Yeah that's why I'm not there - can't afford it. But I love the French culture and most of all the food. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. In another life... But most of all I like the country away from the big cities. A guy I know has a house on the Atlantic coast (Vendée) and I've stayed there a few times. Also I spent holidays in Brittany and Central France. Just this evening I was watching a French film called Music is my Life. At least that's what it said in Bulgarian. Anyway it was about a young woman who as a kid wanted to get into the music conservatory but wasn't good enough. One of the judges, a well-known woman musician, made a scathing remark when announcing that the child hadn't made the grade. The rest of the film is about the young woman's later life. There's a twist in the tail so I won't say any more. But it's so typical of the intelligent French films, I think.
Rusty you're treading on very thin ice there. Because of the similarity between the words Roma and Romania, people assume that they are one and the same or at least connected, which is not the case. This gets up the noses of the Romanians bigtime and it goes to the heart of the paranoia directed against the Roma.
Well, I can only speak from my own experience of these Bulgarian villages. Though I'm sure it's similar in the other rural areas of Eastern Europe and elsewhere for that matter. The thing is that the villagers are subsistence farmers or rather smallholders. The are not really part of an industrial economy. They are not employed, but they're far from being unemployed either. They have to chop down trees, haul that to their home, saw them into logs, and split the logs. That's their heating and cooking wherewithal. They raise their vegetables, keep animals and so on. They have to tend their goats and sheep, get them to grazing land every day, and so on. This is a full-time job. They milk the goats and either sell the milk or make their own feta-like cheese. They keep chickens, geese, and ducks. They slaughter a sheep and live off the meat for some time. That's what animal husbandry is all about.
So, when these villages were functioning entities, I can imagine that the people were quite contented. They have their music, dances, holidays and so forth. The young women are extremely good-looking by the way. But with the continued exodus of the youth to seek their fortune elsewhere, the system no longer works. I'm sure the older people are very sad at having to go through this and witness the steady erosion of their way of life. That's why they're happy that people are coming into the country. New ideas, maybe a rebirth over time.
It is, but these villages are largely depopulated. The locals have seen the young people depart and homes abandoned, over decades. "My" village's population was over 1000 50 years ago, maybe more, and now it's around 60 with an equal number who have apartments in town and come here on the bus once a week for produce from their gardens. So we Brits and Irish are the first people to buck the trend and we spend money that wasn't there before, and people appreciate that.
There is potential for friction, so one has to be circumspect.
As one begins to understand and speak the language, people appreciate that too, certainly in my case they are very friendly.
Yeah I'm one of them. Very cheap but not if you're on the local economy.
btw my current day labourers are Romany. They are great people, clean, temperate, hardworking, reliable. They live in the village. They are discriminated against mercilessly by the Bulgarians. I don't mean the particular ones that work for me. It varies enormously from village to village.
RE: words that rhyme
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/antidisestablishmentarianism