It’s my 23rd birthday today! Over the last few years I’ve started to care less and less about my birthday, maybe partly due to be away from my family. I remember last year I hardly cared about my birthday, but due to the fact that it coincided with my last day of my internship in the Bulgarian National Radio, I had a great day.
This year I felt the same apathy towards my birthday, partly because I’ve just been very busy arranging things and getting myself settled here in Sofia. Bulgarians are great when it comes to birthdays. In Holland you might get a call or a text message saying happy birthday from a few close friends and your family, but that’s about it (in my experience). In Bulgaria however, you can expect almost everybody who has your number to give you a call to wish you a happy birthday, a great life, great health, great love, luck with any new plans or projects, great friendships et cetera.
Probably the best thing about Facebook, besides the fact that it’s really useful to keep in touch with your networks of friends, is the birthday reminders. I’ve had a lot of great birthday greetings from my friends today and would like to thank them all. Dutch, Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Spanish, German, English… Dankjewel, спасибо, благодаря, teşekkürler, gracias, danke, thanks!
Oh, and I was just sent this Bulgarian popfolk/chalga happy birthday music video. The video’s probably not supposed to be funny, but it’s making me laugh a lot.
BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.
