Deaf Festival Primorsko

Every other year they have a deaf festival in Primorsko, which is about 20 kilometers south of Sozopol. Without a car, we had some trouble getting there. Apparently, there aren’t any buses from Sozopol to Primorsko until July. What should have taken us twenty minutes ended up taking longer than an hour. We first had to take the bus back to Burgas and then switch to a маршутка (mini-bus). The drive was quite pleasant though. I expected us to stay along the coast, but we went through the countryside. In one of the smaller villages, every telephone pole had a crane nest. Beautiful. 

When we got to Primorsko, our friends hadn’t arrived yet so we went to the southern beach and tanned for a while. The beach wasn’t very crowded, and I would assume most of the people on the beach were Bulgarian. Near the entrance of the beach two women were tanning topless. This wouldn’t normally surprise me, but these women must have been chalga singers. They were very young, very thin, and had gigantic breasts. Plastic surgery sized breasts. Nearby, two very old men were staring at the young women. Not obviously, but not hiding it either.

I think they look so Bulgarian

 Clouds came in and we decided to find a campsite or a hotel. We were just wandering around when we ran into a group of deaf people. They brought us to a big hotel that had rooms for just ten leva per person per night. That was about the same price as our camping. After sleeping for two days on the hard ground, getting into a hotel bed with clean sheets was fantastic. I can imagine that the hotels have to compete a lot for guests. Practically every building in Primorsko was a hotel, and the few houses also had rooms for let. It was not a pretty city. 

View from the hotel

 Later in the evening, we met up with our Bulgarian friends. A couple of our friends from Macedonia was also there, which was fantastic. We went to a bar, had some margaritas, and chatted for hours. There were so many Deaf people in Primorsko! I had never seen anything like it before; you’d walk ten paces and there’d be another group of people signing. We hardly ever run into Deaf people in Sofia, so it was great to meet some other Deaf Bulgarians.