Good Life

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All the comforts of home.

* Television (actually legal and not-so-legal video feeds from all over the world)
* Radio (similar)
* A telephone (actually Skype)
* A toaster (with a broken timer so you have to stand and hold the bread down)
* A microwave (connected by an extension lead that's just begging me to trip over it)
* A kettle (a heating element plugged into the mains)
* A cooker (one ring and portable)
* A sound system (actually PC speakers and a collection of mp3s)
* A bed (matresses and duvet)
* A shower (...actually it is a shower...but the drain doesn't, um, drain)

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I can keep in contact with most of my friends back home, by email or txt, or indeed skype, but for some reason I can't contact C. His phone doesn't answer and his txts bounce. He does have a knack of disappearing and making me worry about him, but I couldn't do anything about it even when we lived an hour's walk away.

Well, C, if you're reading this, you know my email: kapitano@btinternet.com. Get in touch, when you can.

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Some more things Bulgaria has lots of: Car repair shops, FTP sites, and laws.

Montana is one of those towns that's built around two or three main roads. The road nearest me is called "March 31st Street", marking the date in 1971 when Bulgaria (somehow) gained independance after 500 years of Turkish rule.

At one end of the street is a supermarket and a signpost to the nearest town, called "Lom". At the other end, 20 minutes walk away, is another supermarket, some trendy wine bars, five banks that only businesses use, and the park with the statues of obscure local heroes. At the centre of which is a new discoteque, a new gymnasium, and an old fleamarket.

There are at least ten shops in between with the word "Avto" in the title - "Auto". One specialises in car paints, another in spare parts, but most are garages that repair cars that would be considered beyond repair in western Europe. One sells "nearly new" cars.

It may seem surprising that people who drive such clapped out old bangers should be so computer literate. Indeed, that the physical infrastructure of the internet across eastern Europe should be so much denser and more stable than even in America, while a wholly disproprtionate number of hackers and computer innovators should come from a place which is culturally backward in so many ways.

It's no mystery at all really. Germany got some of the best industry in the world by coming late to it, after other countries went through the painful process of early development. China is set to become a political giant partly because it started it's industrial revolution standing on the shoulders of an earlier giant. And it's a similar story here.

There are no end of laws against "misuse" of computers - hacking and innovation, which turn out to be much the same thing - just as there are countless laws about tax and travel, changed every few months. Almost no one understands them, and fewer obey them. It's an attitude that appeals to me, in case you can't tell.

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Tomorrow I get to see an old country house. It's a bit remote, it's in need of repair, and I might be living there soon. The idea is that students might be less than impressed to know their teacher lives in the office next to the classroom, and there's a convenient place (fifteen miles away) which no one else wants.

I'll...consider it.

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