They don't smile anymore

Being in Bulgaria meant being back in Europe, more specifically in an Eastern European country.

While this was a welcoming thought when thinking of Christmas, it also meant that we could now see things that perhaps we were insensitive to a mere two months before.

Though 2 months may not exactly be an enormous amount of time, it is surely enough to start see little differences in daily life things. And I do not just mean the obvious differences between Africa and Europe, I mean smaller things that before were insignificant to us and all of a sudden seem to be impossible to not notice.

Among the differences we saw, the one that seemed to be the most noticeable was that people were no longer smiling.

Don't get me wrong, people were neither unfriendly nor did we encounter any negativity. People were quite simply no longer smiling in their everyday interactions.

In Africa people often had little but sported a smile that could light up a room. It just seemed to be embedded in them. Even in Oman, a country with a high level of development, people seemed to be happy and were happy to smile and say hello at any given time.

But in Bulgaria this was no longer the case. In fact, it was so noticeable that we immediately remembered that back in Poland people were just as unlikely to crack a smile as in Sofia. Or pretty much anywhere else in Europe for that matter.

It was an odd realization.

Sure, you might argue that in recent history Eastern Europe was oppressed and that people simply had the spark beaten out of them. That may well be the truth but as repression goes, East Africa did not have it any easier and is objectively less advanced than Poland or Bulgaria. And yet they smile.

Why?

What has Europe, or perhaps Eastern Europe forgotten that others didn't?