Work and life in Bulgaria. Part two

November 18, 2010, Moscow, 6 a.m. On the street there is a dank cold wind with a small drizzling rain, which makes us shiver while waiting for the car to Sheremetyevo. Registration, inspection, passport control, a little waiting, and now at 8.20 the plane breaks off the strip and carries us into the distance, to Sofia. Two and a half hours of flight, an empty airport meeting, a small queue at the passport control ... And now we are already outside the airport. We are greeted by the bright Bulgarian sun, affectionately warming their rays, and the warm, light breeze smells pleasantly of freshness and change ...

Hello everyone! I continue to talk about our life in Bulgaria. The first part of the story is here.. In this part, I will try to cover topics such as learning the Bulgarian language, what is medicine here, and is it worth it to send a child to a Russian school. I write these notes solely from my personal experience, and do not judge strictly if you suddenly had something completely wrong in Bulgaria.

Arrival

From the airport we took a taxi to the reception of one of the taxi companies, and drove to an already rented accommodation (without a rental agreement, you will not be issued a D visa). A little advice is coming: if you come alone and you do not have a bunch of luggage, then you can use the metro, which follows directly from the airport and to the city center. A metro ride will cost you only 0.8 euros instead of an estimated 7 euros by taxi.

Taxi dropped us off near the house where we rented an apartment. After unloading the luggage, we began to expect Nikolai, our agent, who was supposed to arrange the transfer of keys and the signature of the act of transfer of property in the apartment. Nikolai appeared 15 minutes later with a small bouquet, which he handed to my wife with a smile. After that, we began to expect the hostess of the apartment, which appeared another 20 minutes later. Lateness at the Bulgarians is a fairly common occurrence, then do not be surprised at this. Be on a relax, everyone lives like this :-)

After inspecting the apartment and signing the act, I handed the landlord the rent for November, receiving two pairs of keys in return. Having hardly managed to escort Nicholas and the mistress after this, chatting incessantly about everything, we finally exhaled and went to sleep, the tiredness of the move took its toll on that day.

After waking up a few hours later, I went for reconnaissance at the grocery store, the closest of which was the usual Bill. Smiling sellers who greeted me at the checkout made me almost out of the habit of stepping aside. However, you then quickly get used to it :-)

The next day, we asked Nikolai to arrange an Internet connection for us. They chose “Blizoo” (I do not recommend it!), Since their office was in the next house. And here I made the first mistake, which then came back to me a year later. For:



The fact is that in Bulgaria treaties are honored and respected. And if you signed a contract for 1 year, then be kind all year and pay. And if about a month before the end of the contract you did not express a desire to terminate the contract, then it will be automatically extended for another year (or even three). Whether you use the Internet / cellular connection or not, this is of no interest to anyone. If at the same time you decide to score for payment, then do not be surprised if you can then be sued because of the penny 50 euros. So, we connected the Internet with TV after 2 weeks, it turned out to be lousy, and I changed the provider to m-tel. Which didn’t stop blizoo from then filling me with pieces of paper “pay the bill immediately”.

In Bulgaria there is an analogue of our big three. These are Vivacom , M-tel and Telenor, better known as Globul. Curious readers can look at the sites of these operators to see tariff plans (look for the word “planned”, this is “tariff” in Bulgarian). For the most part, all services are post-paid, although there are prepaid SIM cards. To conclude a contract, foreigners need either a passport or a personal card (if you have already received it).

Internet and TV from M-Tel are very high-quality, fast, in general - I am satisfied. There are hundreds of channels on TV, including Russian ones (well, if you suddenly missed Brothers in the Law-17, NTV will help you catch up). Most of the channels are in Bulgarian, many in the original language, but with Bulgarian subtitles. And here I would like to talk a little about the Bulgarian language itself.

Bulgarian language

Bulgarian for Russian people may seem surprising. For an unprepared Russian person who has never encountered the Bulgarian language, it will not be a problem to read a text written in Bulgarian on the fly. Let's just say, 80 percent you can understand from the summer. This is not surprising: the Slavic language, common roots, the good old Cyrillic without the addition of Latin letters. And even if the Bulgarian word on the letter contains the “wrong” order of letters, your brain can easily convert the word to “correct”. You can check: read the phrase "Construction workers of the remaining four of the capital of the quarter without current." I am sure that no reader will have problems reading and understanding this phrase.

But it’s a completely different matter when you first hear Bulgarian speech live. And you understand that you don’t understand :-)

And there are many reasons for this, and one of them is stress. Try to read the words “Rod and na” with an emphasis on the highlighted “and”, and you will understand that this word suddenly became completely incomprehensible and alien to you. Accent is one of the key features that distinguishes the Bulgarian language from Russian. To be honest, for 5 years I have not learned how to pronounce the banal telephone “alo” correctly in Bulgarian.

Arriving in Bulgaria, forget about the soft Moscow “Akane”, here the solid “window” and “Ekane” are held in high esteem. A small example: the street on which my family and I lived for a long time is named after the famous scientist: "Nikolai Copernicus Street". Exactly so, not “Nikolai Copernicus Street”, but “Nikolai Copernicus Street”. And pronounced not as “Nikalai Kapernik”, but strictly “Nicholas Copernicus”.

Another interesting difference: the pronunciation of the letter " b ". If you have ever come across a Bulgarian letter (for example, you wandered to a Bulgarian site), you must have been surprised at the abundance of solid signs scattered according to words. And now, attention is not a solid sign at all, but a vowel letter, close in first approximation to the pronunciation of the Russian " Y ". It is pronounced, of course, not just like Russian Y, but the analogue is very close. Another unusual letter is " Щ ". It is pronounced approximately as a merged "Sht." And finally: the letter " E " in Bulgarian is almost always read as Russian "E".

For especially curious readers, I give my homework: practice the pronunciation of the word “KASCHA” (“home” in Russian).

I also want to briefly talk about the so-called cheating words (I don’t remember what this phenomenon is officially called, and it’s not the point). For example, the Bulgarian word “fart” does not mean at all what you thought, but simply “curtains”. If you ask the seller in the store to show you where the melon is for sale, the seller will show you watermelons. For the word "dyna" means "watermelon." A bathhouse is not a place where fun is whipped with hot brooms, but a simple bathroom. A flock is a room, a bun is a bride, a grozha is care, a belly is life, it is safe - a synonym for “beautiful, cool” ... There are a lot of similar words, and if, say, you don't say the word “flock” often, then the word is misunderstood "Right" me on my first trip made an extra couple of kilometers scratching the street in search of McDonald's. For it was necessary to go not to the right, but directly. By the way, if you ask the Bulgarians to find you a brazier somewhere, then the Bulgarian can raise his eyebrows in surprise. For Bulgarians call barbecues gypsies (an approximate analogue of “Khach,” I apologize for the terminology).



There are no special features in learning Bulgarian compared to learning any other foreign language. The language is fairly easy to learn in the process of communicating with the Bulgarians, when watching TV shows and reading texts (newspapers, for example). Of course, if you constantly sit at home and choose only the store, then your vocabulary will be limited to numerals and banal "hello, thanks, how much it costs." Make friends, communicate more - and after a few months you will be able to scratch on Bulgarian at a very decent household level. The Bulgarians themselves are very friendly and curious about the Russians, and you will not have problems finding friends. If you are a terrible introvert and do not want to make contact, then this will not be a problem. Many Bulgarians know Russian to varying degrees (older ones are better, younger ones are worse),

By the way, if you learn the Bulgarian language, then consider that at the same time you learned Macedonian (the Bulgarians themselves do not recognize the Macedonian language, they say, just a dialect of Bulgarian), and you can also easily understand the Serbian language.

Business

My family and I arrived in Bulgaria virtually blindly. Initially, I wanted to engage in the development of payment terminals in Bulgaria, but soon I refused this idea, especially after getting to know the local mentality in the first months of my stay here. The second idea was to develop a program that I wrote for my wife to help automate the online store. The program was able to integrate suppliers' websites with an online store: upload information about products, automatically calculate prices and monitor balances. Later this program evolved into a cloud service, but now I would not want to talk about it in detail, this is a completely different story. At first I worked from home, then the first sales began, and now we were visited by the thought that it would be time to turn our small earnings into a full-fledged business, and I opened my own company.

In Bulgaria, doing business is not easy, but very simple. There are no restrictions on opening a company by foreigners, opening a new company takes about a week, a bank account is opened in a bank in 10 minutes on the spot, accounting is transparent and simple. The minimum authorized capital is actually absent (1 euro). In the vast majority of cases, the tax regime is 10% of profit (income minus expense). This all applies to EOOD / OOD - in fact, a complete analogue to the Russian LLC. There is also AD (joint-stock partnership), an analogue of AO in the Russian Federation), here the authorized capital is already 25,000 euros. Many licensed activities such as credit / banking / payment also require a minimum authorized capital not lower than specifically prescribed by law.

Paperwork is minimized, all documents in electronic form are available throughTargovsky register (analog of USRLE), in the same place any person can view all the data on your company. You have on hand a “friendly agreement” (you can consider the Russian “Company Charter” as an analogue), “the decision is inscribed in the Torg register”, and the EIC is your company’s unique number. In fact, in the daily life of managing a company you only need to know your EIC. Except in the rarest cases when concluding transactions, no one here in their right mind will ask you for copies of copies of any TIN and other paper junk there. There is an EIC, there is a registry - this is more than enough in practice. Oh yes, with a certain turnover, the company will need to register for the payment of DDS (analogue of VAT), today it is 20%, the return of DDS is carried out once a year.

Almost all small firms (and they make up the vast majority of firms in Bulgaria) outsource all accounting to the same small accounting companies. The cost of running a company is different and usually starts from the minimum wage per month. This figure is adjusted every year by the government of the country, and for the 2017th year is 460 leva (approximately 230 euros).

Hiring employees is not much different from hiring in Russia, with one exception: you can dismiss an employee without giving any special reason, you just need to be notified for a certain period indicated in the employment contract, usually 1 month. Similarly, an employee will have to work one month before being fired. In other words, there are no differences between the employer and the employee: the two parties conclude an equal agreement between themselves: you work - I pay, it's just business and nothing personal. I personally think this approach is right and fair.

Employer taxes, as in Russia, are paid by the employer; vacation, salary, working hours, duties of the employer and employee - everything is prescribed in the employment contract. Bulgaria and Russia are also related by one more fact in the sphere of labor relations, inherited from the USSR - the employee has a work book, a complete analogue of the Russian work book. Well, and the rest of any special differences in terms of work between Bulgaria and Russia, to be honest, I did not notice. The atmosphere in the team, technology, jobs, office - all this in the future depends on the particular company and specific people. There are team buildings on a grand scale (corporate parties), there are overtime, there are friendly relations, there are conflicts. In general, everything is the same as in Russia :-)

The medicine

None of us are iron, and sometimes there are times when you have to seek qualified medical help. As a foreigner, access to free public medicine will be closed for you here (at least until you get permanent residence, although here I am not sure it is better to check this information). This does not apply to ambulance calls: if necessary, an ambulance will arrive, and will not even ask you to show any document or passport there. We called an ambulance a couple of times: one time when my wife’s brother felt ill while walking, another time - for our daughter, when her temperature jumped to 39 with famously. The first time the ambulance arrived 10 minutes later, the other time we waited for an ambulance for several hours (as we were later told, the pediatrician was obliged to go to the children, and there were very few of them in Sofia and everyone was busy with other calls).

For planned visits to doctors (mainly for my daughter), we used paid clinics. In my primary view, the cost of treatment in paid clinics in Bulgaria is cheaper than Moscow’s one and a half to two times. The qualifications of the doctors are different, there are good pros, there are gouging ala Lobanov from the Interns who are skipping lectures at the university. The clinics are also different here: there are also super-sophisticated ones, for example, Tokuda, where everything is done in the manner of American clinics; There are also simpler clinics. The state hospitals, where we went to take tests for admission to kindergarten, visually present inside the terrible wretched rooms, where you can shoot scenes for horror films. By the way, my wife corrected me here in the process of reading: a trip to a state clinic is even paid for Bulgarians, in the direction - the cost will be small (about a couple of euros),

In Bulgaria there is the concept of a “family doctor”. This is something like our therapist from an attached clinic. It is this doctor who will write you prescriptions for medicines, conduct initial examinations and refer you to other doctors. Yes, by the way, keep in mind that very many medicines that are in Russia are not available in Bulgaria in principle. Pharmacists are especially precipitated when you try to explain to them what “green stuff” is :-)

When applying for a residence permit, you will have to make health insurance coverage of up to 30,000 euros. If you do this insurance for excuse (as we did), then the cost of such insurance will not exceed 30-50 euros. But I advise you to make normal insurance in a trusted company. The fact is that with this insurance you will be able to beat off many expenses in paid clinics, which will help to save a lot on visits to doctors. We learned about this life hack quite late from our friends. Even the Bulgarians themselves very often prefer to go to paid clinics using the same insurance.

Briefly summarized, nobody will leave you on the street to die, and planned visits by doctors should not hit your wallet hard. But it’s better not to get sick)

Education

At first, when I worked from home, my wife and child mastered local playgrounds, of which there were a sufficient number around our house. In addition to the playgrounds, it was a pleasant discovery for us such places as children's “entertainments”. Their essence is simple: a large children's room full of toys and small attractions. Under the supervision of educators, the child plays, draws, sculpts, in general - has fun in full. Parents at this moment can sit down to relax in a nearby cafe or drive away on their own business. The cost is more than affordable (from 3 euros per hour). Such entertainments also appear in Moscow today, but in 2010 there were none.

Then we decided that it was time to socialize the child. Our daughter at that time was 2.5 years old, and we decided to send her to the private kindergarten "Piter Pan" (I do not recommend it). For foreigners there is an opportunity to send the child to the state garden, but at that particular moment (this was in the spring) we would have to wait for autumn for this. Our daughter at that time still hardly spoke Russian, so my wife and I had certain concerns about adaptation. But as it turned out in practice, fears were in vain. Within a few days, the daughter went to kindergarten with pleasure, and already then she began to utter the first Bulgarian words. After about six months, we transferred her to another kindergarten, because we did not particularly like the attitude of the teachers towards the children (they noticed more than once that the teachers scored on the children and looked stupidly at the TV).Trust , we were extremely pleased with this kindergarten, I recommend and advise.

The cost of staying in the garden is 300 euros per month. This price includes food, and additional circles, and working materials. The groups are divided by age, in each group no more than 10 children. In the kindergarten they professionally teach English, teach mathematics and Bulgarian, and much more. The child always enthusiastically went to this kindergarten until the end of his stay there, made his first friends, ideally learned the Bulgarian language. Thanks to this kindergarten, my wife also made acquaintances among Bulgarian mothers, we are still very friendly friends with one family. At the end of the kindergarten, we were given a state-certified certificate, which is the basis for the child's admission to school.

There are both public and private schools in Bulgaria. For foreigners, the education of children in a public school was previously paid, but today this fee has been canceled. I can’t tell in detail about studying at a public school, because at the end of kindergarten we sent our daughter to a paid school called Educational Technologies, where almost half of the kindergarten group went to first grade with us. The cost of schooling is 350 euros per month (if paid monthly) or 3550 euros if paid immediately for a year. Children learn from morning to lunch (then we had an extension with games and walks), professionally equipped classes, and in-depth study of the English language. Studies continue until the 8th grade, after which there is already the so-called vocational training in either a regular or specialized school. In total, there are 12 classes in Bulgarian schools, the grading system is 6-point. The study starts on September 15th, and continues until June. There are no holidays like in Russia in schools, the only exception is the Christmas holidays, which last from December 25 to January 4-5. By the way, there’s no New Year holidays for adults either,

There is also a real Russian school in Sofia. This is a school at the embassy, ​​where the children of consuls and other diplomatic staff usually study, but it is open to everyone else. Tuition is also paid (it was $ 180 a few years ago when we were interested in this topic), the number of places is limited, all training meets Russian standards, and even the Bulgarian language is not studied there. Do you need such training for your children? If you consider living in Bulgaria only as temporary before returning to Russia, then, probably, yes, it is better to send to this school. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

PS I was asked here to show the cat, catch:



PPS To be continued :-)