Global Tour | I am in Bulgaria – Sofia
Bulgaria is a country in the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe. The country covers an area of 110,000 square kilometers and has a population of about 7 million. From the perspective of Bulgaria's population and economy, it is comparable to mainland Ningxia.
1, Bulgarian money looks like this
Romania and Bulgaria, I thought it was a "conjoined baby", joined the EU at the same time, and also wanted to join Schengen at the same time. Like buying one get one free, the two countries I thought would be quite similar.
The only time I didn't have a way to swipe my card in Romania was to go to the toilet with a coin. It was my last day of shopping in Romania that I ran out of Romanian leu cash!
When I arrived in Bulgaria, I found that the situation was very different, many places could not swipe the card, for example, some stores only accept cash, and the Chinese Super League only accepts cash, so I changed a little cash.
The picture is a foreign exchange store, you can see that there are still many people queuing, I first changed 150 euros, got 293.55 guarantees, more cost-effective than the official exchange on the Internet, does this country also have black market currency?
Because I have been to several countries before, the exchange rate of the black market and the official exchange rate is completely different, such as: Iran, Argentina, Uruguay, if you swipe your credit card in these countries, it is very lossy!
2, the architecture of the XX era is ugly and big
Yesterday, I met a Bulgarian guy who was 1.9 meters tall on the road.
He said hey, are you Chinese? I said how do you know I'm Chinese?
He has been to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Guangzhou, Changsha in the mainland, Japan, South Korea... I have been to Hong Kong 7 times, Chinese mainland 2 times, and Japan twice, so I can distinguish different Asians with the naked eye.
Then he took me to many places in the center of Sofia and talked to me a lot along the way...
Then tell me how miserable they were in the XX era, his father was not from Sophia before, and it required strict procedures, invitations and the like to go to Sophia in other cities...
Then we walked around the city center together and saw several buildings left before the huge upheaval, and he said I don't like the buildings of the XX period, it's ugly, except for the big, it's not aesthetic ...
He said that the XX government does not want the people to see the ancient buildings and the original history of their country, so they cover up the oldest monuments in Bulgaria.
Let me give a counterexample, I said that the Red Square in Moscow during the Soviet Union, the Church on Spilled Blood have always been conspicuous?
He was stunned for a moment, and then didn't know how to refute my counterexample. And then shrugged and said that he did not know either, he only understood the situation in Bulgaria.
3. The liberal values of a new generation of Eastern Europeans
I believe that the new generation, especially the new generation in Eastern Europe that grew up after the drastic changes, has formed a new liberal value after liberalization of education in Europe, and is extremely resistant to the original system and lacks rationality.
For example, he just said that the Bulgarian government at the time subjectively wanted to cover up monuments and prevent people from seeing the history of their country.
I think his judgment comes from subjectivity.
I prefer to think that the government at that time was to cover up ugly and dilapidated buildings, and the new construction of large Soviet-Russian buildings could show their own development achievements, so this building was built, rather than subjectively covering the ancient buildings.
Part of what he said about the state of life in the XX period is a fact, and it is true that many people have a bad life and their lives are restricted everywhere.
However, his understanding of why the government did this at the time was subjective. Perhaps the government did not have subjective malice at that time, but due to various reasons such as the ability to govern and the rigidity of the system, the people's life was not good.
Instead of the government deliberately doing this in order to make your life bad, any system needs to be optimized and updated with the changes of the times and the external environment.