Carolyn, I just discovered your blog (purely by chance, looking for boza recipes), and I can not stop reading it. I am a native Bulgarian, and although I spend the last 18 years of my life in the US, I know the Bulgarian society quite well. One thing, which is very different from US, is that the Bulgarian society is traditionally quite bureaucratic, and autocratic. There are obvious historical reasons for that: From 15-th to 19-th centuries the Bulgarian were subjects of the Ottoman Empire, which was an very autocratic and bureaucratic society. From 19 century up until recently the Bulgarian culture and social structure was mostly shaped by the influence of the Russia/Soviet Union and pre-WWII Germany. And both Russia/Soviet Union and pre-WWII Germany have strong bureaucratic and autocratic traditions. For instance, Bulgarian academic programs are very centralized and rigid. The traditional foreign language programs strongly emphasize on grammar and vocabulary learning with very little context around them. The result is big time and money wasting. This approach is especially disastrous for short intensive courses, when one need to obtain quickly some communication skills.
	I think that Matt Thompson’s interpretation of this story is right on the money. The teacher wanted to do good job, by teaching you communication skill the right way, but she could not change the test, which was designed “from above”, and in result she was forced to do some cheating.
	Also, please, have in mind that in communistic Bulgaria cheating in the public and the professional life was widely spread and quite morally acceptable, and most likely still is... This was the result of the rigid and often plainly stupid communistic ideology. The Party was reluctant to change the ideology officially, but for practical reasons many communistic rules and principles were not enforced and were often bent or broken. On the other side, there were rules, often unwritten, which were strictly enforced, and were very dangerous to break...