Tell me about Bulgaria

It's really where the East meets the West... very exotic, but still Europe.

There's not too many famous people from Bulgaria. That guy Christo that wraps buildings in mylar, I think he's the only one. Oh, and Mira from Ladytron.

Also, there was this famous Bulgarian King named Khan Krum who smooshed the Byzantine Army, killing the Byzantine Emperor, then at the victory banquet, toasting his commanders using the Emperor's skull as his wine glass. Yuk. Then he was planning on laying siege to Constantinople, then he died. Probably syphillis or something. Oh, now some winery in Bulgaria makes Khan Krum Chardonnay.

I LOVE stealing antiquities! I stole a brick chip from the Roman baths at Leicester.

The people upset the country's intelligentsia by recently electing the former King as prime minister.

They have a large Turkish minority of whom the majority Bulgarian population are not ovely fond.

Also, a Womble
http://www.plokta.com/plokta/issue13/bulgaria.jpg

Name Bosko Balaban
Team Aston Villa
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Anyone been? can I get away with a quick study of the cyrilic alphabet or will I struggle getting around?

the former king lost the last election, and his party is now the junior partner in a coalition with the former communists. Some might say that this is something of a former government.

Get down:

Some of the most popular clubs are clustered behind dorm blocks 13, 14 and 15, where bright lights and blaring DJs are the rule. Fans of chalga — a kind of Balkanized disco that sounds something like the Borat theme song — pour into Avenue (1A Atanas Manchev Street; 359-898-553-086; www.complexavenue.com), a well-lighted and mellow club where you’ll find friends dancing in groups, arms raised and hips shaking.

Alt-rocker types head to Stroeja (Block 23B; 359-2-962-5977; www.stroeja.com), a dive bar that resembles, as its Bulgarian name suggests, a construction site, with broken windows, scaffolding and sawhorse tables. The crowd comes to drink Zagorka beers (1.50 leva, or about $1 at 1.49 leva to the dollar), listen to post-Nirvana rock and play the Pamela Anderson pinball machine.

If you have a collection of printed tee-shirts numbering more than 25, or are a sucker for anise-flavored liquor then, congratulations: bulgaria may be just right for you.

However, if you are the pope, or look like the pope, or are known to have had intimate relations with the pope, then be warned: bulgaria is probably not the place for you, no matter how many printed tee-shirts you own.

Do you look like the Pope?

Xenophon wrote that "it was known that a group of Bulgars invented the wheel in the great Steppe".

I would only look like the pope if a new pope were elected who looks like me, or, alternatively, if I were elected pope, which last seems to me to be even more unlikely than the first. So, no, Ned.

http://weightliftingexchange.com/viewtopic.php?t=1331

Xenophon was a rumormonger. For example, you can't believe one word he wrote about Lycurgus. He also wrote a very long book about Cyrus the Great, almost all of which he made up. It is well known that the wheel was invented by a syndicate of toy-makers in the Indus valley.

I discovered the Chalga (aka 'Bulgarian Pop-Folk') sound recently courtesy of my mother's Bulgarian next door neighbours who blast it through the walls of a Saturday night. They seem to have only about four or five CDs so the same songs keep cropping up and I've grown to really like them (although my mother doesn't share my enthusiasm, terming it 'wooooly-wooooly music').

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ReFNdkQ5Y8

Thank you for that.

Learned three things about Bulgarians: they eat french toast for breakfast, they don't wear gloves when they scour copper pots with hydrochloric acid, and young Bulgarian men love douchey graphic design t-shirts including but not limited to ARMY (generic) and BOXING (generic).

they eat french toast for breakfast

Is this unusual?

well before I saw the video I had no preconceived notions about what gypsies or bulgarians or gypsy bulgarians eat for breakfast, so no, without having known their usual I can't say it seemed unusual. But I do think it's unusual to prepare it on the ground. Where I'm from, in South Dakota, we prepare french toast on a countertop and eat it for lunch. I've heard some North Dakotans eat it for breakfast, but they prepare it on the ground, and they call it North Dakota Toast. So yes, to prepare french toast on the ground is unusual to me.

I genuinely thought that video was interesting

I don’t know if deutsche welle has an agenda but i learned some stuff from it

I’m just skeptical how much of it is trying to portray them in a negative light

this seemed like a pretty benign take, given a weird affect by what is I assume an English voiceover that replaced the original German one?

Tsar Simeon Saxe-Coburg Gotha, the king who became PM mentioned upthread, is one of only two people living who were rulers of their country during WW2. The other is the Dalai Lama.

Just found out that this tsar was Simeon II and Simeon I died in 927! Is this the biggest gap between successive regnal numbers in history?!