Ror’s Roars: Salad Days

The first ray of summer sunshine in the parks of Sofia and out come the bikinis, beer bellies and buskers.

Ror’s Roars: "SORE FEET?"

Isn’t it surprising how many marches there are in the centre of Sofia these days? I am not talking politics here. I am talking roads.

Going native?

Prepare for some unusual rustic adventures as you delve deeper into the ‘real Bulgaria’

Ror’s Roars: Pneumatic hiss

Miss Bulgaria 2009 has silicon breasts. Another global crisis? Or a giant leap forward for mankind?

Ror’s roars: Cafe Life

So what if recent comical rumours in the media that various Bulgarian MP’s prefer spending more time in cafes rather than the seat of government are true? What jot of difference can this make to the debate? Aren’t the same old arguments always trotted out regardless?

Ror’s Roars: Barking madness

Quite the best definition of the impossible is a bilingual dog. Especially in Bulgaria. No doubt you are either nodding or shaking your head.

The word on the street

How the 'fairer sex', mobile phones and stilettos are not always, well, fair

Falling down

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here...or maybe get a rope

The Sofia Echo and taxing tales

Money makes the world (of politics) go round, or so it seems. A preview of the next issue of The Sofia Echo.

Ror's Roars: Sisterhood

Hot news! Sofia is going to "sister" with Chicago. Don't know about you, but this puts a huge smile on my face.

Ror's Roars: Without fire?

Smoking is a very Bulgarian pastime, in fact, so many people puff away here like the funnel of the QE2 that perhaps it could even claim to be the national sport. High time to blow the whistle on this dangerous game though, ref! Not least because, horrifying health issues aside, it seems that every few days in winter the omnipresent atom bomb plume of tobacco fumes that

CHRISTMAS TRAVELLING: God rest you, merry gentleman

A cautionary tale of rushing home for Christmas

Listing precariously to starboard like a torpedoed oil tanker, my overweight boss staggers up to me in the jam-packed terminal of an airport in Saudi Arabia dragging his battered suitcase behind him. It's Christmas Eve, late 1980s, and I know he, and by the look of it, his suitcase, too, has been to a party the night before, where Santa has obviously been toasted with copious amounts of some ferocious and illicit expat homebrew.

Ror's Roars: `Casino Royale?'

With 007 back on the big screen once again, a little snippet in the news the other week reminded me of the best movie in the whole spy series, From Russia with Love. A terrific film, the plot centres around snaring the imperturbable MI6 agent in a "honeytrap", which, as you will all know, in espionage is a trap set to compromise a person using sex as the lure.

RORY'S ROARS: `Hot air'

The Presidency on a cold November Monday morning. "So, moving onto number 13 on the agenda today, Your Excellency, I am afraid to say that we have rather a sticky financial crisis on the doorstep." "Crisis?!? What crisis, attache?"

READING ROOM: Urban pigeon legends

Sofia's statues, some rather dilapidated and others kitschy, reflect the surrounding culture

Standing tall and Nelson-like upon a 40-metre high Corinthian column in Barcelona, a sober statue of Christopher Columbus is depicted holding a scroll in his left hand while proudly pointing west towards America with his right. Well, at least that was the general idea of the sculptor. But something Spanish must have gone awry with the plans because at the last minute the bronzed explorer ended up bizarrely fingering east towards Italy for all eternity.

Foreign lawyers in Bulgaria lack their quantum of solace - The Sofia Echo reports

Foreign lawyers, led by practitioners from the UK and Austria, are complaining to the European Commission about Bulgarian law that they say deprives them of a level playing field to practice in the field. The issue of The Sofia Echo published on November 14 2008 has the full details.

Rory's Roars: Science what?

A couple of weeks ago, a "Message from Earth" was transmitted from a powerful radio telescope in the Ukraine. At about the same time, a "Message for Help" was expressed by a polite voice in Sofia. The destination for this crackling cosmic communication from the Crimea was deep space. Coincidentally, the destination for the casually cajoling communication in Sofia was also deep space.

TO THE EDITOR: Road rage

Rory Parsons' ranting article about Bulgarian traffic passes over the one and only important aspect: that road mortality in this spacious country is about four times as high (related to population) as in overpopulated and bicycle-ridden Holland. And of course, it is the weak and not so rich who pay the highest price, such as last week, when a BMW X5 killed a family of three by overtaking where it shouldn't.

Bad timing

Soon be time to turn the clocks back again. But...er...why bother? Who takes the slightest bit of notice as to what hour it is anyhow? Let's face it some people here plainly run on Moscow time, some Johannesburg, most sleepy students moonlight on a Dracula-like schedule, and to really rub it in quite a lot of public sector folk and

READING ROOM: Road rage

Driving in Bulgaria from another perspective

A neon sign flashes the words out over the capital in colossal yellow letters: "Keep walking!" A wry comment about the state of the pavements? Do you have to be three sheets to the wind to obey them? Absolutely. What a cheerful thought. Break a leg, Johnnie Walker! Well at least we've got that straight for the more cynical among you. No, the sign really isn't a twisted government health warning:

The new look of The Sofia Echo

The Sofia Echo published on September 19 has plenty of new stories to tell - all set in the new-look redesign of Bulgaria's national English-language newspaper. Friday's issue takes a bold leap into the trend for visual journalism, and boasts a better design, with new typefaces, more space and new visual elements that will help you read more easily. What we have not changed are the core values of The Sofia Echo: first

RORY'S ROARS: One key fits all

There are few things in life as amusing as an old Russian comedy. My particular favourite is one from the 1970s that seems to sum up communism succinctly. A guy gets plastered on Christmas Eve and, by mistake, is put on a plane from Moscow to St Petersburg instead of his equally drunk friend. Once there, he does not realise he is in the wrong city, mainly because everything in St Petersburg is exactly the same as back in Moscow.

Bulgaria and the `big bang' in The Sofia Echo

One of the most fascinating and controversial scientific experiments, involving the largest particle accelerator ever built, was scheduled to be held in Switzerland on September 10 2008 - and of the team of more than 6000 scientists involved, 100 are from Bulgaria. In a story especially written for The Sofia Echo published on September 12, science correspondent Bozhidar Stefanov explains the meaning of the experiments involving the "God particle".

READING ROOM: The unkindest cut

The tale of an English Patient in a Bulgarian hospital will leave you in stitches. It did him.

Lying flat on my back on an operating table, I stare up at the 1970s lights above me that are flickering dimly like the disco headlights of an old Lada. The lung machine next to me is being readied for action by a nurse with a fabulous chassis. Hiss, phweeee, hiss, phweeee. It wheezes a little as it builds up some puff, a slight smoker's cough perhaps? We are in Sofia after all. Naked apart from the green plastic

From marriage to money in The Sofia Echo; from mattresses to Macedonia in Month2Come

Getting Bulgarian citizenship is no easy task, often involving a wait of years. Yet, for one foreigner unaware that he automatically and officially had citizenship by virtue of birth, it meant a bureaucratic obstacle to going ahead with his wedding day. The issue of The Sofia Echo published on August 29 2008 has full details of the strange story, as recounted by reporter Svetlana Guineva.

READING ROOM: Military intelligence. A contradiction in terms?

(with all due apologies to Groucho Marx for detonating his famous quote into shrapnel)

Three million euro for a clapped-out old tank? What? Rommel and two other careful owners in the log book or something? No. Much better than that. Giovanna, Tsaritsa of Bulgaria. Yes, one of those stolen Maybach tanks, rust 'n' all, was apparently a present from Hitler to Her Royal Highness. Well, according to a military junk collectors' website, that is. Such taste, Adolf!

The Sofia Echo's exclusive report from Georgia

Reports on serious issues facing Bulgaria and the wider region are among highlights in the issue of The Sofia Echo published on August 22 2008. New statistics show that Bulgarians are among the lowest-paid employees not only in the European Union, but also in comparison to several other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Petar Kostadinov has the details.