much of the rest of europe, even eastern europe. Probably comparable to Russia, outside of the inner ring of Moscow, from what people tell me.

2. Every second person seems to run a little shop of some kind.

   In the city of Sofia, from any spot in the city, you rarely have to walk more than about 100m to find a shop open between about 10am and 10pm, and usually no more than 500m and you can find one out of hours.

   In many places, it is traditional even for people to set up impromptu market stalls, but nobody stops you from doing it absolutely anywhere, unless it's private property and then the security guards will probably tell you to 'byagai, mrusnik' (go away, dirty person).

3. It's supposedly against the rules to do a lot of things, but people do them anyway.

   This relates to the first one, but is more general. They made a rule a few years back that people have to wear seatbelts in cars. But they made an exception for the front passenger seat for taxis. 99% of taxi drivers don't mind if you don't strap in. Mind you, if you feel a bit dodgy about the state of sobriety of the driver, strap in - once or twice a year there is a serious car accident involving drunk taxi drivers.

   You are supposed to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle, and mostly people do, when they have the fancy 1000+cc road bikes that are everywhere during the summer months especially on weekends. But especially late at night you can often spot someone going from A to B without one. I am pretty sure if you run across a cop and they see you, probably they want like 20 leva or something, and let you carry on your way.

   It's supposedly illegal to possess or ingest cannabis, but in all of europe the only place where I have ever been where I smell the waft of weed being smoked frequently in parks, Sofia is number two after Amsterdam. I ran across a little of it in Budapest when I was there, and in Bucharest, I spotted needles from meth users (as I was homeless, I was holed up in one of these ATMs-in-a-room type deals, and I was in there charging my phone, and the little urchin that was leaving his sharps laying about comes in, mixes up and takes a shot...). I know from personal experience it can be pretty rough if Bulgarian cops decide to arrest you for using drugs, but they really are not out hunting it down. I personally got into trouble in this country over drugs because I was urging a friend, a local, to advertise a bulk quantity that I wanted to be rid of, and it got mixed up in this that I was selling it on the Black Market (no longer exists), and the cops came after me because of a current campaign by EU regulators to 'clamp down on internet black markets'. So I was their meal ticket, and that's why they sent 6 special police to arrest me. But generally, when it comes to drugs, you only get into trouble if you are competing with one of the local gangs. Specialties like psychedelics, weed and pharmaceuticals are not their business, the gangs mainly run amphetamine and heroin.

   Well, the reality is that within the EU, this business is huge. Intra-EU postal systems do absolutely no checks on anything. People ship around kilos of weed and tablets of this and that, legal, prescription only, etc. But I was saying 'Bulgaria' and 'awesome' so I'll quit rambling on about the situation in the EU.

   They recently upped the price of public transport tickets in Sofia from 1 leva to 1.60 leva. There was a baby sized uproar over this from the anarcho-socialists who like to scrawl hammer and sickles around on the walls, but it doesn't matter. All public transport apart from the EU funded metro lines in the city, are paid for by trip. The tickets are validated by the passengers in these puncher things on the sides of the cabins of the trams and buses. People punch them, travel their way, and you can almost always find someone has left their punched tickets sitting on the seat after they left. Grab it, and if a checker happens to board, they will walk straight past you when you show it to them.

4. The prices for agricultural land are absurdly low. Urban rents are pretty low as well.

   I forget exactly the figure someone told me, but the typical price per 10x10m of farmland in this country is about - I could be wrong, but I think, 200 EUR. Maybe it's 200 leva (about half). It's very low, anyway. A hectare therefore goes for - I'll be conservative with this and use the former number - therefore about 20,000 EUR.

   In central Sofia, per square metre prices to buy an apartment are about on average 1400 leva (700EUR) per square metre of floor space. Anywhere outside this area in a city, it's more like about 500 leva, and in the country, it can be as little as 100. Mind you, Bulgarian builders are perhaps some of the slackest, cheapest bastards in the world. I recall from my first taxi ride, with an 'unauthorised taxi' who charged me 50 leva to go from the airport to the centre of town, looking at the state of the many multi-story high density housing. The facades were usually faded, decaying, and generally looked dodgy.

   My father thinks that he would not trust any multi-storey building in this country, at all, but having personally seen a fair bit of it, structurally the buildings are sound. I have watched the construction process and they use plenty of rebar and standard concrete mixes for the structural stuff. I have not seen any slanty buildings, as are common especially in Amsterdam, but much of the Netherlands is built literally on sand, and you can forgive 400-600 years of age causing the betons (foundation pins) to have slowly shifted.

   A bulgarian friend of mine, who I met through the #bitcoin chatroom at freenode, showed me photos of properties his father had taken him to look at, a decommissioned arms factory, and a rural hotel. Both buildings were a little dilapidated but the prices were amazing. If you could find some profitable way to use them, that is.

5. Most Bulgarian made things are really made quite well, at prices much better than anywhere in Western Europe or 'the first world'.

   Bulgaria has factories for a whole range of things, mostly simple stuff, guns, textiles, food products, furniture. Most of the best of the food products, in particular, are exported, and fetch amazing prices in the rest of Europe. Particularly milk products, cheeses and yoghurts. What you buy locally isn't that bad, especially for the price. Food prices in Bulgaria are 1/3-1/2 of what you will pay anywhere else in Europe. Bulgaria is also a major producer of tobacco, along with Greece, Croatia and Italy. A standard pack of 20 cigarettes in Bulgaria goes for about 2.5 EUR. I discovered in the Netherlands it was only 2x this price, but having come from Australia, where, when I left in 2012, a pack like this cost AUD$20, and now I hear it's more like 40...

6. They don't poison medical or laboratory grade ethanol with anything at all. You can dilute it and drink it, and it's more or less vodka (Probably made from dextrose from wheat as well). You can buy diethyl ether, if you are so inclined to discover first hand what the old druggy guys from the 60s like Hunter S Thompson went on about in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (It's quite boring, actually, sorry, the stuff smells and it's a serious hazard to store), if you must. I did, cos I musted. But it was boring. Give me nitrous oxide anyday, or better still, some S-ketamine.

   If you are over 18 years of age, and can prove it, or just look it, you can walk into laboratory supplies, and almost any chemical or apparatus you can buy, if you so desire.

   Every other old grandpa in this country makes his own brandy (rakia) from grapes, or plums, or whatever he can get his hands on. It's technically restricted to operate a still to produce alcohol, but it's so deeply embedded into the culture that nobody rats anyone out anyway, and the cops will look at you sideways if you were to declare to them that you know someone who makes bootleg spirits.

   "Domashen Rakia" - the usual name for the fruit-derived brandies that these grandpas make, is perhaps some of the highest quality, most agreeable alcohol I have ever sampled.

7. There is plums, apples, peaches, various kinds of cherries, and forest berries growing everywhere. In the early part of summer, you could literally survive just by roaming around, collecting these fruit that are on trees everywhere. I remember when I was a youngin, hanging around these anarchist types and seeing screeds about gathering freely available fruit. Well, in Australia, there was bugger all of this around. At the right time of year, here in Bulgaria, it's frickin everywhere. My apartment, the first place I lived here in Sofia, had a cherry tree with branches I could reach from my balcony. I figure I picked probably 3 kilos of cherries just from what I could reach.

8. Hunting is legal here, not with bows, only firearms, and only if you don't have a record (or can't pay to have it ignored) can you get them. The laws protecting the ample game available in the vast amounts of wilderness in this country are pretty well protected, but then, if SHTF, and you had access to a rifle, you would have no problem managing to feed yourself off the boar and deer that are in no short supply. If SHTF, all bets are off, and you would be wise to be careful, because most lifetime farmers are well armed, there has been cases of some quite fantastical caches of military weapons found in stashes held by farmers. There was a case a cellmate told me about in southwest Bulgaria, near the Macedonian border (He grew up on the other side) where a farmer was shooting rockets at foreign helicopters that flew over his farm. He wasn't gonna let those damned germans come back and steal his land again!

9. Ok, so maybe I will make a list of 10. So here's item 9: Internet.

   Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria, is ranked currently a the number 4 most internet-connected cities in the world. Pretty impressive for a country full of empty farms. It is also why Bulgaria is a major location for IT outsourcing operations especially for sales and support. If you come from outside Bulgaria, you can speak English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish or Russian, there is a pretty good chance you can get a decent job here. The starting salaries for these jobs are far beyond what average laboring jobs get paid here, about 2-3x the minimum wage, depending on how technical the position.

   If you have no money, but you have an internet device, probably no place anywhere in an urban area of reasonable size, can you not find an open hotspot, and the speeds are pretty impressive.

   If you have money, and you want to get connected, many parts of urban centres you can literally have 100Mbit ethernet cables piped into your apartment, and 50Mbit speeds are just the baseline (3-5MiB/s)

10. The landscape. Really, it has everything. You have ski resorts in winter. Balmy beachside resorts for summer. In the warm months, all but the most tropical plants can be grown here. It gets quite hot, actually, even here in the coldest part of the country, Sofia. Throughout the central region of the country, there is absolutely amazing mountains. Anywhere near these there is springs everywhere that you can tap off water from, and some of these springs are amazingly clean. There is so many spring water manufacturers here it's ridiculous. Gorna Banya (I live about 5km from where the springs are), Bankya, Devin, etc etc.

    There is loads of awesome, old-school communist era abandoned buildings everywhere. Factories and other kinds of processing plants, and in the cities, if you are adventurous, you can find all kinds of cool things to go and look at. I spent a week when I was in Ruse, a city on the northern border nearest to Bucharest, where I slept in an abandoned set of school classrooms, complete with decaying old educational materials laying around.

    Relating back to the 'nobody cares about dumb rules' thing, I came back here when I had been getting to far too close to 2 years living homeless in the Netherlands, and wanted out. It's not so bad being homeless here, certainly it's nowhere near as bad as in Hungary, and you don't get nearly so much of that sense of shame here than in many other places. Most people here know what poverty is about. They were more generous at giving to beggars in central Budapest than Sofia, but you could easily rake in 5-10 euros begging if you were determined enough, anywhere within the central urban areas of Sofia.

Well, I thought I would make a silly post, to see what people thought of it, and give it a little twist with a silly title. I guess I'll see how it goes. Mainly I just wanted to explain why in the hell I live in this country. If you are looking to expatriate from a nanny state, you will get high just on the vibe of freedom here, like I did. It's by no means any kind of heaven, but it's a place where making an honest living is more possible than most 'advanced' countries. If you are determined, there is far lower obstacles to surmount in advancing.

Edit

For information about land prices in Bulgaria, here is some links:

http://www.bulgarianproperties.com/bargain-agricultural-plots.html

Here's a really good example. About 18km from the border town of Vidin, next to the great Danube River. 421Sq/m for 900 EUR:

http://www.bulgarianproperties.com/Development_land_in_Bulgaria/AD24348BG_Development_land_for_sale_near_Vidin.html

Seriously. And one thing to note: This year they lifted restrictions on ownership of land in Bulgaria by foreigners. Previously you would have to register a company to hold the title (about 300 EUR cost for this administrative procedure). Now, you can do it in your own name. A plot of land you register your residency at, plus 2500 EUR in the bank and anyone, from any country, not just europe, can have residency permission.