Karolinka In & Around Bulgaria

Let me start with the big news: I’ve started a side-project. Well, side-blog if you will.

In Bulgarian. Yep.

A simple blog in Bulgarian. It’s streamlined. No bells or whistles. Just me and the Bulgarian language.

A friend of mine once told me that the language of your friendships with foreigners is cemented in your first few exchanges. After that if the language of your friendship is English it will always be English. It’s incredibly hard to change once established. He was right of course. (There are some friends who are like that. Maddeningly correct. Even when you wish they weren’t.)

Anyhow two things came together recently that lead me to thinking more and more about Bulgarian. It’s sort of becoming an obsession.

The first thing was this. I went hiking with some Bulgarian friends recently. On this trip a few people admitted to following me on twitter and others I knew already were reading my blog. They asked me a lot of questions like: how many followers I had, what kind of traffic I had, where my readers were from (Bulgaria vs. the States). Then someone said: wow and your blog isn’t even in Bulgarian.

It’s true. My blog is not in Bulgarian. I’m making my blog friendships in English.

The second thing was this. A few weeks ago I found this blog, the 99%, and I subscribed to the RSS feed. Then two weeks ago, this article on bad habits appeared in my feed. Of course I was trying to procrastinate (is that a bad habit?!) so I decided that reading an article titled, Fix Bad Habits: Insights from a 7-year Obsession, was the perfect use of my time. Turns out it was. These lines caught my eye:

If the first step required the most conscious control, then habituating that first step would cover most of the habit itself. This means that learning a new skill or language doesn’t need to begin with commitments to invest dozens of hours each week. Simply committing to starting for five minutes every day conditions you to get used to performing the habit.

It’s pretty hard to refute this idea of conscious control and breaking the task down into manageable pieces in order to create a new habit (or to break an old habit).

These two moments–one in the woods and the other at my computer–came together and I realized it was time to start writing in Bulgarian. But I also realized that this blog isn’t the place or space for that. You know because we’ve already cemented our friendship in English!! (And it kind of annoys my MoM when she can’t read my posts in Bulgarian.)

So I started a new blog. It’s not much to look at but it’s all in Bulgarian. I have a hunch it’s kind of questionable Bulgarian but so be it. Read it if you want. Comment if you want or in this case, if you can. For whatever reason, I decided to give tumblr a go only to learn that they don’t have a built in comment function which lead me to disqus.com in order to make this happen and now I am not sure if one can actually comment.