Let me tell you, I have the utmost respect for folks who go to Mexico without speaking a lick of Spanish! It’s very isolating and frustrating to not even be able to exchange pleasantries with a neighbour. But I’m getting by and the folks I interact with daily are seeing some progress, or at least effort, on my part.

I just went down to the village store for beer and hoped to get yoghurt and jam. They didn’t have the latter, but they did have the good German butter I’ve fallen for. I thought maybe I missed the jam, because it seems like such a common thing for a convenience store to have, so I asked and was told “Ne.” Okay, fair enough.

The lady pointed to my bottles and said something. I knew she was telling me to return them, so I said, “Okay,” but I doubt she knew I understood her. She will when I go back in a few days with a bag full of empties! She told me my total and I understood it, 6.20BGN. Don’t ask me to tell you how to say that (I can write it, but oral numbers are different from spoken), but I understood her. Without looking at her piece of paper, I handed her a 20BGN note and a 20 stotinki coin, then kept digging around for the 1BGN coin I knew I had. When I finally fished it out, she went, “Ah!” and handed me back a 10BGN and a 5BGN note.

Bulgarian money is very easy to use and has been much more intuitive than the peso was at first because of the extra zero (eg. 100MXN being close to 10CAD versus 10BGN being close to 10CAD). The symbol for Bulgarian currency is лв (literally lv, for lev). I will stick to BGN rather than switching my keyboard back and forth. Right now, I am paying 0.75CAD for each BGN, very similar to the exchange rate I enjoyed in Mexico. So when I see a price here I think of it as being as par, and then happily adjust downwards when I balance the books.

Bulgarian currency has the following coins:

1 stotinka

2 stotinki

5 stotinki

10 stotinki

20 stotinki

50 stoinki

1 lev

2 leva

I have seen the following banknotes:

1 lev

2 leva

5 leva

10 leva

20 leva

There are also 50 and 100 leva notes. I find it interesting that they have both coins and notes for 1BGN and 2BGN.