"THINGS ARE NOT STRANGE BUT DIFFERENT"

by Agatha Maloda (Tanzania)

A leap into the unknown Bulgaria

"Things are not strange , things are different" I came to understand this sentence more and more when I start travelling. My story began in 2014 when I had to take a first flight of my life out of my country to South Africa for a Bulgarian visa application. The experience was a mixture of excitement and worrying as not sure what will really happen in the following days staying in a new country. This was my first time using new currency where the process of converting before buying was very complicated to me, before buying anything I had to calculate the price to my currency to know how cheap or expensive the product is. With the limited time I got to visit and explore some of important historical and cultural sites of the country. My Bulgarian visa got released early and I had to came back to my home country. After few months of preparations for a life abroad, the time came for my first travel out of Africa. This was by a project called Arts for social change, a project involved 4 countries which are Bulgaria, Italy, Uganda and Tanzania. In this stage of the project 4 youth, two from Tanzania and 2 from Uganda were getting the opportunity to live in Bulgaria for 10 month as volunteers. The whole time of living in Bulgaria was full of new experiences. The project gave me the opportunity to meet new people, new friends and some became families. I was able to explore Bulgarian culture where most of the things in their culture were so new to me, I remember one day when I was so afraid trying to hide myself from the people with masks all over their body singing and scaring people but at the end I got to understand that it was one of their national day where people wear like that to scare and chase devils. During my stay I had opportunity to learn Bulgarian language. I was amazed on how they use their own alphabet. At the beginning it was very hard as some of alphabets that look the same in English and Swahili ( my national language ) are pronounced very different, making talking and listening easier than writing and reading. During talking I had to note the movements of heads too as when you nod your head up and down meaning "yes" this means "no" and vise versa. This country was where I experienced my first real winter. I remember when it was still summer everyone was asking me if I was ready for winter and I was " yeah , I'm ready" with my sport shoes and my Tanzania's sweater, but when that winter came this was totally the opposite of what I was thinking before on how the winter will look like. I had to start a new shopping for the winter, buying new shoes, new sweaters, jackets, pull necks, heavy socks, things to cover my head and scarfs, the weather was something new to me . This was also my first time to see snow as in my country you can only find the real snow on the top of mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. Me being in the snow and making snow balls was one of my greatest adventure. One day me and friends travelled to one of the mountains in Bulgaria called Vitosha mountains, on this day It was my first time to go to the top of the mountain using a special lift, at first I was so afraid when it started but when i got used it became another one of my life's great experience seeing how beautiful nature is from the top. The project gave me the opportunity to mingle with locals where I got to learn the real life of locals. Together we were able to cook together our local foods, sharing traditional costumes, sing and dance our traditional songs together. All of these made me find myself liking some of the things in Bulgarian culture. Some of the things I couldn't think I will come to like at the beginning became one of my favourites, even after I came back home. "Things are not strange but different".