Name Days

To live in another for a long period together with people from totally different places is pretty interesting. To be EVS on the Canary Islands is giving me the chance to get to know the local culture and tradition but not only. Here as you know I am living together with Polish, Hungarian and German girls. And each one of us has her own different perception for the world. Of course this is because of the family and country we are coming from.

On 7th of January was my name day and as it was festivity day here I stayed in home and whole day spoke on skype with friends and receive messages with greetings. This was really strange for my German flat mate, she doesn’t even know when is her Name day. Well for Poland and Spain the Name Day is a special festival too.

So around 100 years ago Bulgaria is adopting the Gregorian calendar which means that all of the festival is now 13 days before they were celebrated due to the Julian calendar. As 100 years is not so much time in my country or at least in my family the people are still remembering that my name day was celebrated always on 20th of January on old style calendar. My grandfather continued to celebrate on the 20th instead of 7th till he died few years ago.

Well all of these explanations were actually for you to can understand how different the traditions in the different countries are. And also to see how comfortable was for me to celebrate my Name Day yesterday on 20th instead of 7th when I was sick. I recognize in the end of the night that it was my old style Name day but the karaoke party was so nice that I decide to name it my Name Day celebration.