Arriving in a country without much previous knowledge about it can be an advantage, even from an intellectual point of view. As I had never been to Bulgaria and had met very few Bulgarians in my life I armed myself with a reasonable amount of travel literature for the plane ride from Copenhagen to Sofia. I did not want to look totally ignorant; on the other hand I did not mind having to ask a lot of questions. Having travelled widely in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the last fifteen years or so, after I decided to learn the nature of these societies in the only possible way, through personal experience and participant observation, I expected yet another variation on the same pattern of historical continuity in the midst of tremendous political change.