Have you ever heard of a town, or let’s
better call it a village (and even that seems a bit exaggerated) called Shtit
(Щит)? No? One year ago I neither had any idea of where that was supposed to be
nor what that was. For better understanding, besides my study of TKK I’ve been
studying Environmental Systems Science with a special focus on Geography for
three years now and the geographical institute offers one big excursion every
year. I fortunately got the possibility to join this year’s excursion to
Bulgaria and Istanbul and after a long period of preparing and planning it
finally took place in July.
I’m not going to write about every
city we visited and everything we saw on the excursion because that would
definitely go beyond the scope of this blog. But there was one special
experience I absolutely MUST share with you: And now I come back to Shtit. It’s
a little “village” that gives home to 150 souls and is located at the Bulgarian
border to Turkey. ( If you are starving for a calm place – welcome to Shtit. Apart from a restaurant which also houses a
little shop you can only find a closed school building and old or in the worst
case abandoned houses.
Our group was supposed to stay in
Shtit for three days and because there was no hotel, we were housed at locals.
This gave us the possibility to gain an insight into the real life of
Bulgarians living on the countryside.
In a group of four we were led to an
old woman who has been living alone for some years and who was really glad
about some company. The only problem was that our host-mother or better call
her grandmother was talking Bulgarian all the time and none of us could
understand any of the words she said. But luckily we were somehow able to
communicate and trigger out what she wanted to tell us!
When we first saw her house we were
a little bit shocked about the poor circumstances that woman was living in: the
toilet was a highlight (and not a positive one), so was the rest of the “bathroom”
– a little building next to the main house that can’t truly be considered a
bathroom. Being used to our western European hygiene standard this kind of
housing was a bit of a challenge for us. But on the opposite this woman did
remarkable things: She had a huge garden, growing all kinds of vegetables and
fruits (there were figs, tomatoes, pumpkins, melons and many more) and despite
her advanced age she worked that garden on her own. And she was so friendly, so
content with the things she had and simply happy that we were there.
To sum up after three days of
gaining insight into living on the countryside I really wouldn’t want to miss this
extraordinary experience: Living there made me appreciate our standard of
living even more! I started to appreciate the doors of our toilet rooms, I
appreciate warm water while taking a shower and I appreciate all the
possibilities I have here in Graz, attending university, being able to eat at
different restaurants – simply everything.
The only challenge now is to keep
this feeling of appreciation as long as possible :-)
