Spinach

Now that's what I call a striking subject line...

Having learned the hard -- or in this case, the leathery -- way that the concept of baby spinach is unknown here, I ordered 2 bags of 1 kg each of fresh spinach, in the hopes of finding therein enough small leaves for a decent-sized portion of spinach. Ha bloody ha. I don't know how or why they do it, but the leaves were at least as big as my hand (the smaller ones), with stems as thick as my index finger, and disfigured by some horrible kind of illness or animal, which I expected to uncoil from the depths of greenery any moment to bite me. After half an hour of intense spinach selection, I had two hands full of halfway acceptable not-too-leathery bits which, after being tossed into boiling water, amounted to 3 tablespoons full. Not exactly what you'd call a success. Not if you really like spinach and intended to have more than that quantity, anyway.

And Carrefour didn't have any chicken breast. Which is a bummer, if you had your heart set on making chicken mousse with layers of spinach in between. Never mind, though. I'll go shopping tomorrow (shoes, sunglasses etc.), and will buy both chicken and frozen spinach, if the idée of chicken mousse is still fixe.

Now to something completely different: I had no idea that the Bulgarian alphabet had 30 signs, 22 of which are consonants, 6 vowels and 2 half-vowels (one pronounced like "you" and the other like the "you" in "young"). Or that you have to read with a magnifiying glass, because some of the signs are near-identical, with only small microscopic, tail-like appendages to identify them as the one or the other. And no infinitive. Still, once I'll be used to the alphabet -- which is just similar enough to Russian for making mistakes -- it'll be quite interesting.