Bulgarian Food, Maths, Holidays, Destinations

Shopska Salad

The holidays are over and summer is slowly coming to a close and autumn is coming to Sofia, so it’s really time to get back to the ordinary, everyday life and also to tell you more about that everyday life on my blog.

Of course, holidays are a time for reflection and so I’ve had a chance to think about some of the things I might be talking about things from the past, like food and customs and also ideas that I got from my holiday when I went to different parts of Bulgaria.

And on the personal front I can tell you that everything in my house is eerily quiet - quiet as can be.

There’s a very simple reason for this. My eleven year old son, is not here.

He’s gone to his summer camp. Maybe he thought he was going to have a last minute pre-school holiday but it turns out that he’s really having to work quite hard.

Every evening he phones to tell us of the latest programme he’s written in C++. The reason for this is that his summer camp is the Informatics Summer Camp of the Sofia Maths School.

As I think I told you, Alex has been lucky enough and hard working enough to qualify by examination to go to the Sofia Maths School.

I’m not a great mathematician although I very much enjoyed maths at school but I think I can tell you that Bulgaria is one of the stronger countries of the world in mathematics, so to go to the main maths school in the country is quite an achievement.

How he’ll get on I don’t know but as far as the Informatics summer camp is concerned, although there’s only one other fifth grader, some of the older students are just beginners too.

Alexander actually starts his new school proper in a couple of weeks and is naturally a little apprehensive. Still, like any parent I hope he’ll do well.

One other point is that, as you can imagine, he speaks very good English and has been a bit frustrated at his previous school where he had to attend an English class as this was the only language taught.

At his new school he’s going to take up Russian so I hope that in the coming years he’ll be able to develop his Russian and Spanish as well as his Bulgarian which should give him a good background in languages which he seems to like.

Anyway, that’s the family info for the moment but among other things that I decided, as I said to look at every day things like the way of eating here in Bulgaria.

As most people who have visited different countries know, it’s not just a matter of having different kinds of food, but also the order, for example, in which people eat things or how it’s different from place to place.

As an example, when I lived in China as well as having to get pretty adept with chopsticks I lived mainly in areas where rice wasn’t eaten as much as noodles and steam bread so the idea that everybody eats rice all the time was a mistake.

Here in Bulgaria there was a little bit of a shock because as well as widespread continental customs there are some specific ones: Every main meal begins with salad which means a dish - not just bits of greenery.

There are many salads available but I must confess I’m rather lazy and look through the list of all the salads and, like many people, I simply come back to what you might call the national favourite which is the Shopska salad.

Shopska salad is named after some of the people who live around Sofia who are known as the Shoppi or Shop who have a particular dialect with their own vocabulary and expressions and have been around for a long time.

Shopska is the traditional salad which is made primarily of tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and sometimes, usually, with one or more olives and it’s all topped with a generous helping of brine cheese.

This cheese in Bulgaria is called Sirene, more likely called feta in some countries but here it’s kept in water as it’s often bought rather over salted and gradually the water dilutes the salt content and you get exactly the taste you want.

So, the Shopska salad is the way to start the meal.

As time went by on my holiday I realised that I was on holiday in Albena so it was time to think about places in Bulgaria to talk about and as Albena begins with an “A” I came up with the idea of trying an A-Z 0f Bulgarian destinations.

It’s not quite possible to do this because the Cyrillic alphabet which I’ve talked about before doesn’t quite correspond to the Latin alphabet that many of us are used to.

It’s my intention to build up a survey of places that I’ve been to in Bulgaria with plenty of photographs so that anyone who wants information of places to go in Bulgaria and my particular take on them can get some more information from this blog.

I haven’t forgotten about the wedding - in fact I’ve been reminded that I’m not up to date on this. My excuse is that I’ve been waiting to prepare some photographs. Still, that’s for another time.

One last thing, you can’t really talk about salad here without considering rakia - so that’s for another timeas well as the drink goes with the food.

I'm John Rocha, Blog Master of Bulgarian Vistas.

I like to write from experience about living in Bulgaria, holidays in Bulgaria, Bulgarian food,

famous Bulgarians and ....

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All the best John