A few days into the new year and everyone I know is skiing in Bansko. No one's left for the UK, or anywhere else in the EU for that matter.

In fact, most of my British friends are also skiing in Bansko. Several of them are toying with the idea of buying a flat together, so that they can have a winter base in Bulgaria. Unless I am missing something, the traffic these days seems to be Sofia-, rather than London-, bound.

However, I do see where the fear of mass migration is coming from. When the last ten countries joined in 2004, instead of the forecast 15,000 migrant workers a year, the UK got 600,000 in two years. I know from experience that it could be confusing to wake up one morning only to find that the official language of Hammersmith is no longer English ... but Polish.

For me, though, to fear a new migrant invasion is to base one's expectations on fiction. Bulgarians have enjoyed the freedom of self-employed business visas to the UK for quite a while and anybody who wanted to set up as a cleaner, builder or electrician has been able to do so for a number of years.

Self-employed business visas are actually a very decent and quite convenient way to earn a living in the UK. The reason so few of us made it across the Channel is that, traditionally, Bulgarians have preferred to cross the border into Greece, or travel south to Italy or Spain - home of the biggest Bulgarian immigrant community.

Those (relatively few, I reckon) wishing to leave the country in search of work, now that we are part of the EU, are likely to go for these destinations, as they probably already have family or friends there.

A couple of months ago, a BBC journalist on assignment in Sofia found it hard to locate Bulgarians eager to move to the UK. Around the same time, I took part in a focus group for Bulgarians who had come back home after living in the UK. There they were in their new roles - heads of this and execs of that, all of them under the age of 30. I couldn't help but feel that I had somehow underachieved.

In fact, I often feel that way in Bulgaria - and it's not only because of those returnees who have been "spoon-fed" all the skills in the world while working abroad. Most young, and not so young, Bulgarians have not had the advantage of working overseas, but have instead learned the free market economy book the hard way - by trial and error. They've earned their place here, in their country, and they are staying put.

As we toast the new year, we exchange the usual greetings. There is no mention of the EU. It's not as if we'd been waiting for this one event to transform our lives miraculously. This would imply that there was something fundamentally wrong with our lives to begin with. No doubt, it opens new horizons.

Opportunities for education at home student rates and visa-free tourism to the UK rank high on my list - but note that we have not needed tourist visas to all other EU countries for the past six years.

By now, though, we all know that it's tough out here, just as it is tough out there. The only difference is that for the time being in a country like Bulgaria you need considerably less money to achieve a decent quality of life. Isn't that precisely why so many Brits are regulars on Wizz Air?

By Olga Apostolova

Originally published in the Guardian Unlimited
 

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