I think that there are a lot of things that Bulgarians love. Shopska Salad. Cigarettes. Yogurt. Rakiya. Driving too fast. Complaining. Plastic bags. Cucumbers--pickled or fresh. The Black Sea.

But today reading the newspaper, I was struck by the realization that the government is trying to strip two of these little pleasures from everyday hard-working Bulgarians.

Yes, in fact, cigarettes and plastic bags, two of things that Bulgarians love the most, are currently under attack.

First there's the on going issue of smoking cigarettes in public places. The push seems to be away from smoking inside. This seems to have resulted in larger establishments more or less offering smoke free areas in their restaurants. Although in practice even these smoke free areas are hardly smoke free. The smaller ones? Well it seems totally acceptable to smoke there still. Or it seems just as acceptable to go outside and smoke right in front of the door so that everyone has to walk through your smoke to get in.

Then there are the plastic bags. These seem as pervasive in Bulgaria as cigarettes. At major grocery stores like Billa and Hit you have to buy your plastic bags but pretty much everywhere else in country shops use gratuitous numbers of plastic bags to pack up your purchases.  Want a few carrots and a kilo of oranges? Of course you'll get separate plastic bags. As a result, these plastic bags are now blowing all over the country. Enter <a href="http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=126567&amp;utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">proposed plastic bag tax</a>.

The funny thing is I am actually in support of both of these measures. I don't smoke so the first is probably a given. And I know that I use too many plastic bags and that I should be smarter about that.

Still, I've only lived in this country for two and a half years and its pretty hard for me to imagine it without clouds of cigarette smoke and plastic bags stuck in bushes.