One of the photos I took with my mother's and my sister's new camera, to just start figuring out its settings (there are more settings, but thankfully, more instructions... I haven't managed to read them all, LOL). Just one of the first test photos and by no means the best that camera is capable of. It's an amateur (Sony) camera, but better than mine.

And Mina kitty says hello to Tomaz - paterson_si and Igor. :)

Yes,paterson_si , it is still autumn here in November. :P And this is a selection of last week's photos that I didn't have the time to post.

Specially for  bear_left  , and for anyone else who is interested.

Elections in December 1994 brought an unreformed ex-communists party back to power with an absolute majority. This brought the crisis to a head. Inflation reached hyper-inflation levels in winter 1996, triggering a run on the banks. Both the banking system and the currency collapsed, leading to the closure of 17 banks. When week-long street protests, with protesters manning barricades all over the country in icy winter nights, brought the ex-communists down in early 1997, a visitor to Bulgaria would be reminded of a third-world county, with foreign donors shipping in humanitarian aid and financing soup kitchens.

Full article and a video here. I took part in the street protests myself (I was a student in Sofia then), but I'm not in the video. :P
It all lasted 3 or 4 weeks in Sofia. God, it feels like it was in some other life!

Some people who talk in the video oversimplify the things, but everything you can see in the video itself was reality, including the empty bread containers in the shops.

It's not that the Communist-renamed-to-Socialist Party tried to do things the old way of the Soviet Era. It's that the organized crime practically and quite openly ruled the country together with said party. And they managed to sell all the wheat grain abroad, that's why there was the bread crisis. The next government was forced to import some grain (from Polland if I remember correctly) to provide bread for the population until the next harvest.

Things are not as rosy as the article's author hoped for. The next government lost catastrophically the next election because of too much corruption and the Union of Democratic Forces split into several parts none of which can be a serious political power. Then the next government had the same fate. Always starting anew with each new election... but economically,  with all of our ups and downs, we at least aren't sinking into full Third World again, after the two collapses in 1990 and 1996.