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Most of the landscape is remarkably pristine and varied. The terrain is often mountainous (30% of the territory is classed as mountains), but there are various wild and rural environments. Bulgaria doesn't have its "Great River", if you exclude the languorous Danube in the North, and streams and lakes prevail. But there is the Black Sea to the east. The sea is not all there is to Bulgaria, but it is much of it for many - the beaches are perfect if you prefer sand dunes, a bearable summer and a zone with all its facilities geared for visitors in summer. The rest of the country is distinctly hot in July and August (unless you go above 500m above sea level) where it is refreshing and crystalline. The foodstuffs produced throughout have unsurpassable flavour and Bulgarian diet includes them in copious amounts, straight from the markets. The people are generally lively and welcoming-mostly, they genuinely enjoy foreigners. To some minds, foreigners are treated better than locals! The locals' ancestors are mainly Slavs (who dominate Russia and much of Eastern Europe), but their name the Bulgarians take from a Turkic tribe from Central Asia. There are traces of the Romans and Byzantines perhaps, of what became the modern Hungarians, of the Celts who were here in the 3rd century BC. The modern and recent-past minorities - Jews, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, Gypsies and Russians among others have varying success in leaving a mark but have mostly coexisted happily. Bulgaria was one of the 2 European countries to save its Jews during the Second World War (with Denmark), but their community has largely emigrated. Gypsies (or Romanies) are a blessing with their colourful lifestyles and a challenge that is only now being taken up: they suffer some discrimination, fail to get education, and have bad economic prospects. There is otherwise a near-universal literacy (in Bulgarian, written in the Cyrillic, Greek-derived, script) and by high achievements in international school subject comparisons. In a population smaller than that of Sweden, and equally open to foreign cultural contact, which also possessed in the 1980s one of the languages that most books were translated in, there is a lot of knowledge and interest in foreign languages and cultures. French and German dominated the older, wartime generation. They are still spoken, but now joined by English. Perhaps 20% of Bulgaria's population has a decent command of another language(s), and anecdotal evidence is that Bulgarians' are better at it than the average Spaniards or Italian.
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Survey of Bulgaria
