Adventures at a Bulgarian Supermarket

Seiji speaks Bulgarian very well. I, on the other hand, not a lick. Though I hope to change this through language classes at the Embassy, those lessons have not yet begun and reading in Cyrillic is totally lost on me.

Our previous, and first, trip to the grocery store, Seiji was with us. But, today, I took the boys alone. We did pretty well until we got to the pastry counter (a promise to the boys for behaving - mostly - during the shopping trip). There were these Bulgarian treats that they wanted to try, so why not. The lady behind the counter is looking at us. I look at her and ask "English?" Nodding her head "yes," she says "no." Oh G-d, I'm never going to get this opposite head nod thing down. I try to communicate in the best way I know how. I point to the pastry the boys want and hold up two fingers. She gets a box and starts for the correct pastries - yeah success!!!! There's our two, but she is still going. Uh oh! I say "that's good, no more," shaking my head "no." But, of course, a head nod "no" actually means "yes" here. What am I going to do? I make the "stop" gesture and, thank goodness, she understands. She gives us our box of 5 pastries and I just take it and am happy she stopped at 5. Then the boys ask if we can get pastrami. First of all, I don't even know how to say "pastrami" in Bulgarian and even if I find it and point to it, how can I possibly communicate I only want 500 grams. After seeing the pastry debacle, my oldest actually understands why we need to wait for Dad on this one. We made it out of there with everything we actually came for and five pastries. All in all, it was a successful trip.