Your kids will be delighted. A few dollars for the teacher will make sure that they will get top marks.
Observers believe that it may take another generation for the country to be purged of the rampant corruption, usually considered a leftover from four decades of Stalinism. Tackling corruption and organized crime was supposed to be a pre-condition for Bulgaria joining the European Union on January 1, 2007. A little more than a year after the country had joined, three streams of EU funding were suspended because of fraud.
The award-winning investigative reporter Yovo Nikolov of the weekly Kapital magazine reported a year ago that nothing had changed. “If there was a real fight against corruption,” he wrote, “you would see more convictions from the courts.”
Others have stated that Bulgaria was backsliding on reforms, after it had jumped the hurdles to win membership in the EU. However, before the last election, Maria Anguilieva, an MP for the ruling coalition and deputy chair of the parliamentary EU affairs committee, said that Europe needed to have a little more patience: “We’ve achieved a lot in a very short time.”
“Corruption is not an everyday thing,” the BBC quoted a woman in one of the Sofia markets as saying. “It is an every-minute thing. Everyone wants money for everything. Anything you want to do, you need to have connections or you need to give bribes.”
On August 4 the daily paper Klassa criticized the priests of the Orthodox church for taking better care of themselves than of their congregations. “They treat people like customers rather than believers,” the paper wrote.
Few old-timers are left who can compare today’s conditions with those under the last king of Bulgaria, King Simeon II of the House of Saxe-Coburg. He was born in 1937 and is still alive. Thanks to Prince Consort Albert of the same house, he is closely related to our own royal family. When Simeon was a little boy he was tsar of Bulgaria, from 1943 to 1946. After the fall of communism he became active in Bulgarian politics and served as prime minister from 2001 to 2005 under the name of Simeon Borislav Sakskoburggotski.
He has never renounced his royal title.
Nobody has ever accused a member of the House of Saxe-Coburg of taking bribes.
It is time he got his throne back.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Great Blog So Far! Look forward to the next ones.
Love You
They simply need time to codify the various prices/bribes of the corruption system so that they can be formalised as prices as per “our” system.
Once corruption ceases to work, it will stop. If people get what they pay for, the system will continue. If they do not, it will die out.
I was reminded of this by a story on BBC about the restoration of a house built by Horace Walpole, son of Sir Robert, first Prime Minister of England. He had a vast amount of money left to him by his father, who had made it all in office as a part of the system of bribes that existed at the time. The system dies out. Must not have been efficient enough.
Sir, I have passed on your comment to Karlheinz Schreiber. I will of course pass on his reply to you, once I receive it.