Before I left for Sofia, I had to complete McGill’s pre-departure course – a requirement for any student leaving Canada for academic purposes. I remember the course putting emphasis on how difficult “culture shocks” can be for travellers, complete with strategies to manage them (avoiding isolation, maintaining contact with friends at home, etc.) I will admit that I was apprehensive about the culture shocks I might face. I am not the kind of person who can be described as “going with the flow”, or even “chill”. The last time I had lived outside of Canada, I left after barely more than month due to the pandemic, and never really faced the cultural differences. How would I adapt to Bulgaria?

Now – more than halfway through my internship – I struggle to think of any real culture shock I have experienced. Sure, plenty of things are different here. It’s a country with an entirely different language (and alphabet), and plenty of historical, religious, and cultural factors that are alien to me. However, none of those aspects have been “shocking” to me. If pressed, the only actual shocks I can name are laughably mundane:

  1. Bulgarians keep tomatoes in the fridge,
  2. My definition of an appropriate air conditioner setting differs from that of some of my coworkers,1
  3. Fridge thermometers are not a popular appliance, and
  4. There is no Diet Coke, only Coke Zero.2

As funny as it sounds, these have been genuine shocks for me (especially the last, as Diet Coke comprises approximately 30% of my blood volume). However, I have a feeling these are not exactly what the McGill travel course was talking about.

If I could add a slide to that particular module, I would title it “Reverse Shocks”. That is to say: the shock of finding a cultural familiarity in an unfamiliar place. I have experienced far more reverse shocks during my time here – finding things incredibly personal to my life back in Canada in the most unlikely spots in Bulgaria. Some examples:

  1. Finding a Quebec-made eco-friendly home goods brand, Attitude, in a health food store. I only noticed the brand’s products in Pharmaprix in the past few years, yet here they were with Bulgarian ingredient lists plastered over the originals.
  2. Hearing coworkers and friends reference the same Vine memes my friends at home have been repeating for years.
  3. Realizing that although it is a wonderfully walkable city, navigating Sofia as a pedestrian requires the same intrepid fearlessness in the face of death as in Montreal. Drivers can smell fear – just like home!

My list could go on. I could even talk about the ancient Thracian jewellery in the National Museum of Archaeology resembles the Celtic designs my own ancestors favoured, or the frequency with which I stumble upon street festivals (also a regular occurrence in Montréal, at least for me).

If there have been true culture shocks, they have been in my work. I came to Bulgaria with a reasonable background understanding of the Balkan Peninsula’s particular history. However, it is hard to conceptualize just how fresh that history is here. There are ghosts here, as pervasive in human rights work as they are in the graffiti-ed memorials. Ongoing political tension between Bulgaria and North Macedonia has been inflamed by Bulgaria’s refusal to recognize the existence of its internal Macedonian ethnic minority (an issue thrown into the limelight by the repeated denial of legal status to a civil society organization created for Macedonians in Bulgaria). This conflict is now a threat to North Macedonia’s EU ascension, which was previously under duress from a conflict with Greece over competing claims to “Macedonian” heritage. Alexander the Great has been dead 2,347 years, yet he is still somehow relevant in modern politics. Ghosts indeed.

The bulk of my research for BCNL thus far has concerned the legal environment for civil society organizations (CSOs) in Bulgaria (and by extension the EU). Bulgaria’s political history is embedded even in the operation of nonprofits, whether that be the aforementioned issue with Macedonian advocacy groups, or the anti-foreign agents law floated in parliament recently. The latter of these represents a wave of isolationist policies in the nonprofit sector influenced by a similar law imposed in Russia in 2012, which has been used to silence activist organizations in that country working on LGBT+ rights and environmental issues. This trend has swept throughout former communist countries in eastern Europe and Central Asia, and in some ways evokes historical distrust of “western” influences in national politics.3 Bulgaria’s proposed foreign agent law did not make it particularly far due to the instability of the national government, which has seen six elections in the past 4 years. Of course, preventing the ascension of the foreign agents law is one positive outcome among several setbacks caused by the lack of long-term governance. Despite these electoral issues, my coworkers and I still find time to share concerns about the upcoming American election, which none of us can vote in. Yet another reverse shock – even thousands of kilometres away, we’re all still unwillingly obsessed with American politics.

I suppose I am probably searching for the similarities more than the differences. I crave relatability – I want to be able to look at something here and explain how it is the same at home. How we are all really the same, in every country. It has been comforting to find my reverse culture shocks – it feels very human to know that we share the same habits, tastes, and quirks. It only takes a few familiarities to stave off homesickness, even if they are found in unlikely places.


  1. I apologize to future interns at BCNL – I may have already lost you your air con remote privileges. ↩︎
  2. These are not the same thing, and anyone who says otherwise is in denial ↩︎
  3. I recently published an article on the phenomenon of foreign agent laws through BCNL. It can be read here, in English or Bulgarian: ANALYSIS: PASSING OF GEORGIAN FOREIGN AGENT LEGISLATION IN A GREATER GEOPOLITICAL CONTEXT ↩︎