Bulgaria is not one of the first and principal tourist destinations chosen by the Italian normal traveler. You go to Bulgaria because in some periods the flights are really cheap or because you begin to have seen all the other European destinations and you are attracted to the east part of the Europe.

But there is a thing to know before everything: when you go to a country like this, you understand some things about as you have learned to see and to look the cities in your precedents years of trip.

When you go to Bulgaria you understand how much able you are to leave behind you the aesthetical, historical and cultural prejudice and how much able you are to appreciate a place, on the base of what that place is and it has been.

That’s why the first thing that you must know and to know how to do before departing for Bulgaria is to leave behind you the west and the cities that you know. This is not the world that we know, it is another one completely different and it deserves to be discovered and lived.

The history that has brought here me in Bulgaria is initiated last year in France. I was tired of the life that I conducted, I wanted to absolutely change something and then I have taken advantage of an occasion that is introduced me and I departed to the adventure to the search of something that I don’t have yet well understands what it is.

My experience in France has been for me of great help, great inspiration and it gave me a lot of ideas and hopes for the future. So at the end of my project, I decided that my desire to travel around for the world was not ended yet and that it was so the moment to go even farther away from the normal habits.

Bulgaria, for me, before departing, so was an opportunity all to be discovered. I didn’t know and still, I don’t absolutely know anything of Bulgaria. For me, all the countries of East Europe as Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Russia have always been an only great entity with people all equal ones on the inside.

Already after the arrival to Sofia, you understand that the things are not the same, and already the letters of the alphabet remember that your knowledge of the things must be reconstructed from zero. The Cyrillic has been one of the most devastating impacts of my life. You feel yourself as a child of the school that must learn to speak properly for the first time. And for me, this is an extremely interesting challenge. The first contact with a country that doesn’t understand you because it doesn’t talk your same language, the sharing of comprehension and finally the result when you begin to talk with the people around you, this is the only reason that I need to go everywhere.

In every case, Sofia is still a European capital. It needed, therefore, to wait to arrive in the city in which I would have developed my project for the rest of the year to have a first real and authentic comparison with the reality of the things. I gotten on the bus with my head full of theories, ideas, worries, hopes and a big headache.

The arrival to Kazanluk has been to the beginning a bit traumatic, because from one day to the other one I have felt as projected in another dimension, language zero, habits and completely new customs, the city that seemed to have need of urgent road, building and electric restoration if compared with some other Italian cities, a style of cooking completely different from ours, the yes and the no exactly contrary to our way to express us and so many things that asked for time to be absorbed, but facilitated by the presence of the Bulgarian friends that brought me here, the others volunteers, and minimized by the calm of the city, from the green of the thousand of trees that are everywhere, the beautiful parks that can host people during all the day and from that spontaneous attraction that has done that i wanted to discover more and more.

Bulgaria it’s a land of strong contrasts, that cannot conquers you at the first look: at times it seems some “ruffled” and messy, a sort of continuous work in progress, but all it takes, maybe, is having the desire to discover more something and to go besides the first impression to probably fall in love with it.

I am thankful to have chosen this nation. Since arriving in this country I bring only with me the hope that the choice that I have done will be the correct one. After five days I don’t have the certainty of it yet, and probably I will still need time. But I know a thing for sure, for now headache is ended. And this is great.