Three days in Bulgaria

The Jewish Bulgarian community is one of the few in the world that allocates funding and energy into encouraging visitors to learn about their community. Our second day there we went to visit a school which though over 60% of the student body was not Jewish, taught Hebrew and about Jewish culture. We sat in on classes and I got the opportunity to talk to some kids in eleventh grade. They were not Jewish and though they admitted their school was one which offered a well rounded academic curriculum they felt that learning English was a much larger priority then being aware of a heritage and a language which did not belong to them. 
I am now writing nearly a month after our return from Bulgaria. This time in morocco I will attempt to be much more diligent in keeping record of my travels. I will just briefly relate two more experiences in Bulgaria before ending this entry. Our third day on Sofia I went to an elderly woman's house to bring her food, since she wasn't able to get herself, and on her small pension she couldn't afford it. We sat down with the women and her two sons and with the help of a translated from the Jewish community we talked for hours as she related the story of her life. Most of her family had already emigrated to Israel, yet she had chosen to stay. When I asked why she simply stated, as I'd it was obvious, " Bulgaria is my home". I wrote an essay about it after returning from our trip, perhaps I include it in this blog. 

In Bulgaria we also got to get a small taste of the night life. The eleventh graders I had talked to commented that the only reason people visited Bulgaria was for the cheap alcohol, women, and drugs. Not exactly the best impression of their country but I suppose in some sense it holds truth. I know that bulgaria has in fact become a popular tourist destination for Israelies probaly largely for that reason. Our guide took us to a club in Sofia, and though it was a wensday night there were still many people there. The music was something similar to Israeli mizrachi music, and people as the energy in the club picked up began to toss napkins in the air. I was told that the mafia in Bulgaria used to toss money in the air as a sign of their wealth, but when someone realized that it was a waste of resources it became a custom to toss napkins instead.