Life in BG

As promised, here are some pictures of Sofia all decorated for Christmas. These lights are strung across the two main boulevards in town, one is on our street and another is the street where Mark’s office is located (clickon the photos to see them more closely):

Day by day, more lights appear. Just today, I saw a guy climbing a tree and stringing lights on it. One big difference between here and the U.S. is that Christmas, while perhaps the largest holiday of the year, is only celebrated for a few weeks. There aren’t months of frantic shopping and decorating. They literally set up the tree lots a week before Christmas and just now there are stands to buy decorations and pointsettias. It’s a pleasant change!
Oh, and for those of you concerned about Guiseppe Vladi, the Bulgarian hound, here he is on his nightly walk in the snow with his new coat on:

He is not too fond of wearing a jacket (I had no idea he was a nudist at heart), but he kind of likes prancing through the snow. We must be careful, though, because the sidewalks are slippery and he seems a bit sore from his two long, snowy, slippery walks today….