Good luck, Fretful!
What effects will Bulgaria’s joining the EU have?
Hey Fretful. Not to intrude but I spent a summer in Blagoevgrad back in 1995 – I was part of an archaeological dig run jointly by AUBG & Brooklyn College, & we stayed in the dorms. If you want to email me, its in my profile, I’d me happy to share my experiences.
Good luck with the job offer, Fretful Porpentine!
I’ve been looking into some job possibilities for myself, that might involve living at least part of the year in Bulgaria (almost certainly Sofia). With the recent EU membership, BG is going to be for the 2000s what the Czech Republic was for the 1990s! 
What: off the beaten track but scenic?
Much easier mobility for migrations (language barriers but no need for work permits), a lot of help for public works, access to some wonderful exchange fellowships (the Erasmus program kicks ass). Bulgarians with another language (preferably English, French or German) will have relatively easy access to EU jobs in the first years; translators to Bulgarian will be needed (every language that’s official in all the territory of any member state automatically becomes an official EU language).
There will be some expectations about economic growth, human rights, social safety networks etc but the EU helps “lacking” countries achieve the goals set.
Until now, the EU has been renewing its base treaty every time another batch of countries joins; the failed European Constitution was an attempt at creating a new version of the treaty that wouldn’t need to get upgraded. But taking a look at it gives a good idea about what kind of representation will Bulgaria get, what kind of standards will they be expected to face, etc. Many things are better developed in Regulations: that’s for flexibility, updating a Regulation takes a lot less paperwork and high-level meetings than upgrading a 20-country-treaty.
Oh geez, where to start…cost of living here is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH lower than in the US. (Although Bulgarians don’t believe this. My coworkers are constantly asking me what [random thing] costs in the US, and then they don’t believe me and start griping about how expensive Bulgaria is.) But expensive electronic stuff tends to cost about what it would cost in the US, and people here earn far less money.
My school provides my housing. I’m not even sure how much it costs. Sorry.
I don’t have a computer, so I usually post from my school or from the internet club in my town. But broadband is apparently easy cheap and easy to acquire. In Blagoevgrad, which is a hip college town, it’s not something you need to worry about.
Language…Bulgarian is a really tough language. It’s unusual for a foreigner to learn it, so their reactions can be funny. My kids think my mistakes are hilarious. (Which on a bad day, I find really annoying, because I’ve been studying Bulgarian for far less time than they’ve been studying English, but who speaks the foreign language better, HMMMM? Me, that’s who.) The positive side is, they know Bulgarian is tough. I’ve had several people insist that Bulgarian is the hardest language in the world. I don’t know about that, but any language with five ways to express the definite article is not easy in my book. And the perfective and the imperfective…if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I won’t spoil the surprise. [evil laugh]
Stuff to know…um, Bulgarians are still angry about being part of the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, they call it the “Turkish Yoke” (“yoke” can also be translated as “slavery”), and are fiercely proud of the April Uprising, a failed attempt to throw off the yoke in the 1860s. (1870s?) Half the stuff in the country is named after Hristo Botev or Vassil Levsky, two of the leaders of the uprising (who were executed by the Turks). Bulgarians love the Russians, who did end up freeing them from the Yurks (not because they were such altruists, but for their own reasons, of course.) Bulgaria will NEVER switch to the Latin alphabet, as they like to claim Sts. Kiril and Metodi, the creators of the Cyrillic alphabet, as their own (in fact they were Slavs living in Thessaloniki when it was part of Macedonia, but those are just details) and May 24 is the Day of the Bulgarian Alphabet, a big holiday.
And, of course, the best Bulgarian fun fact: Bulgarians nod their heads backwards. They nod for no and shake their heads for yes. This is totally easy to get used to and never, ever confuses hapless foreigners.
As for what the promise of EU membership holds…jobs for everyone, lots of holidays at the sea, holidays in Italy, and ponies for all. Right!!!
OOOOOO, I want to know! Are the perfective and the imperfective articles too?
Were us Spaniards supposed to get ponies? Are they compulsory? Can I trade mine in for an electronic version? All this moving between countries would get quite complicated if it included a horse, even a small one.
Oh, you didn’t get your pony? It must have gotten lost in the mail.
Fretful Porpentine, all that and I forgot to wish you good luck! Geez. Good luck! At the rate we’re going (Antonius Block, what’s this about coming to BG?), PlovDope may eventually become something more than a figment of my imagination!
I’m spoilering my explanation of perfective and imperfective because it’s probably really boring unless you’re a language geek.
[spoiler]All verbs in Bulgarian (and other Slavic languages, I know, not sure if this is the case in all of them, though) have a twin. Sometimes the twin is identical, and sometimes (maybe 80% of the time) it’s fraternal. In a simple sentence, like “I like school”, you use the imperfective form of the verb “to like” (haresvam). However, if you need to say something in the past or future tenses, you use the perfective form of the verb (“to like”= haresam), and if you accidentally use the imperfective form, it changes the meaning.
You also have to use the perfective form of the verb after the connection of two clauses with the word “da” (to). So, with “I like to go to school”, the verb “go”, being after the “to” requires the perfective.
I go to school = Az otivam na uchilishte.
I like to go to school = Az haresvam da otida na uchilishte.
Otivam and otida are both first person singular of the verb “to go”. Otivam is the imperfective and otida is the perfective.
The upshot is, learning a new verb requires memorizing TWO words instead of just one about 80% of the time. The fact that the two words are always fairly similar doesn’t necessarily make it any easier in remembering which one to use while speaking on the fly.
Fun, huh?[/spoiler]
I do, in fact, know what you’re talking about, since Czech has it too. Do they also do ridiculously complicated things involving prepositions and noun cases?
Nope! (Except I’m not sure what a noun case is…) Maybe Bulgarian will be easy for you after all! I personally find the prepositions incredibly difficult, because they’re wildly different from English, but that’s just me.
I felt bad after all my gloom and doom talk about how hard the language is, so I wanted to note that I’m actually pretty happy with my abilities, given the amount of time I’ve been studying it. (Of course, I have ample chance to practice, being that no one else in my village speaks English…)
Heh, Kyla, to me that sounds like you’re too used to English’ oh-so-simple verbs, that’s all 
Me gusta la escuela. Me gustaba la escuela. Me gustó la escuela. Me gustará la escuela. That’s whithout even getting into “composed forms” (verb haber + participle), subjunctive, etc.
Ahahaha. No. I studied Spanish for five years. The Slavic imperfective/perfective system is like ten times more complicated.
Noun cases would be like declinations? In German you have dativ and akusativ (as well as the regular nominativ, which doesn’t get into book exercises). You have to use a different ending for the name depending on its function within the sentence. The only cases in English are the nominative and the genitive.
Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, etc. (and in Czech, there’s also vocative, prepositional, and instrumental, only not all objects of prepositions actually take the prepositional case – some take dative, accusative, or genitive instead, and you have to memorize which preposition does what to the noun after it). I hate noun declensions with a burning passion, so if there aren’t any in Bulgarian, I shall be very happy.