Plovdiv (OT)

[Richmond Mathewson]

  On 02/05/2010 23:01, David Glasgow wrote:
> On 2 May 2010, at 8:39 pm, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:
>
>>> About 3 hours ago my wife and I went for a walk in a park here in Plovdiv; from the hill in the centre of
>>> the park I could see 3 shopping malls under construction:
> Shopping malls in Plovdiv?  I called in there about 25 years ago on the way to Burgas. Todor Zhivkov was the head man back then.  I think it might have been there that a friend and I wandered through a shootout between police and some "New Bulgarians".  Strangely enough, it wasn't on the news that night.  Also strangely, neither side shot at us, or even shouted anything at us.  They kind of shot round us at each other.
>
> Shopping Malls?  Nah.
>

20 years post-totalitarianism Bulgaria has most of the advantages of not
being a police state (in fact the police are so crooked one could almost
call it a policeless state), and most of the gross materialistic guff 
that seems
to go with it.