Alaskan Bulgarian

2003-12-11T17:16:00.000+02:00

WHOA...HEY THERE, HO THERE
What's going on? Oh, oh yeah, the site's moved. It can now be reached and will be updated at the much more pleasant address http://www.alaskanbulgarian.com. Adjust accordingly the bookmarks and links you maintain so religiously. Of course, I just bought the domain name, the server space I owe to the man behind Lex Libertas and so the site's actual address will always have to pay tribute to him.

For the time being (and hopefully not forever) the archives will still be here. So if you want to see something I wrote in the past year, this is the place to go. However, I think everybody will find the new digs homey and hospitable.

See you there!

2003-12-10T18:46:00.000+02:00

Ahh Wednesdays
For the last few weeks Wednesdays have started early and ended late. I've talked about them before, but it never hurts to praise my favorite day again and again. I get up at 6 or 6:30, relax for a little while as I get ready for the day, and head out for school around 7:30 or so. I teach two eighth classes, which usually go well since the students are still pretty drugged from sleep and have yet to wake up enough to become pains in the ass.

Then, at about ten, I go back home. Today, I ran into one of the orphans who walked with me along the way and, in a heart wrenching attempt to screw with me, showed me about five different things he'd like to get for Christmas. I gave him two leva for oranges he wanted to buy and some time in an internet club, which I gather is one of the orphans' few entertainments during winter.

Back at the apartment, I made myself some French toast and settled in on the couch. Usually, I wind up taking a nap for an hour or two, or three, but something just didn't connect today. I wound up going to bed, reading some Tortilla Flat, dozing off, then waking up a second later after thinking I was going to be late for my Bulgarian lesson. This happened for about a couple of hours until 3:30, when my alarm went off, I stared at the ceiling for a couple of minutes, then got up to go study some Bulgarian. Two hours of study, coffee, and cookies later, I always come to the internet club to check up on things and do that one thing that makes every Wednesday--read the Onion, top to bottom.

Today, in addition to a brilliant article about a point in teaching I've come close to but never reached, I chuckled audibly at just about everything on the site. Also, the Lakers won, which kind of wrapped the whole day in a tidy bow.

After the internet club, I'll go home, check homework for tomorrow's classes, and watch the WWI documentary on the Discovery Channel at midnight. I can't really say that Wednesdays are the most productive day of the week, but it's nice having a day where I relax and actually do something . Makes the week flow a little easier, especially when Thursdays always wind up being a challenge.

For the last couple of days, I've been orally testing the eighth classes, and I really hate giving tests, I've discovered. The problem is, every student speaks English passably well, but I have to draw the line somewhere. I wind up dropping students I know speak the language well down to the equivalent of a "B" for not using full sentences or messing up word order in slight ways.

It's awfully stressful. Pretty much every kid here wants to learn the language and learn it well, but sometimes they just can't keep their mouths shut during the test. I gave about four "2"s ("F"s) for talking when not allowed and, in a moment of pity for the great students that just couldn't keep themselves together for forty-five minutes of testing, gave them a nigh impossible extra-credit assignment to have the privilege of taking the test. Fortunately, the students are well-disciplined enough that this doesn't seem like rolling over and exposing my throat to them.

Some volunteers have had to get so strict on cheating as to impose an actual, fully-functional bell curve on their classes. This smacks of weeding students out. I would never want to give a kid a two just because he wasn't keeping up with the rest of the class, but I suppose if that's what they need to do to maintain order, then that's what they need to do. Discipline, especially in the younger classes, seems to be paramount.

So what does this coffee-inspired divergence mean, exactly? Well, it means that I only had to suffer through a couple of hours of teeth-grinding testing before I got to relax the rest of the day. That was pretty nice...

Anyway, what I now realize too late was an unfortunately dull entry peters out as the bulk of another Wednesday comes to an end, and as I search for a decent way to end this post..Oh screw it, the post is over. Good night, everyone.

2003-12-09T16:54:00.000+02:00

TIS THE SEASON

There have been signs in Silistra for about 3 weeks now. The first Christmas trees began popping up in store windows then. Since that beat Thanksgiving--which most of the volunteers I've talked to seem to agree is the beginning of the standard Christmas explosion in America--Bulgaria seems to be right there in the Christmas spirit.

I find that impressive, somehow, but have yet to put my finger on why. Maybe it's the growing presence of a community identity, something that didn't seem to exist in summer but grows every day now. Maybe it's just that I've gotten to know the city well and am noticing the details. Whatever the case may be, it's the holiday season in Bulgaria, and Silistra seems about as ready for it as Sofia was when I visited it last weekend.

Lights lace the town center and store windows, although houses are still bare. There's finally a thin film of frozen snow on the ground, not enough to qualify for a white Christmas, but there are still two and a half weeks. I haven't seen any department store santas, but that doesn't mean there won't be.

Most of all, the students are into it. My slackest class last week got into singing Christmas carols, and to get through the last ten minutes, I even managed to pull all twelve days of Christmas out of the deep recesses of my memory. One girl, a singer, left her usual seat in the back and hopped quickly up front when I started writing the lyrics on the board. They all really ate it up. Even mentioned it to Vanya, my counterpart English teacher, in her next class with them.

The gloves are beginning to come out and snowballs, scraped together off the park lawn, are getting thrown lamely across the street toward the school.

I'm going to go up to the orphanage this weekend and do whatever I can to pull off an early Christmas there, since I won't have another free weekend until the New Year. I'm thinking of just going as a Santa, bringing them whatever goodies I can get together, and take their wishes. We'll see how that turns out, I'm sure there will be pictures.

Of course--and here's the problem--if I do a pre-Christmas Santa, how do I not disappoint them when the big day arrives? I could leave 70 or 80 candies with the director up there to be dispersed on the morning, I suppose that would work. But it's something I'm going to need to make sure I have nailed down before I go.

2003-12-06T09:01:00.000+02:00

A SELFISH ENTRY, BUT AN ENTRY NONETHELESS
I've been thinking about putting up a kind of written cultural time capsule on the site. Something to the point that I can look back on in a year or so to remember what I was watching, listening to, and reading in the heady days of December 2003. Some may find it interesting, others may not. But here, unapologetically is...

WHAT'S GOING INTO ROB'S HEAD? DECEMBER 2003

Most of the books I've read (some for the second or third time) since I came to Bulgaria in April:
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay--Chabon
The Citadel--Cronin (On the front it says it's now a Masterpiece Theater movie. That fits it really well.)
Travels With Charley--Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby--Fitzgerald
The Thin Man--Hammett
The Way Some People Die--MacDonald
Uncle Tom's Cabin--Stowe (The fact that this has been banned in some libraries absolutely baffles me)
Tender is the Night--Fitzgerald
A Man in Full--Wolfe (The best 700+ pager I've yet read)
The Perfect Storm--Junger
The Sun Also Rises--Hemingway (Can't get enough of the greatest party novel ever)
The Grapes of Wrath--Steinbeck
The Barbarians Are Coming--Louie
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe--Adams
What's Wrong With Dorfman?--Blumenthal
Hannibal--Harris (Hannibal Lector is Sideshow Bob in this book. No question about it.)
The Once and Future King--White (Probably the best read thus far)
A Farewell to Arms--Hemingway (Hemingway started it as a downer, and by God he would end it as one, too)
The Salmon of Doubt--Adams
Oliver Twist--Dickens (Turns out Oliver is the long lost cousin of Charles Darnay, Ebenezer Scrooge's much younger half-brother, and a personal friend of David Copperfield's former roommate. Who knew?)

The book I'm now reading:
Tortilla Flat--Steinbeck

Some of the movies I've seen:
Matrix 2+3
Terminator 3
X-Men 2
Bad Boys 2
Charlie's Angels 2
2 Fast 2 Furious (When's "2 Pointy 2 Breaky" coming out?)
Johnny English
(What an absolutely terrible movie summer it was. When you line it all up like that...)
Pirates of the Caribbean (The best of a bad crop. But still pretty good)
The Italian Job (Nice little caper movie)
Dumb and Dumberer (Okay, I'm stopping this right now)

Videos
Favorite video at the moment that no else here seems to like all that much:
Outkast--Hey Ya

Video that all the girls say is all the guys' favorite (giggle, giggle):
Kylie Minogue--Slow

Favorite videos from artists that I'd never heard of, but guess I probably should have:
Lene Marlin--You Weren't There
Texas--Carnival of Girls
Fun Lovin' Criminals--Various Videos
Paul Van Dyke--Nothing but You
Propeller Heads--History Repeating

Video that most guys really like for the “giggle, giggle” reason:
Dido--White Flag (also “Life for Rent” for that matter, but that’s a newer single)

Favorite techno, outside of “Nothing but You”:
Chemical Brothers f/ Flaming Lips--Golden Path

Favorite rock:
Limp Bizkit--Eat You Alive (There! I said it! I like the song and I love the video. What are you going to do about it?)

Close second for favorite rock:
Evanesence--Going Under

Favorite German:
Scooter (But that’s really the top of a pretty rotten barrell)

Favorite Bulgarian:
Oh, please don’t make me choose. Probably Slavi, but that’s just because I saw him live, I suppose.

Favorite video of an artist whose country of origin I still don’t really know:
Moloko--Forever More

Favorite group to make fun of mercilessly with other volunteers:
Black Eyed Peas (But all they want is to stop “the Bloods, and the Crips, and the KKK!” They are after all, just a bunch of “conscious cats” who didn’t want to release a song about “ugly people” after 9/11. Oh, just shut up, shut up.)

Favorite Music Channel:
Euro VH1. All videos ever released get played here. The Police are singing “Wrapped Around Your Finger” right now. It’s good stuff)

I think that about covers it. If I think of anything else I’ll put it down later.

2003-12-04T15:04:00.000+02:00

THE SILISTRA SPORTS REPORT
Tuesday, one the girls in my eleventh class approached me after class and told me that the girls’ volleyball team would be playing at PMG that night. “Would I come out and support the team?” she asked. Of course, my first thought was “There’s a girls’ volleyball team here?” but that thought passed quickly and I told her that I would come.

So, that night, after my regular visit to the internet club, I walked to the gym at PMG. PMG’s is probably the best gym in Silistra. It has a good solid floor, 4 baskets, and a decent amount of sitting space around the court. The first time I had visited I was playing a pick-up basketball game after the city’s teams had finished for the night. When I arrived before the second half of the last game, I’d estimate there were about 30 people there watching. I can’t remember who was playing that night, because I had been so taken aback by the fact that there was any kind of city-wide basketball at all.

I bring that up because the language school’s girls’ team (EG) was playing PMG Tuesday night in a first round game of a small tournament. As soon as I walked in, the girls noticed me and cheered and kind of clapped. I felt honored, but later realized that it was only half because of who I was. Turns out I was one of two, maybe three people from EG there supporting the team. More on that later.

I walked across the court to the single row of benches along the side of the court opposite the team benches. The PMG crowd had already gathered and filled the benches so I stood next to the bench on the EG side of the court. When I entered, the teams were in their pre-game discussions. The game started shortly after I took my position.

It wasn’t what you would call pretty. It was entertaining, worth going to. But no. No, it wasn’t a good-looking game. EG played pretty well considering that they didn’t seem to have a girl who could get both hands above the net at the same time. Neither did PMG for that matter, but PMG had an artillery division when it came to serving. They had a few aces that dropped hard and fast on the sidelines. It didn’t help that the ceiling in the gym is low, and most of the bumps off the harder hits went straight up and high. A ball into the ceiling was side-out. Anyway, that night it was three blow-outs and good night. Dejected looks for EG all around.

After the game I went up to the girls to congratulate them on an entertaining game, and before I even made it to the group they gave me grins and told me not to say anything. I gave a shrug, thanked them for the invitation, said that I had had fun, and that the match-despite the loss-had been entertaining. They thanked me for coming and told me to come the next night, when they would win. I said that I’d come, of course, and wished them good night.

A day of teaching later, I cut my Bulgarian lesson a bit short so that I could make it to the game on time. I arrived at about the same time I had the night before, and took the same spot next to the benches. It was a colder night, and everyone in the not-really-heated gym had their thick coats on. Fortunately, the games went EG’s way and they won three close games to sweep the team from-well, I never did figure out what school they playing-but it was a well-played victory nevertheless, and they were all a little more receptive to my congratulations after the game.

I walked out happy, they walked out happy, and three-quarters of the audience stayed in the gym to watch the next game. I was, again, one of maybe four or five non-participants from the school watching the game. PMG was up next and by the time EG’s game was over, there were about 60 or 70 students in the gym. This confirmed that, as rumored, volleyball is more popular than basketball in Bulgaria. But it didn’t explain why no one from the language school really bothered to come to either game.

I think this might be another of those things I’m going to want to focus my energy on. People need to come to these games. And not just students either. During the second game, I noticed that apart from the coaches and referees, I was probably the only person over twenty in the gym.
Sports are a great way to get the community involved in local schools, and since there aren’t bands or orchestras at the schools not dedicated to music, sports in Bulgaria are really the only way for the community to get involved in the schools’ activities. Sports might just be something schools should advertise and not leave up to word-of-mouth from students.

Of course, I say this as if it applies to all of Bulgaria. It doesn’t. In the smaller towns, if a school is lucky enough to have a gym, it usually has no room for an audience and no sports program to go along with it. As in most cases, Silistra is just big enough to have all the nice things that go along with a big town. I’m lucky in that, I suppose. But it also makes my job more about improvement than creation. Many volunteers are the only people around to coach their teams, making it pretty easy to get involved. But here I feel like I have to show my worth in order to be part of the circle.

Fortunately, coming to two games seems to be enough at this point to label me a booster, if not a die-hard fan. So I think things are off to a good start.

2003-12-03T19:48:00.000+02:00

LIGHT POSTING THIS WEEK, EXPECT MORE OF THE SAME

Well, if you must know...I'm approaching my first blogaversary and want to give the old girl a makeover in time for the big event. It'll mean a new address, a new look, a new host (Thanks Owen), and new pages if I can get them ready in time. Unfortunately, it also means that most of my time in the internet club is spent tinkering with the new template.

So, to sum up, there will be a new post tomorrow about girl's volleyball here in Silistra and sports in Bulgaria in general. Tune in at the usual time to get that update. Until then, please accept the above photo of the Thanksgiving group as a peace offerering. See you tomorrow.

2003-12-01T19:47:00.000+02:00

STARTING OVER ON A NEW WEEK
Coldplay's "The Scientist" has been running through my head today, or at least a few lines from its chorus, since I can't really remember any of the other words to the song:

Nobody said it was easy,
No one ever said it would be this hard,
Take me back to the start.

Now, the song's about starting over in a relationship where the singer (usually Chris Martin, but it could be anybody really) overthought everything and kind of ruined it all. While this is certainly applicable to certain areas of my life, it really isn't what kept the chorus running through my head all day.

Sunday, following an incredible Thanksgiving Saturday, I raised what I thought was an interesting question. I asked whoever was around at the moment if these fantastic weekends we've been having make it easier, harder, or about the same going back to class on Monday. While everybody around answered "harder," I said that, for me, it made things easier. No matter how hard each consecutive week is, a weekend will always be there in the near future, giving us all a chance to vent, hang out, and have fun. Hell, sometimes the weeks are pretty fun themselves, they're a grab bag, really. I never know what to expect Sunday evening.

So that's why I've come to accept Mondays as a new start to each cycle; a cycle that gets easier as the months unfold. There are challenges pretty much every day, but as long as I have a chance to take those challenges and talk about them at some point in the future, maybe bringing solutions if I've found them, life gets easier and there's a better a chance of a week becoming fun again. I've finally figured out that things will be hard, occasionally nigh impossible, but if I learn from it, I can take everything back to the beginning every Monday and rework it, at least to a certain extent.

What does that mean in the context of the day? Well, it means that I had to shout a couple of times today and act good and mean, but I got more done than I did in my classes last Monday, and the kids were better behaved. I checked all the workbooks, did an overview of a test next week, and ran through a quick lesson for AIDS Day, since it's an important subject and I wanted to keep the day pretty lax on testable material since the eights will have a big, giant test in their other English class tomorrow.

Brings up an interesting subject. The eights are pretty confused at this point in their lives about what they can do to prevent AIDS. One suggested the pill, and another suggested the pull-out method. I corrected them both, and made sure they knew about their real options, the best being abstinence. As I've learned though, one day of teaching does not a huge impact make, so I've kind of made a memo to myself to repeat some of these lessons when the opportunity arises in the future.

As progressive as Silistra seems to be (AIDS Day was pretty well covered city-wide, where other cities would need a little prodding from volunteers), the post-communist values vacuum my colleagues are always talking about still sucks hard here. Kids take most of their lessons from TV, and parents expect schools to train their kids in values just as they did under the communists. It's a generational thing, so it'll take a while to bring in better values than those coming out of Britney and Co. But it'll happen someday, and I'm glad I'm here to help it on its way a little.

[Grinding transition gears until they shatter in order to save a little internet club time]

Thanksgiving went delightfully well. About eleven volunteers gathered in Pleven Friday evening. Before the big gathering, I went with Kate (Pleven resident and incredible hostess) to a couple of her classes to make things flow a little easier there. Following that, a few of us went to Pleven's Billa, a large Western-type grocery store (Jeff: "So Kate lives in America...") and the eaters bought a snack to tide ourselves over until dinner while the others did some Thanksgiving dinner shopping. Later, we all went and ate at a great Chinese place and got our venting (or our venting about other people's venting) out of our systems at the dinner table. Then we got to sleep at some reasonable hour after a big meal. Day one ended with full stomachs and relieved heads.

Thanksgiving Day (observed) began whenever it was we all decided to wake up. Some of us took a walk and, since it was a cold, drizzly day, threw around a football instead of playing what would be a sloppy and muddy game. Chance, Sharad, Jeff and I sat in a downtown cafe with a football in hand and scarves around our necks. We talked about life and literature and India and we all felt incredibly haughty and preppy.

On the way back to Kate's, I bought a kilo of mandarins on a whim in the pazar and shared them with everybody. Mandarins are absolute candy in Bulgaria, you unwrap them and pop the bits in your mouth (the same process everywhere in the world, I suppose). We went through the bag pretty quickly, but it was just a small part of the appettizer spread laid out on the table that afternoon. There was bread and butter and spreadbale cheeses and wafer cookies and wine. Everything we needed to get through the afternoon and arrive at the turkey.

We passed the time by watching a strange HBO double feature of The Shipping News and Best in Show. Also by playing Scrabble and Yahtzee. It was only the second time I'd played Scrabble here in Bulgaria, and I'm clearly rusty, but it was also good fun. I started a horribly wrong trend with the fake word "vike" after Minnesota native Ryan substantiated it. Jeff, then, at some point played "saep," or "peas" spelled backwards, which we grudgingly accepted. Then it got all out of control as Chance used his fake word option to play "synj" on a triple word score. I can't really remember his fake definition. It was all out of control, or at least as out of control as a game of Scrabble is likely to get.

Dinner had the requisite turkey (one of the few Billa had, apparently) front and center, with all the usual bits surrounding it. Although there wasn't any sweet potato or cranberry sauce to be had in Bulgaria, we made do with casserole and squash with walnuts. There was also mashed potato and gravy and well-made stuffing. I'm not sure I could have had a better meal anywhere in the world. It was incredibly well-made, in fact. A meal only Peace Corps volunteers could pull off.

Since I had nothing to do with the creation (not wanting to pack an already crowded kitchen with what meager services I could have provided), I eagerly volunteered to do the cleaning. I took care of the dinner's dishes right after the last plate was set down on the floor. Family tradition, I suppose. Whoever it is that doesn't do the cooking should do the cleaning. Seems like a solid enough rule, and I was willing to stand by it.

Over pumpkin bread and the last of the wine, we talked about life in general and our plans for Christmas, having forgotten about school following the discussion the night before. We all went to sleep one-by-one, and when we felt the time was about right. The last thing on the TV that night was a dubbed version of Battlefield Earth, and we used our last powers of sarcasm and irony to make fun of the horrible make-up and the fact that not a single shot in the movie is level.

Morning came, people began to leave, we played Uno, and I asked my question about the weekends. Jeff hadn't quite figured out his travel plans well enough so he and I, both living in the same mostly inaccessible region, took an afternoon bus back to Silistra. Jeff took the couch at my place and left on a bus for his small town of Isperih this morning at 6:30 and the weekend was over.

Most of us will be gathering in Sofia this weekend for various important reasons and we'll talk, play basketball, and have another fun weekend in the midst of carrying out the toughest job any one of us will ever love.

2003-11-27T15:07:00.000+02:00

WE GATHER TOGETHER...
Students ask me all the time why my favorite season is winter, and I usually say something about how the snow makes everything look crisp and new, and how there are new things to do, and the joy of regularly having reason to down warm beverages. Things like that. But this week the real reason finally hit me. My three favorite holidays come right on top of the other. I'd say that's about as good a reason as any.

Christmas, is of course, number one. The combination of it being a family and friends holiday is pretty powerful. Although it's best celebrated with the family, a group of friends can have a lot of fun celebrating Christmas before, after, or--if necessary--during the actual day. It really is the ultimate Swiss Army holiday. Whatever you want it to do for you, Christmas is there.

Thanksgiving though, is a little different. Without the family around, it just doesn't feel right, at least as far as I'm concerned. In 22 years of living, I don' think I've never been away from some family member for Thanksgiving. I suppose while they were always on hand, ready to give something to be thankful for, it made the whole thanking thing very easy. But here I am in Bulgaria, and I'm still thankful as all get-out for my parents bouncing around Alaska and having the time of their lives empty-nesting it. And for my sister doing what she has to do to take care of the animals she loves. And for my Grandmas, who both support me here, even though they're both still a little wary of the whole internet thing. Oh, and Barkley, I'm awfully thankful Barkley's still enough of a puppy to eat snow when it first hits the ground. However, as nice as it would be to go back to the stately living room on Lake Street, I'm here in Bulgaria, aren't I? So I have to dig a little bit deeper and pull out some more things to be thankful for.

Well, I'm thankful for the greatest 41 people a guy could come through Chicago to Bulgaria with, and also the Americans I've met in Bulgaria. I can imagine situations where the people I would be with here would help the country in driving me quite literally insane. But these volunteers, these glorious, proud, hard-working folks, are the greatest group of people with whom I've ever had the privilege to work. I'll be spending Thanksgiving with people I've known for a little over seven months, and already I can't think of a better substitute for family. I'm pretty damn thankful for them.

My friends back home in the States (and one in Russia, and one in Tasmania), have kept me going well here, too. Staying in touch with them has gotten me through the rougher days here, and I'm lucky to have friends as supportive, brilliant, and reliable as them. Not a day goes by without my thinking of the fun times back in California and Alaska, and those memories help a lot.

My Bulgarian colleagues here in Silistra have been exceptional, and even though we all went through the same confusion at the beginning of the year, they were always more than willing to help out. It was all well-appreciated.

I'd have to really scrape low, but I know deep down I'm happy to have the students I do. Even though the 8th classes needed some reminding about the ramifications of being noisy little grunts today, they were pretty good for a Thursday. They also mostly remembered to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving without my prompting them. I thought that was pretty impressive. They're a good bunch of kids, and I'm glad to be teaching them.

So, um, coming down off of planet Cornball, where were we? Oh yeah, favorite holiday #3...New Years. And, honestly, although it's nice, a guy really doesn't need his family around for that one. Distant third, really.

Still, when it gets cold, the best holidays come out to shine. And even though it's not technically winter yet, it sure as heck feels like it, and there's no better time than winter to say something chessy like "Happy Thanksgiving Everyone."

2003-11-26T17:49:00.000+02:00

THE FIRST BLOW HAS BEEN STRUCK
For those who think I've done nothing but complain lately, today saw triumph. In the battle against undisciplined eighth graders my opening salvo went through the wall of noise and tore it down to nothing. Leaving behind pretentious metaphors for a second, I actually did something to shut down the obnoxious noise today! I'm happy.

I was going to just slam both eighth classes with assigned seating. That was my intention right up to the sound of the bell. But when I got to class I realized something I had previously only suspected: Assigned seating would only anger them and make them yell to their friends over the two or three desks between them.

So, on the fly, I made it all a game. Michael, a B-12, had at IST introduced a reward-based point system of his that seemed to be working with his students. If they were good, they got points. If they were bad they lost them. There were a variety of rules for losing and gaining points. I had seen two problems with his system that kept me from getting it going right away: For one thing, it was complicated and would take a week I didn't have to completely explain to the students. More importantly though, it lacked the crucial "guillotine" factor. There was nothing hanging over the students' heads if they failed. Under Mike's system, if they were good they got a movie day after getting a certain number of points. If they were bad, no movie, but they could go right on misbehaving and talking in class.

In a couple minutes of re-planning after my fateful realization, I took Mike's system, simplified it, and added something I'd gotten right from my parents, the choice. I told them that we would all be playing a game, this brightened them up and got them all excited. I lined them all up at the blackboard and then seated them the way I would have them if there were assigned seats. By the time I had finished, they pretty well realized what had happened and most were complaining that this wasn't any game. I told them that it was, and a very long game at that. Then I explained the rules.

The students start clean, no points, and have a clear choice for a path to follow. Every time I say "quiet down," and they don't immediately shut up, I go to the board and put up a hash mark, 1 point. If they get 50 points between now and the end of the year, they would have to sit this way, then I'd come up with an even more severe punishment--like push-ups to begin every day--and hang that over them. They all looked at their new neighbors and most everybody quieted down right then. Then I gave them the choice. If they're good, and stay below 50 points, they'll get a movie day every few months. For example, I'll now write "MOVIE DAY: FEBRUARY 1st" at the top of the board next to their point total every day.

Then one of the students asked if there was a way they could get points back if they were good. "Um, sure," I replied. Remebering one of Mike's "good" rules, I said that if everyone brings in their journal and completed homework on Monday (our big homework day), I would subtract two points from their total. I'd also subtract a point or two for what I thought was exceptionally good behavior. "Everybody has to bring in homework? Ne e chestno." one of the students said. "No," the student behind her said, "it's fair. It's fair." And the rest of the class agreed.

The immediate result? Absolute silence and superb behavior the rest of the day. Working on the day's lesson, I told them to take two minutes to do an activity. Shortly after those words, I clicked my pen to write something down. The sound of the pen echoed and boomed around the room. The dead quiet would have been scary and ominous if it weren't so pleasing. When I noticed that they were all finished, I walked to the center of the room, asked if someone wanted to read the first part of the exercise, and hands across half the room shot up.

I've never been quite so happy leaving the classroom. If there's been a personal victory here in Bulgaria, this was it. We'll have to see how it goes in the long term, but I have a feeling that as long as I can threaten the students with a hash mark, they'll be good. Only time will tell.

2003-11-25T15:52:00.000+02:00

A NEW RECORD IS SET!
Even though there are 6 writers credited on IMDB for the immortal Bad Boys II, let's take a look at the first meeting between screenplay writers Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl:

Ron entered the room at about 3 in the afternoon, and flopped down onto the couch, kicking his feet up onto a coffee table. Jerry sat behind his shiny black desk and puffed quietly on a cigar. He rotated a glass of bourbon in his left hand.

"Afternoon, Jerry!" Ron beamed when Jerry took the cigar out of his mouth. "You ready to get down to brass tacks on this thing?"

Jerry put the cigar back into his mouth and puffed a cloud over toward Ron. "Sure. What's "your vision" for this?"

"Well," Ron said as he lowered his feet and leaned toward the desk. "You know how the funniest scene in the first Bad Boys flick was that scene in the dead guy's house? You know, Martin Lawrence came in all 'we're here to borrow some sugar!' and they sniffed and realized that there was a dead guy in the house. Then Martin Lawrence almost got sick all over the place. You remember that one?"

"I sure do Ron." Jerry let go of the bourbon and planted both of his elbows onto his ink blotter. "But I don't remember it being the best scene in the film. I remember it being a long, drawn out one-joke piece of bs that could've been over in a minute or two. Gotta admit it was funny when Will Smith said 'don't be alarmed, we're ne-groes' though. That made me chuckle."

"See," Ron's eyes were lighting up. "That's what I'm talking about. And haven't you always thought that dead bodies are funny? I mean, in general."

"Um, no."

"Work with me here. I mean, I've always loved autopsy scenes, where the police reach into dead bodies and pull out stuff. That scene in the middle of Silence of the Lambs? Where they pull the coccoon out of the fat chick? Hee-larious." Ron took a breath. "And I've always gotten a kick out of coroner's vans. The scene with a coroner's van absolutely made The Chase. When those corpses started falling out. I nearly cried. Cried, Jerry!"

"I'm not following you here. Do Americans like dead bodies falling out of trucks?"

"Screw the Americans! Eastern Europeans'll eat it up!"

Jerry leaned back in his chair and took a long pull of his cigar. When he had finished he said "Well, why didn't you say so, Ron? We've been looking for better worldwide sales. Let's make it happen. I picture the last third of the flick one big, long corpse joke."

Ron lept up. "Now you're speaking my language, boy! And you know, Jerry, I've always wanted to write a really long ass movie. I mean one that'll make audiences think 'Good God, this is a long ass movie!' Epic like, you know?"

"Go on."

"Well, even if we have to make maybe half, hell, three-quarters of the movie pointless gibberish, I say we do it. Just to make a really long movie." Ron was pacing the room now, his vision leaping before his eyes.

"Ron. Make it so. Do we want to get together on the weekend to pound this thing out?"

"Ahh. I want to golf this weekend. Let's get everything down tomorrow at lunch, and if we need to add stuff we'll just wing it, huh?"

"Wiser words were never spoken, sir." Jerry poured another glass of bourbon as he spoke and handed it to Ron. "Wiser words? Never spoken. Cheers."

I'm pretty sure that that's what had to have happened. It couldn't have gone down any other way.

Before I get into the heart of the drubbing. Let me make one thing clear. I am not one to easily call a movie terrible. I thought Battlefield Earth was entertaining. Mostly because it was laughably bad, but I still had a good time watching it. I've enjoyed both Matrix movies this year for what they were, entertaining fluff. I'm a long-time fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, where a guy and two robots make fun of the worst movies made. I respect the art of poor film-making. A bad action movie can be just as good the first time as any classic if it's comically wretched enough. "Entertain me" is all I ask of most movies. Was I expecting the long lost sequel to Scarface in Bad Boys II? Nay. I just wanted a good time after a long day.

I think what makes Bad Boys 2 the worst movie I have ever seen (and this includes movies from Mystery Science Theater 3000) is that it tries, and desperately fails, to be a comedy. The corpse joke thing? It really happened. Nearly every one of the last dozen or so scenes features some bit of "comedy" involving a dead body. DID WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S DO NOTHING? Heven't we realized by now that, because they are inert, lifeless objects (and usually meant to be respected) dead bodies are not good comedic fare? How the hell long does it take?

Beyond the failure of the comedy is this one small fact: There is not one scene--one scene--in the entire movie that couldn't be cut in order to make the movie better by virtue of not running so long. There are at least 4 car chases in the movie, all looking exactly like the last. Gun fights run so long they lose any minimal suspense they came in with. The movie is dull. It was by no means an entertaining experience, and I regret spending over two hours of my life on it. There, that's out of my system now.

Today was a little better on the front than yesterday. The kids were reasonably well-behaved and I did what I wanted, when I wanted to do it. Made for a relaxing day, all around. Now, if only I could get the horrible memories of it out of my head.

2003-11-24T17:46:00.000+02:00

THE FIRST DAY BACK. A CATHARTIC HARANGUE.
Okay, maybe I didn't quite expect it to be this way, but I certainly hoped it would:

I would enter the room. The students, all in or near their desks, would turn their heads gracefully toward the door. Upon sight of me, their faces would brighten and through smiles they would chirp "Hello, Mr. Young. My it's good to have you back!" I would trot merrily over to the desk, place my backpack on it, and have a good chat with them about how splendid their week had been. Before we began the lesson, we would go through each of their workbooks and check to see if they had done all of the homework I had assigned for the week in Ruse. They would, beaming--of course--and coming one at a time, bring their workbooks to the desk, where I would, with my own broad smile, check each and every one of them. I would give them each a six because they're such intelligent, good-willing little rascals, and then I would explain to them the course of the week's lessons, answer a few questions, and send them on their happy smiling way at the end of forty-five gloriously well-spent minutes. My God sir, it would be heaven.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Earlier in the day, a teacher working with my first eighth class had warned me that they had only gotten more evil in my time away, but I was skeptical. They had always been at least managable. "We'll see." I had said.

Coming up the stairs from the teacher's room, I ran into a group of five or six students standing nowhere near the classroom. Ushering them toward it with the book in my hand, I opened the door and was instantly pounded by the insane ravings of Sean Paul and Beyonce singing "Baby Boy" out of the demon box (um, cassette player).

"MR. YOUNG. I'M SORRY BUT I FORGOT WE HAD CLASS TODAY AND I DIDN'T BRING MY WORKBOOK." One of the little banshees screamed into my ear. I think the headache began right about there.

Three more devils flanked me and in an earnest effort to look genuinely sorry (the filthy liars) complained that they too had duped themselves into believing there would be no class today and had not brought their homework.

Without a word, I waded over to the tape player, which some student mercifully shut off before I arrived, and put my backpack on the desk. The screams and yells of the class began to wash over me as the group appealing to my rapidly disappearing forgiving side huddled around me and began to show me what meager parts of the homework they had done. I told them all that they could bring their workbooks in the next day and receive a slightly lower grade, but I was apparently speaking gibberish and they would not acknowledge me.

After about a minute of staying uselessly cool and calm, I rose from the chair, walked to the center of the room, and at the top of my lungs, yelled for the entire room to be quiet. It worked for a brief moment, but it really didn't get the annoying mosquitos flying around me and near the blackboard, still screaming at me in Bulgarian, to sit down. I told them all to sit. Nothing. Then I wacked them each on the head with a notebook and that finally got their attention. They went to their desks and sat, for a moment, giving me their attention.

I began to lay down my plan for the day.

"Mr. Young?" One of the children of the night howled without raising her hand. "We've just had a free week and don't want to work today. Can we have a fun day and listen to Sean Paul and Beyonce sing?"

"No."

Moans and wretching sobs as if I had dumped boiling oil over the lot of them--a thought that had, at that point, passed through my head at least once. I tried once again to lay out my vision for the day.

"You just don't like Sean Paul." The afore-mentioned child of darkness pouted. "We all want a fun day. It's been a long day and we're all very tired."

Ignoring the least intelligent words I had ever heard and using all of my available patience and will, I finally got the class into some kind of order and shut up the evil voice demanding the migraine-inducing club anthem. The students finally began to work on the assignment of the day and, one-by-one, came to me to either show me their homework or--once again--plead their case. At the end of the period (It took that long to get through every workbook), the last students comforted me by admitting that the class had been "very bad today."

When the bell rang, the eternal champion of "Baby Boy" ran to the player and pressed play. Since I was still answering questions and explaining things to some of the students, I suffered through the song and, to get something out of it, stopped it at the end to explain some of the lyrics to the students.

You'd think I had just rammed a hot poker through each of their stomachs. The screams were ear-piercing and long lasting. I quickly explained the lyrics to any students who cared and got out of the room. Tomorrow will, apparently, be the first battle of a long war. If they want one, they've got it.

The second eighth class of the day wound up somewhere in the Earthly range between these two dramatically different visions, and, as such, was pretty tame and, thankfully, not worth writing about. After school, I talked basketball with some of the guys on the team. That was nice and relaxing, and a good way of cooling down a little after the day.

My lesson in Bulgarian, as always, brought me down to peace still further, and my time in the internet club will hopefully level things out completely. After a little escapism with Bad Boys 2 later, I'll arm myself well for the day ahead. Seats will be assigned and a new battle plan sketched out. Today was absolutely unacceptable, and it will not happen again.

2003-11-23T18:26:00.000+02:00

WAIT. I HAVE TO GO TO WORK AGAIN?
Yesterday's post was supposed to go up, well, yesterday. But it didn't make it because I didn't quite make it to the internet club. Oh well, it's there today so scroll on down and have a look. While I don't have all that much to say today ("It's good to be home!" sums it all up pretty well), I'm here and might as well say something.

I slept in today and then went shopping. I picked up everything I needed to stock the fridge, and noted that Bad Boys 2 was playing at one of our theaters this week. Now, I haven't heard the greatest things about that movie. In fact, I've heard a lot of bad things. But I have a special place in my heart for the first movie, it's one of those movies that, despite being pretty bad by all indicators, is eminently rewatchable. I will see Bad Boys 2 this week, probably tomorrow, and I will enjoy it. So there.

Yeah, um, I guess that's pretty much it. Shopping was pretty uneventful. I asked for what I wanted and the woman ran around the store getting it. It's almost fun if you don't have the pressure of a dozen people standing behind you. That was the event of the day. It's been a calm, peaceful, and uneventful Sunday.

And even though tomorrow's Monday, it's good to be home.

2003-11-22T18:10:00.000+02:00

THE HORROR, THE HORROR

The events of the past week, will, of course, be detailed later. First, I have to describe the opening events of a crisis. The coup in Georgia? No, that's covered elsewhere, and Bulgarians could really care less about Georgians--or anybody but Americans and Bulgarians really. This crisis is decidedly more personal. I came home today at about 4, unpacked, and sat down on the couch to unwind before dinner and a trip to the internet club. I flipped on the TV, turned to Cartoon Network, and sat back to enjoy some mindless humor. Now, as far as Peace Corps volunteers in Bulgaria go, I have a good selection of TV stations. Euro MTV, VH1, CNN, Eurosport, DW, they're all there. Cartoon Network has always been something I can depend on when I need to not think. When a day has left me so tired the only solution is to laugh it all off. Today, disaster struck.

My cable feed of Cartoon Network has finally gone completely French.

I saw the warning signs earlier. The ads were all in French, and the credit sequences as well. But, miraculously perhaps, the shows had all featured the usual English voices. Now it's all changed: Dexter speaks with a horrid French screech; Mojo Jojo does his thing, but it's all in French. It's horrible, and made for a terrible homecoming.

Oh, wait, I'm a Peace Corps volunteer. One who happens to live in Europe and get an amazing array of quality television. Maybe I ought to stop complaining. Where were we?

Oh yes, I've just gotten back from Ruse (or Rousse. However the heck it's transliterated. It's pronounced "Roo-Say," with an emphasis on the "Roo." I've always been fond of "Ruse" for getting that point across), where all the volunteers who got here in April, the B-13s, got together to talk, complain, eat, drink, plan ahead, and take a week-long break from teaching. On the menu for the first three days was project development. We all worked on this with our Bulgarian counterparts, so they were by our side until Wednesday afternoon.

Some of the interesting bits out of those days were the ongoing discussions of volunteer guilt over abandoning our counterparts at the end of the day. Somehow, the facts that they're Bulgarians, in their own country, and among their own colleagues, were not enough to sway many of us from the belief that we were somehow obliged to entertain them. To her credit, my counterpart--Vanya, never let me feel too bad as she always had a plan for the evenings, most of the time before I did. We also worked really well together and with the other people in our group of six. We designed a theoretical project to rehabilitate a local sports facility and program. For our closing presentation we made a rousing push for youth sports. Each of us read about particular values to be gained from sports while the rest did a stomp/clap (whump, whump, clap. The backbeat from "We Will Rock You"). The Bulgarians had a hard time picking it up at first, but managed to get it down perfectly for the presentation.

That lasted through lunchtime Wednesday and the counterparts left that afternoon or the next morning. That night, a few volunteers went to go see American Pie 3. Well, if there was ever a source of mindless humor, that movie was it. One laugh-out-loud scene, and the occasional snicker or chuckle the rest of the way. Not as good as the first two, but while that may sound like pretty faint praise, it's worth seeing if you want to see where the envelope sits at the moment. It's been pushed pretty far. The slightest reason to see it comes from Sean William Scott, who really channels Belushi pretty well in this one. He has his act down well.

Wednesday afternoon and Thursday were spent in TEFL training courses, where B-12s and PC people taught us new ways to keep the hell spawn (err, students) under control in class. Tricks, philosophies, and boondoggles were tossed at us, and I might try a few, but compared with some of the horror stories I heard this week from other volunteers, my students are angels. Perspective always works miracles.

Thursday morning also saw the arrival of the Peace Corps "in general" folks. Carl, the country director, came for the day and night, and volunteers representing the community development, environmental, and youth development programs all came for the day. We split into groups and had the opportunity to listen to a presentation from one of the programs. I chose youth development, seeing as I hadn't really been satisfied by an explanation of just what they--the newest program in Bulgaria--do here, or met many of them. I came away incredibly impressed and optimistic about my chances for using what they do for my own ends at the local orphanage.

Things like Halloween night at the orphanage are all well and good, but also incredibly random, unfocused, and draining. I figure it would be more productive to be doing something, well, productive with the kids. I had a chat with a couple of the new volunteers to see what they thought or what their programs did in regards to orphans nationally, and we managed to at least get some things out in the open. Unfortunately, Peace Corps hadn't quite dug deep enough to give them rooms in the hotel so they could stay beyond the afternoon. Chats over meals are where Bulgarians get most of their business done, as a counterpart or two reminded me earlier in the week, and it was a pity we didn't get so much as a dinner to talk about life, orphanages, etc. But, well, these sacrifices have to be made occasionally, I suppose. There's always a next time.

Carl, however, did stay the night and told me of a beautiful place in Sofia where he plays basketball on Sundays with locals and occasionally U.S. Marines. Carl does rather enjoy dangling carrots. Fortunately, this gives me one more regularly occurring reason to get down to Sofia, a seven hour, 15 leva bus ride away. Can't have too many reasons to get down to Sofia.

Friday was language day, where I learned and reviewed a couple of new tenses and learned a little about the history of Ruse and Bulgaria. It was a long day to finish up a long week, but we had a great farewell dinner at a local tavern and spent the rest of the night dancing and chatting at a nearby club.

Morning came, and we all crawled out of bed to check out and go home. I caught a 2:30 bus here, and well, I guess that catches us all up, now doesn't it? Since I'm back in the happy confines of Silistra, expect more regular reports throughout the week. Until then, photos of the two most disturbingly placed mannequins in storefront history.

2003-11-18T18:29:00.000+02:00

THE BLANK
Not much to report. O! How I wish there was something to report. We've had two full days of seminars where we've been planning potential projects for our towns. Once Vanya (my counterpart) and I get a project solidified, the first thing I'll do is post a page about it detailing ways it can be supported. It will be part of that big facelift I've been promising this site and haven't yet stepped to the plate on. The seminars have been useful in an abstract and theoretical way. Vanya and I keep trying to whisper back and forth about practical issues with our project, but we keep getting hushed. We take the moments where we can get them. Tomorrow, we'll make presentations about our theoretical, nearly fictional, projects and everybody keeps demanding something special out of me.

Since this internet club's connection is attempting to suck an elephant through a coffee stirrer, I can't go back and check the archives in the time I have here. But at some point in the past, July 10th probably, I detail the events surrounding my counterpart conference at the end of training and the little song I sang there. Everybody has been, quite seriously, asking me when I will sing again and telling me that this presentation will be the perfect time and place to do something great. I'm forced to tell them that, despite my desire to entertain the volunteers and their counterparts, the last song was something like an event of the moment. I saw an opportunity, a small gap of opportunity was suggested, and I tucked the ball and hit the gap running. Turned out well enough, but even though there may be (as Letterman says) no off on the genius switch, there are times when that genius lightbulb is most appreciated (and for Letterman that happens to be around 11:30 most nights). On short notice, having everybody on the edge of their seats is just bound to lead to their disappointment. And since I'm also limited by the none-too-subtle fact that I have to be productive with this seminar, and am working with a group who may not be able to improvise new lyrics to old songs with the timeliness, things just can't be as magical as when I sang that song from Mary Poppins to a room full of people expecting a rather serious presentation.

Or I could just be imagining all of this pressure and should just freakin' relax. That could be true too.

More or less, the week will go on as planned. Long, productive, but mildly dull days backed by nights filled with fun, and gossip, and interpretative dance, and singing, and proposals that the whole Peace Corps experience would make a great HBO dramedy series of some sort. In short, the nights are filled with the scattershot ramblings and inventive friendliness that's all kinds of fun, but not really something that can be written about in the time I have here. That also means no time to proofread. I hope with crossed fingers that it was a good read.

2003-11-16T16:11:00.000+02:00

EVERY WEEKEND THAT BEGINS MUST END
But this one has a ways to go. Friday morning I woke up on a bus as it was approaching Sofia at around 7 AM. From the station I walked to Peace Corps Headquarters and relaxed there while I waited for Jeff to come in so we could take care of travel plans. My M-Bag, a giant bag of books from the states, had finally come in and I looked through it, but all the books were appropriately wrapped in plastic bags. Only when I got home did I realize what a trove I had received. I'm reading Oliver Twist now and the school library will get them all as soon as they're processed somehow. Thanks to everyone who has sent in books so far, they're appreciated beyond words.

So Jeff finally came in, we had a long talk about various things Bulgarian, then we went over to the travel agency where we, with a couple of other volunteers, had arranged for a trip to Egypt for the New Year.

We paid for the packaged trip, after waiting for a particular agent to arrive, then, at a loss for things to do, we went to go see The Matrix Revolutions. I'm going to go ahead and slap it with a big "meh. It was okay." Entertaining, but with frightfully bad character development (The Frenchman and Persephone, the two most interesting characters in the last two films, are again given less than five minutes of screen time) and bad dialogue (Young Kid: I never completed training. Dying Mentor: Neither did I. ). It's an impressive study in how sequels can be much, much worse than originals. And I'm at this point thoroughly convinced that the brothers Wachowski did not plan the whole thing as a trilogy. If they had, any reasonable person would have paced Neo's development better, so he isn't the exact same character in the last two films.

Anyway, we saw that, did something or other for two hours at Peace Corps HQ, then hung out at the nearby Irish Pub, Murphy's, with other volunteers. On that particular night, a group of Irish guys at the bar were having a swell time singing along to various folk songs that, if one knew the words, would be very fun to sing along to. For a while, we talked about this and America's surprising lack of such songs. I argued heroically that if any bar were to start playing "Cecilia" or "Hey Jude" with a group of Americans, of any age from 20-50, around, those Americans would be bound to join in and sing along. Everyone seemed to agree, but as none of us had ever encountered that kind of situation, we were all left without any proof.

When Murphy's had exhausted itself, and we had gotten good dinners, around 8, Jeff and I wandered aimlessly looking for something to do. We went over to the National Palace of Culture, an immense, ominous looking building if there ever was one, and we saw a crowd at the entrance. Curious as to what was happening, we went to go figure out where they sold tickets, which turned out to be in a hole in the ground on another side of the building. On the way, we met up with two volunteers of the female persuasion who, when they saw us, asked, "Are you guys here to see In the Cut too?" "Sure." we said, having no idea what In the Cut was.

Well, turned out it was a chick flick starring Meg Ryan. Not a bad chick flick though, and one involving murder, blood, and enough nude shots of Meg Ryan to make things interesting and even out the other kinds of nude shots in the movie. Bit of a departure for her, this movie. She plays a weak English Lit teacher fascinated by her own fantasies in life and oblivious to the differences between those fantasies and the startling things that start to happen around her. It's a good movie to analyze a bit when you're done with it, and it's a pretty entertaining ride. Never would have seen it if we hadn't been in a "Ah, what the hell?" kind of mood that only a mediocre Matrix sequel can create in a person.

After that, Jeff went to a hostel to get to sleep and I met some other volunteers for a nightcap at another cafe near Peace Corps Headquarters. There I met two B-14s, who seemed to be good, hearty folk and in good condition after training. And, incidentally, the Alaskan Bulgarian would like to extend a warm welcome to all mothers of B-14s whose kids don't write enough e-mails. Glad to be of service in showing you a glimpse of the kind of life they're living.

Left the bar at 12:30, caught a bus at 1 AM and slept my way to Silistra where I arrived at 8ish. I did some last minute laundry, using my heater to dry the clothes in a slightly more rapid way than the usual drapings around the room, and then went to sleep on the couch. I woke up at four, prepared things a little for the next day, and went outside to meet my 12th class students at 6 so I could chaperone their little all night party.

They ushered me away to an old boarding school outside of town that seems to be used only for sanctioned high school parties these days. The two supervisors were very kind, and made sure everything was taken care of before they left for the night. There isn't that much to report about the party, it featured the usual senior sentimentality and group bonding. I was the only one there looking over the 30 kids, but they were all fine and only wanted to have a good time. I had a "wow" moment at about 2 AM when I realized what an odd situation it was to be listening to a bunch of my students in Bulgaria singing along to all of Deep Purple's "Soldier of Fortune." That's a "life's funny sometimes" situation if I've ever heard of one.

Shortly after that moment, when about half of the group had gone over to the dorms to go to sleep, I followed them and rested for a while myself. I woke up at 7:30, followed shortly by everyone else. We cleaned the whole place up and were gone by 9. Good times had by all.

Getting home, I packed again and walked to the bus station at 11. I napped on the bus to Ruse and got here for PC in-service training that will last until Saturday. All the B-13 TEFLs will be here by tomorrow. And I have a feeling it won't be just a week of somber reflection and renewed intent on doing a job well done.

So that's where I am now, a Ruse internet cafe, where the light is getting dim outside at 4:00. Time to go eat.

2003-11-13T16:44:00.000+02:00

THURSDAYS, BLOODY THURSDAYS
Another hard Thursday, come and gone. I got both 12th classes to debate, although it was like conducting surgery without anaesthetic in the second class. They simply have no desire to do anything but sit around and mope in Bulgarian about life and do crossword puzzles. Occasionally, I give them exercises to do, and they do them in a grumbling, bitchy sort of way. I have more fun doing the "creative" things with them, and it gets them speaking in English, but it really gets most of my energy. They do this to all their teachers apparently, or at least that's what my counterpart and they tell me. I just wish they wouldn't do it to me. This week has become "I didn't come all the way over here for..." week, and I certainly didn't come all the way over here for high school seniors who have no further desire to learn English, or anything else for that matter.

Yesterday was a bit better, although odd. Wednesdays are always odd. I only have two hours of class to teach, and they're the first two classes of the day, beginning at 7:30. Basically, I treat it like a period of three hours where I'm simply not sleeping. I go to school, teach, talk to other teachers to see if anything's going on during the day, then go home, fix myself breakfast, and go back to sleep, usually on the couch. Strange thing about yesterday was that I only managed to coax myself awake around 4, when I was supposed to meet my counterpart at the post office and take care of some things. This wound up being 6 hours of napping on top of the 6 hours of sleep I had gotten the night before. Weird day.

It left me all disoriented when I finally managed to find a good basketball game to play in and got some good full-court running. These guys knew what they were doing, and I felt like the guy out of touch. It was a first in Bulgaria. I managed to get a few points on the board and pick up a few blocks, but it wasn't really my best outing, and their solid defense was just as responsible as my sudden desire to sleep whenever I'm not teaching.

That's been another theme of the week, me being busy but intensely lazy about it. I've done just enough to get the jobs I have to get done finished, but I've never really exerted myself, and I've been napping whenever I can. I need a good solid sleep weekend, and it ain't going to happen this weekend.

Tonight, I take the all-night bus to Sofia where I'll take care of Christmas plans once and for all tomorrow. Then I'll take another all-nighter back so I can get to Silistra in time to meet a 12th class student who will take me to a party I'm chaperoning just outside of town. Sunday afternoon, I head to Ruse to have an all-week conference with other TEFL volunteers and their counterparts. I'm not altogether sure that I'll get much sleep at all next week either. Well, sleep will come when I get back to America, I suppose. All's well as long as I keep the awake and alert face to the students. Something I'm getting better at every day, it seems.

2003-11-10T19:10:00.000+02:00

HEY FELLAS, WHAT'S COOLER THAN BEING COOL?
Before we begin, I've fixed the stupid and obvious grammatical errors in the last post. Just pretend they never happened. It was a busy weekend in a certain abstract kind of way and I was in hurry. Now, your post for the day...

The first signs of winter struck hard today. The biting cold came in on a wind from the north and forced everybody's hands into their pockets and prompted some people to put on hats and gloves. There still hasn't been any snow worth mentioning, but I have a gut feeling it might come in the next couple of nights. Today, at times, temperatures were certainly at or below freezing with the wind taken into account.

In school, things were a little more heated as I got a touch peeved with my 11th class. They're studying English as a 2nd foreign language, which in most cases would mean they don't have to give a damn about the class and will take any grade as long as they pass. Most take English at a private school in town, skip classes in school, and show up only when they have to do whatever they can on a test. It's the one class I'm teaching on my own, so I have to focus on explaining the rules of the language as well as fluency (my focus in the classes where I can leave the rules up to the Bulgarian teachers, who probably know them better than I do anyway). I'm willing to give them a little leeway, since I'm a nice guy and habits are hard to break. But they don't get a freaking native speaker from America to pop in and teach them English every year, and I had to give a little speech today.

I had just returned and reviewed a test whose results had disappointed me more than a little, and was about to begin the day's lesson after a break, when two girls who had gotten a five (a Bulgarian "B") and a four ("C") on their tests came up and, I swear to God, asked me:

"Can we go home for second hour so we can talk to our boyfriends?"

I looked up from my lesson plan.

"What?"

The girl who had gotten a 4 mumbled something in Bulgarian. The other girl translated for her. "She says she has to talk to her boyfriend about ..." I phased that part of the sentence out. I really have no recollection about what the problem with their relationship might have been.

"Look. You two didn't do too well on your tests, and I'm going to start a new subject today."

"Yes." Five girl answered. "But it's about modal verbs, and we've already studied those at Alexander Language School."

"You can go," I said. "But I'm going to mark you down as absent if you do."

"But we've already studied--"

"Look." I sat on a desk and prepared to ramble on for a while. "I'm not here to read your textbook to you. I talk to you, and use the textbook as a guide. I didn't come to Bulgaria to sit in any empty classroom and think about the things I would do if I had students. I left America, left my family, my friends, my dog, my cat (who has since died), to come to Bulgaria for two years and teach English. I try to make the classes entertaining. But if I bore you, I'm going to have to say that that is too bad."

"But you're our favorite teacher." 5 girl replied. "You're fun. But she is having problems with her boyfriend."

Realizing that appealing to their respect for my being in their country wouldn't work, I appealed to their gradebook. I pulled out the list of grades for the test.

"Looking at this, it seems like the students who got twos, threes, and fours on their tests were the ones that never show up to class. The ones that got fives and sixes have only, at the most, missed one class. It seems like showing up to class once in a while is a good idea."

That actually got them to stay, and 5 girl spent the next hour of the lesson consoling 4 girl while tossing out the occasional answer to questions I asked regarding modal verbs. 4 girl spent the hour looking and acting miserable, but I can't say I didn't give her the option of leaving with an unexcused absence. We made it through a lesson on modal verbs where I used examples from the Matrix, which had been on Bulgarian TV the night before. I would write "Morpheus tells Neo that he ________ in himself to be the One." on the board and the class would say, in surprising unison, "must believe!" The class also agreed that the first movie was vastly superior to the second, and most saw seeing the third as either a joke or something they'll do someday when they're very bored (which will probably happen to be the week the movie finally comes to Silistra).

The rest of the class seemed to have a good deal of fun with the lesson. But the insane request from the two girls has gnawed at me for the rest of the day. Ah, the challenges of teaching.

AND IN OTHER NEWS...Owen has left for St. Petersburg, and has gone to...[man on kettle drums begins playing] dum, dom, dum, dom[man on kettle drums stops]...Travel Blog mode! Today marks his first "Travelling is Hell" entry and also his first use of heavy adjectives, as in the phrase "rich blue seats embedded with individual screens." Head on over to Lex Libertas and wish the man better travelling (and better punctuality) in the future. Welcome to Eastern Europe, Owen!

AND MORE QUIZ FUN...
I'm not sure if these are getting better, I'm getting more bored at the internet club, or both. This one intrigued me when I saw it on the always worth reading Ghost of a Flea (who I really haven't linked to enough). I've always wanted to be in a Hemingway novel...Well no. Not really. That would probably mean getting shot, punched, or really very drunk day and night. But his characters do have fun occasionally, I like his books, and I'm an ex-pat at the moment. So it all seems to fit.

Ernest Hemingway penned your novel. Go you
studlyman, you.

Which Author's Fiction are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
Time to head over to the bar and have pull with Jody and get really tight and enjoy the evening. The air is cold and I can see my breath when I walk, but it keeps me awake and prevents me from toppling over when I drink too much. I need the drink, the powerful drink. It keeps me from thinking too much about Bulgaria and the students and the grading and the tests and the cold, cold air and her. It keeps from thinking about--her.

If I aim in a slightly less alcohol-oriented direction, I get Robert Heinlein. So I'm doomed to die in a trench or be devoured by aliens. The outlook is good!

2003-11-07T15:45:00.000+02:00

IS TEACHING FOR ME?
This is the kind of question that gets asked a lot around Peace Corps-Bulgaria. Teaching is, after all, what many of us are here to do, and few of us have had any kind of long-term experience actually doing it before our arrival. I think about it a lot myself, going to classes, coming to classes. The thing is, as draining as teaching is here, and I'm sure it's draining everywhere, I never drag my feet getting to school. While I'm teaching, I may sometimes rub my temples and take a couple of deep breaths when the kids just won't shut up. But I never ask myself what I'm doing here, or why I continue to stay. Thing is, teaching at its worst is a challenge and at its best makes me laugh and smile more than a lot of things. On the whole, it's actually pretty fun, and I enjoy myself when I do it.

So am I going to rush back to America after two years, get a teaching certificate, and teach at the first school that will have me? Um, no. Probably not. More likely at this point would be pursuing a PhD in English and teaching college students. In my opinion, the more students that come in ready and willing to learn, the better. Motivation hasn't been my favorite aspect of teaching so far. Making the boring bits, ie lectures, exciting has been one of my favorite parts. And applying this apparent talent I have to literature would be a way to spend a life, methinks. Besides, this inherent need to connect with the students gives me a reason to watch the music and cartoon networks religiouslty without feeling guilty or childish. All I need to crack up a room is throw out a Mojo Jojo impression or explain by example why I don't like Linkin Park. I don't spend every day in every class discussing the finer points of Cold Play and the White Stripes, but if I need to bring the kids in the rear back into the class, a short discussion of music works better than demanding they get their nose in the books.

And can I apply this all to teaching at a university? Well, seeing as I got my example from a professor at a university, I don't see why not. My senior year I had a German philosophy class with the chair of the Germanics Dept. at UCLA. I wasn't all that interested in the course, taking it because it fulfilled a requirement for my major. But he made Neitzsche, Schopenhauer, Hegel et al as palatable as they could possibly be, and I do in fact remember most of their points, if not volumes of quotes from their work. The professor did this by invoking the odd Madonna reference, the occasional Ben Affleck throw-in, and constant updates on the Justin-Britney breakup. This stuff wasn't relevant to me at this time, thankfully, but it lightened up discussions on the dialectic and made everything in the lectures a little easier to swallow.

I'm not sure if I would still use pop cultural references in class without that example. Nevertheless it seems to work and makes the classes flow more easily. I also get to learn about the reaction of Bulgarian youth to Western culture. Shockingly, very few Bulgarians like the White Stripes and Outkast. Most are indifferent to the heavier pop icons like Justin Timberlake, and most love rap and hip-hop as well as hard rock from all periods, prompting my regualr criticism of Linkin Park, whose every song sounds exactly like their first hit "In the End."

Of course, I'm saying that there hasn't been any burn out just before I'm finished with my second month of classes. If that isn't jumping the gun, I don't know what is. All I'm saying is at this point, things are looking good.

2003-11-06T15:21:00.000+02:00

THE LAST, DYING DAYS OF THE WEEK
Well, the cold I feared earlier came and peaked Tuesday night. It's now in remission and my body's in the persistent process of getting rid of the phlegm. All that's left is the clean-up. I really like it when colds work out like that.

The problem is, clean-up or no, the cold has sapped me. Even though I'm normally in need of a long nap Thursday afternoons, I really need one now, since the eighth class was a giant, collective pain the rear today.

I'm pretty much saying that there's a lot to write about, but at this particular point in time, while I'm here in the internet club, right now, I'm in no real mood to write. Apologies, etc. More to come tomorrow, I'm sure.

2003-11-04T16:05:00.000+02:00

Because I'm tired, I want to go home, and I feel a cold coming on, it's...
A SHORT GLIMPSE INTO LIFE IN BULGARIA
Today, I was in a hurry around lunchtime (which should explain, in part, why I'm tired.) I didn't have time to go all the way home and make myself a lunch. I had an extra class with the llth graders at 2 and needed to make some copies before the end of the school day. Since I had already obliterated the copy guy's patience and also weakened the copy machine with my test for an earlier class, I had to go into town to get the day's reading copied.

On the way back, I stopped in at a hamburger stand. Bulgarian hamburgers, I should mention, are not in any way the sort you'd find in McDonalds or Burger King. They are, instead, an enlarged english muffin mashed into a toaster, sliced down the middle and stuffed with meat, tomatoes, cucumbers, french fries, mayo, ketchup and mustard. It is, undoubtably, crap. But so is fast food in America and I was in a hurry.

I approached the counter as a small herd of primary school girls giggled at the fact that I towered over their friend, also at the counter. After their friend had ordered, I said in Bulgarian "May I have a hamburger with schnitzel?" I've grown to have a fondness for schnitzel as fast food. My host family used to serve it for lunch. It has a particular unhealthy taste to it, and some stands actually have it. This one had it on the menu outside.

The woman behind the counter said not a word. She nodded her head and continued standing there, not looking at me in particular, but maintaining a half-interest in a bottle of ketchup on a shelf. My mind made two clicks: head nod, no bodily movement. Ah Ha! She was trying to tell me they have no schnitzel! The Bulgarian head nod/shaking reversal still takes a while to register with me. "There isn't any?" I asked.

She turned one eye, the closer one, to me and said "No, there isn't!" As if I, the only paying customer at the counter, was presenting a serious roadblock in her day.

"Is there ham?" I asked.

"Yes." She shook her head and assembled a ham hamburger (How novel!) in the most immaculate manner I've yet seen in Bulgaria. Each tomato, cucumber, and french fry was placed with precise location and meaning, and it seemed to take her all of 5 minutes to assemble the thing.

Fortunately, I was able to pay in exact change and not further inconvenience her. The consequences of that could have been severe.

And that's...
A SHORT GLIMPSE INTO LIFE IN BULGARIA

2003-11-02T16:00:00.000+02:00

THE GREAT CONFEDERACY
In an Onion AV Club interview, Will Ferrell talks about the possibility of his playing Ignatius Reilly in a film version of A Confederacy of Dunces. Here's the relevant bit:

O: Are you doing A Confederacy Of Dunces?

WF: Yeah. It's now kind of gone back into a bit of a holding pattern. When the money is there, it's definitely something that the producer and director want me to do. I would be thrilled if it finally gets together, but it's been fraught with peril for a long time.

O: Would you gain weight for the part, or have you thought that far ahead?

WF: I have. Whatever the health issues would be, there's a part of me that would love to do the De Niro Raging Bull thing. But I hear that actually wrecked his metabolism, and he's had to battle that ever since he did that.

This made me sad, then happy when I thought it over for a while. At first, I reacted the way I normally do about books made into movies. I asked the room in general "Why can't Hollywood make something original for once?" I have thousands of my own images in my own head from A Confederacy of Dunces and when I watch the film, some of those images will be corrupted.

But, thought I, what if Will Ferrell gives me a new perspective on Reilly, something I hadn't thought of before? He's certainly more than able. If he treats Reilly the way he needs to be treated, I think Ferrell can more than handle the part. And what if the entire movie is actually done well and brings out new ideas? Well, that will allow it to break even in my mind.

What will push it into the black is the very real possibility that more people will go out and read my favorite book and I'll get fewer confused stares when I tell them that it's my favorite novel and that John Kennedy Toole is my favorite writer. Some will assume I only like the book becasue I heard about it from the movie, but that's the price I'll have to pay to actually be able to talk about Toole's one major work and one masterpiece.

As it is, I don't have the book here in Bulgaria because I loaned it to the proprietor of Lex Libertas, and am only vaguely optimistic about his reading it. But he did the right thing in borrowing it at least. If you've never read the book, find someone who has a copy, go to the library, go to Amazon, wherever, and get a copy. You might still have a chance to be one of the fashionable ones to read the most triumphant piece of literature ever written before "Now a Major Motion Picture From Paramount" is permanently tatooed on the binding and cover.

2003-11-01T16:49:00.000+02:00

UPDATES
Photos have been added throughout the week, going all the way back to Monday. Re-read the stories (it won't kill you) and marvel at the photography. Also, a quiz response...

Which OS are You?

Warm fuzzy feeling from that one courtesy of Owen at Lex Libertas, who wound up being some creepy Mac OS. That'll teach him. He'll be leaving for Russia soon, and California's giving him a fantastic and apocalyptic good-bye party. All of Mother Nature's friends are chipping in.

2003-11-01T15:16:00.000+02:00

THE ORPHANGE AT HALLOWEEN

I'm not really sure what to think of last night. It felt great to go up the hill again and help out at the orphanage. It always feels great when I'm done. I feel absolutely drained of all physical and emotional energy when I head down the hill, but I think the great feeling comes from that. An hour later is when the cloud sets in. It's the afterglow of the orphange that gets me, the thoughts and reflections on what those kids go through. Let's start at the beginning.

Debbie, the volunteer in Silistra working with the municipality and business center, had gotten a couple of boxes from friends of hers in the states. The boxes were full of little plastic bags containing Halloween candy. Understandably not wanting to go up there alone with two boxes of candy, Debbie recruited me and Gail from Pleven to go up and help. I needed to go up at some point anyway, since I had promised one of the kids I would return with English workbooks for him to use. Gail's just a good volunteer willing to sacrifice quite a lot of energy to help out. Debbie, properly assuming that I might need a costume, brougt along the silly cowgirl hat you can see if you squint at the pictures and she and Gail picked me up in a cab on their way up the hill.

As soon as we stepped through the gate at around 6:45 in the evening, it was like those moments in "Backdraft" where the poor arson victims open their doors. I could hear an audible whoosh as the lungs of the kids standing around the door filled up, and they rushed at us shouting batko at me and kaka Debbie at Debbie (kaka being a familiar form of sister in Bulgarian). They swarmed Gail and started hugging her even before Debbie had the chance to introduce her. Hugs were tossed around, we shook hands, I explained why I was wearing a cowgirl hat and pigtails, and explained what Halloween was all about. Then we all went inside and upstairs to the orphans tiny little living room.

I should qualify that. The orphans' living room isn't tiny. In fact their common area is about the size of the whole of my apartment, which is more than ample. For one person. Squeezing all 70-some orphans into that space is intense. Apparently, when Americans or other visitors aren't there, the orphans spend most of the winter sitting in their dorm rooms, where the bunkbeds are all stacked next to, near, and on each other. They aren't allowed to go out in the winter, even on sunny days, for fear of one child catching a cold and infecting the entire population inside. As a result of this caging the orphans develop prodigous amounts of energy, and release it on any novel person willing to step through the door. At night, only one, and at the most two, adults are around and supervising.

The pictures above don't adequately represent the insanity of last night. I have 92 photos from the night, and we were there for a little over an hour before the kids had to go to bed. I didn't take all of the photos, of course. In fact, I think I wound up taking ten, at the most. After the first kid asked if he could take a photo and I gently showed him how to look through the digital screen and press the button on top, every kid had to take a photo. I watched the camera like a hawk and never left the side of the orphan holding it, and it got through the night without a scratch. The kids got infinite joy out of it, I think it was worth the risk. And I'll have to do a separate entry on the camera and send an e-mail to Kodak one of these days because this basic EasyShare CX4200, that doesn't even have a zoom, has been through hell and back. Other than the tiny scratches on the screen in the back, the camera is really as good as new. It goes out, takes upwards of 100 shots on a single battery charge, and comes back ready for more. I've sat on the thing lightly when it was in my pocket, dropped it short distances, held it in the same hand I was using to balance myself in a slide down the side of a steep hill, and seen it go through the hands of 70 Bulgarian orphans, and it still works well and takes great pictures. I haven't been so happy with a piece of technology, ever, I think. And, since the camera's less than a year old, I'm knocking loudly on wood as I write this.

Back to the orphans. As soon as we started passing out the candy, two mobs formed around the two boxes. I kept yelling at the kids to sit and come one at a time, and my commands would work for whole seconds at a time. Amazingly, every kid who wanted candy got a bag, and the whole thing was over in about five minutes. For the rest of the hour in the orphanage, I was tugged all over the building assisting in, being in, and taking photogrpahs of orphans all wanting to do the most extravagant of poses. Some wanted to have their photos taken with only one other kid, and wouldn't leave me alone until that task was done. Those were the hardest photos, as I had to hold all the kids dying to be in a shot back until I'd fulfilled the wishes of the two selfish little things.

Finally, the supervisor started ushering the kids into their rooms and I found Debbie and Gail being played with in one of the back dorm rooms. I told them what was happening and we decided it would probably be best to leave. A half hour of more photos, American football throwing, hugging, etc. later we managed to call a taxi and make it to the front door, where it took a good deal of effort to peel the kids away and keep them there. We finally got to the cab and Debbie invited me over to dinner at her place.

She had a chicken casserole prepared and I poured some wine and we all sat down to another of Debbie's great dinners. The conversation kept diving back to the orphange, though, and when it wasn't there we talked about any number of things about Bulgaria we find depressing. Apparently realizing the futility of attempting any conversation based around mirth, we peppered the downer lines of dialogue with stories that drew laughs. There was nothing that could be done really, and we all managed to vent a little, but it's always a shame to bring down a good dinner.

I had promised Jody and a few Bulgarians that I would come to a nearby bar at 10 for a Halloween party. After leaving Debbie andd Gail, I walked down the street and stopped after a step next to Jody whose group was hanging out on the fringe of the sardine can bar. I ordered a beer, and finally got through it after an hour and a half. My stomach felt off, probably because of the wine before beer, and I couldn't breathe at all in the bar packed with people dressed in costumes and celebrating the holiday no Bulgarian celebrates. After an attempt to see if some air would clear things up, I said my goodbyes and went home. I hadn't really been in a spectacular party mood anyway, and everyone seemed to understand.

2003-10-31T13:53:00.000+02:00

THE BULGARIAN NON-HOLIDAY

"No, no. We don't celebrate Halloween here, Mr. Young. But, um, can we have a party at your apartment to celebrate Halloween?"

Ah, the 12th grade, the students I was most looking forward to before I started teaching. I thought they'd be just like little college students. The school I teach at is a language school, a public school with a selective admitting system, and the 12th grade kids are the bunch that has gone through the school's rigors for five years. They really know what they're doing and they all want to learn. Turns out they are little college students though, and many of them come complete with drunk driving records and most have an insatiable desire to smoke whenever they aren't in class and drink whenever they aren't in school. I'm willing to take a "we're all adults here" stance with them in class, as long as they don't ask stupid questions like the one above. Then I just give them a baffled look and tell them to get back to work.

Anyway, since I have today off, most of the time spent yesterday in class was devoted to Halloween. My colleagues see my being here as the perfect time to teach the kids about my least favorite holiday. It's not that I hate Halloween, or get "bah humbug" about it and snarl at the kids ready to egg my door. I'm just indifferent to it and run through the paces where, for any other holiday, I'd really expect myself to get into some kind of spirit. I did manage to do it for the kids yesterday though.

I figured that no one in Bulgaria, let alone the eighth graders I was focusing on, had seen the brains and eyeballs, and bloody organs in a bag trick. I was worried for a moment that it would be tough to pull off in a country where livers, hearts, and bowel linings are considered good food (I have, in a sporting way, given the liver and heart their due. But I've resolutely avoided shkembe), but I went ahead with it anyway, cooking up some spaghetti in fruit juice so it came out with that perfect, pinkish hue. I also bought a small platter of cooked kufte balls and red pepper slices, which I figured would pass for rotten eyeballs and slices of heart. I put the "brains" in a plastic bag of their own, and the "eyes" and "heart" in another bag. I doused the eyes and hearts in ketchup and put the whole thing in the fridge for the next day.

The costume was another problem. I simply had nothing to wear. So I took my plaid shirt, buttoned it poorly, put on my worst pants with a rope as a belt, and mussed up my hair beyond recognition. The rest of the costume I left up to performance.

The first class was the best, seeing as how I had the most energy going into the last long day of a long week. I came into the room as Frankie, jutted out my lower jay as far is it would go, and did the whole lesson as Phil Hartman's old Frankenstein from Saturday Night Live. I told the kids that "Frankie like to talk in the third person and would be make mistakes throughout class." When they caught me, they would say trick or treat, and I would give them something out of the bag of candy I had brought. That all went over pretty well. And they loved the brains and organs. Most bought the brain illusion until they were right up on top of the bag and looking inside. I also let them take turns carving various parts of the pumkin one of the students had brought. They made a pretty good jack o' lantern.

My next four hours were with the 12th class, so I abandoned Frankie and turned to Edgar Allan Poe, who most of them had to wrestle with but seemed to enjoy. We did the "Masque of the Red Death" and "The Raven." They illustrated sheets of paper I had given them for "Red Death" and acted along with "The Raven." Went over pretty well, but since the copy machine had broken down as usual and on schedule, I had to read everything aloud in both classes, leaving me without much voice or energy.

For the last eighth class, I again abandoned Frankie, but kept up the mistakes for candy game, the organs, and the pumkin thing. The class, normally obnoxious at the end of the day anyway, was nearly unbearable, but I managed to make it through the forty-five minutes without killing any of them, which would have been an apt finale to Halloween, but would probably have gotten me thrown in jail.

I stopped in at a restaurant on the way home for a late lunch and, at my apartment, collapsed on the couch for a long nap. I woke up, finished A Farewell to Arms, and throroughly depressed, wound up cleaning the entire apartment before making myself dinner and starting in on Douglas Adam's posthumous The Salmon of Doubt. It's sad knowing that Adams will never write again, but good to have his wit around after Hemingway's how-to manual on miscarrying babies and losing girlfriends during pregnancy. A lot of people call that his best novel. If I had people going around calling a downer like that my best work, I'd think twice whenever I passed the shotgun on the mantle, too.

Thankfully slept in today, took a shower and took care of some business at school, then came here. I'm bracing myself, though, as this day won't be easy. I'm going to pay a Halloween visit to the orphans this evening, and they never let me off the hook very easily.

2003-10-29T17:59:00.000+02:00

THE LUCK AT THE END OF THE LINE
As I've mentioned before, Silistra is at one of Bulgaria's corners, nestled between Romaina to the west and the Danube to the north. Romania is awfully quiet across the border, and since there really is nowhere else to go, bus and train routes come to a halt in Silistra. The train tracks end at the foot of the station and the bus station is a turnaround (although this is usually the case in any other city, it's poignant here in Silistra. Come on, work with me on this one). I'd never really thought of the advantages of living in one of the country's dead-ends until last night and this morning.

Coming home from Varna last night, the bus was very warm and I was very tired after a long weekend and a long day of travelling. I was also wearing khakis with large loose pockets, an important fact when one is drowsy on a bus, a fact which I overlooked until later in the evening. I fell asleep in my seat and woke up just before the arrival in Silistra. I got up out of my seat, stretched, said goodbye to the two teachers I had travelled with and waited so I could be the last person off the bus. I walked home in that lazy way I've gotten used to after a trip on the bus where most of the time is spent sleeping. Then I made dinner and read Farewell to Arms until midnight, when I decided to go to bed.

I walked over to the table and unloaded my pockets. Hmm, I thought, I don't remember taking out my cell phone earlier. I walked around the room, checking all the usual places where I might have deposited the phone, and I also checked the couch, to make sure the phone hadn't fallen out of my pocket while I was reading. Nothing. I was surprisingly rational considering the hour and value of the phone. I remember first chalking it up as the first casualty to Bulgarian pickpockets or my own carelessness. I remember thinking something along the lines of "that'll teach me, then, won't it?"

Then I went through the usual process one goes through when they lose something. When did I last remember using it? I had used it to check the time just before getting on the bus. Okay, so pickpockets were out. And it wasn't in the apartement, although I couldn't be certain that it wasn't somehow under a plie of papers. It was probably on the bus. Well, that bus could be anywhere now. No, wait. That was an express bus from Varna to Silistra, and the last bus of the night. Besides, it's a long trip and they probably aren't going to send a bus back out on the road without a pit stop. I'd better go see if it's still at the station.

So, at 12:30 I went back to the bus station. The early morning buses to Sofia were warming up in the parking lot, their exhausts puffing clouds in the cold and their windows already foggy from the passengers inside. The Menes bus I had taken wasn't in the lot. I went inside, where two policemen and a couple of workers were sitting in the station cafe, talking. I explained my situation.

"Well, that bus is probably at the petrol base, in the Menes Garage." One of the policemen said in Bulgarian. "Do you know this city?"

"Yes, yes." I replied. "Where is the garage?"

"Near the airplane."

I gave a puzzled look.

"He doesn't know the city." The policeman sighed. The waitress at the cafeteria said that I could just ask any taxi driver to take me to the Menes Garage.

"Or the petrol base." The policeman added.

"So I should go in the morning?" I asked.

"Yes. You should go in the morning." The policeman answered. "The bus and the driver will be there. They'll be there at 6 in the morning."

"And that bus won't be the first bus out of town tomorrow morning? It won't come here to the station?"

"It might be the first bus out, but you should go at 6 anyway."

"No. There's no way it will be the first bus." The waitress retorted. "They need time to check it in the morning."

"But if it's checked tonight, they could leave in the morning." The policeman turned to me. "Just go to the Menes Garage, or the petrol base, at 6 tomorrow morning."

I thanked them very much and left. As I was leaving, they were still discussing whether the bus could be the first one out in the morning. Before I returned home, I crossed the street in front of my apartment, put my phone card into the pay phone at the gas station, dialled my phone's number, and sprinted across the street to my apartment. When I got inside, I heard no ringing. I had done what few who lose things manage to do. I had placed the lost object precisely. It had to be on the bus. The driver probably wouldn't even give the bus a once-over tonight and as long as I got there early in the morning, I would be the first one to see where I had sat on the trip. I went downstairs, collected my phonecard and hung up the phone, then went back to the apartment and to bed. I got to sleep around 1:30 and woke up at five to my alarm.

I had a small breakfast of apples and a glass of milk and went downstairs to catch a cab. I asked the driver if he knew where the Menes Garage was. He did, and took me there. Sure enough, it was in the most distant corner of town, squeezed between the river and the border, and there was an airplane parked uselessly in a lot near the garage. The morning was very cold and a thick frost covered the grass and the puddles were all iced over.

I walked up to the gate, waited for the gatekeeper to come out, and explained my predicament to him. He told me that the driver, a guy named Michael, would be by at 9 to work on the bus, and that I should come back at 9. I thanked him and walked the twenty minute hike to school, stopping in at a store for a warm banitsa (cheese between layers of phillo dough. Mostly fat, but filling and warm). I had classes during the first two periods of the day, the second ending at 9:10, and I thought over my options and what I would have to do to get to the garage by 9.

As it turns out, my second class was good today, and in-tune to my predicament when I brought it up. They blazed through the day's lesson, and I let them go ten minutes early without much guilt. I caught a cab at the main street near the school, and went back to the garage. A different gate guy was there for the day shift, and I explained the story of the missing phone for the third time. My Bulgarian in telling the story was rock-solid by this point. He took me into the garage and asked Michael, who was leading a team working on the car, if I could have a look inside the bus. He said "of course," and I went in and to the back where I had sat the night before. Sure enough, the phone was there, right in the middle of the seat, and it said I had missed the call I had made from the gas station last night.

I left the bus all smiles and thanked the gate guy, and Michael. Michael was the first person of many during the day to tell me that I was "very lucky." I never really brought up that a lot of it had to do with footwork, too. But luck seemed as good a reason for my success as any. I went back to the school, where the kids had apparently told the other English teachers about my problem. They were all worried and seemed happy and ready to credit luck when I told them I had found the phone.

The day went on pleasantly after that, with whings falling into place. I've been asked to put on a couple of Halloween parties during my classes tomorrow. We're behind in our work, but a holiday is a holiday and I agreed to lead the day's festivities.

Anyway, that's the long and winding story of the day. I have grading to do. Gotta run.

2003-10-28T14:45:00.000+02:00

SITTING IN A VARNA CAFE
Well, today's seminar was entertaining and informative. It was also an ad for a British textbook publishing company, but they never went so far as to say "Buy the books!" and the travel expenses were all paid for, and their were snacks and drinks. So as far as textbook junkets go, this one was a-okay. The lecturer, an instructor from England who does a lot of teaching in Spain, knew her stuff pretty well and brought up some great points about grammar and writing. At this point, frankly, every little bit helps and even though the seminar lasted only three hours, it helped quite a bit. At the end I got an under-the-table recruitment brochure for the school where the seminar had been held and I had hardly said a word during the seminar. Native speakers around the world: Varna wants you! I kept the brochure because I think it's funny that a private elementary school would call itself "The Little Prince." It's a cute book, yes, but I also like the aristocratic connotation. I told the other teachers from Silistra that it probably wouldn't fly in America, although I'm not entirely sure.

After the seminar, the Silistra contigent went to lunch at a place called "Restaurant Godzilla." The doorway was a giant fiberglass lizard, but the atmosphere and the food inside had nothing to do with the monster but for the occasional "Godzilla salad" or "Godzilla Pizza." Good food though, with large portions. It's close to the city center and I'll probably wind up going back. It's always nice to visit these big cities with people who know the town well. Otherwise I probably would have wound up at KFC or one of Varna's two McDonalds.

At lunch, we talked about private and public schools in America and Bulgaria, and that led to a discussion of values. It seems a pretty big values vacuum opened up during the nineties, and pop culture wound up influencing the generation almost entirely. This is still often the case today, but it's decreasing. Anyway, this pop culture values system has left kids spoiled, apparently, and so many parents who can afford it aren't sending their kids to private schools simply because they want them to work for the grades they get. Private schools are too easy on the kids.

I argued that while that may well be the case, private schools offer the chance for students to work closely with teachers in a more advanced environment and more access to materials. If the money is there and the school is a good private school, I think it should be up to the parents to urge their kids away from being spoiled brats. And, although I didn't say this, most of the kids in public schools here seem pretty spoiled anyway, so what do private school parents have to lose?

We also talked about discipline, and I gave them stories of such fantasitcal concepts as "detention" and suspensions that mean something more than a week out of school. Students never have to stay after class as punishment in Bulgaria, nor do they lose time during their breaks. The only way to really punish unruliness is with grades, and that--I've learned--can be unwieldy since telling a student they have a bad grade one day is really just a drop in the bucket. After all, they have a couple hundred more days' grades to lean on.

The other teachers at the table sighed, complained about the ministry of education, and went on with the meal. We split up after lunch, and I came here. My bus leaves at six and I'll probably spend the rest of the afternoon, seeing parts of Varna I haven't visited before. It really is a beautiful city.

2003-10-27T16:59:00.000+02:00

HAPPY VOTING DAY!

Note: More pictures to come later, whenever Blogger's !@#$ing ftp server decides to work

It's election day in Bulgaria, which means there aren't any classes, as voting often happens in schools. I took advantage of the four day weekend (I have Fridays off) to visit Sofia and my old host family in Septemvri. Incidentally, we begin today's big photo session with one taken while zooming by a forest on the way home from Septemvri yesterday. Fall has arrived in force, and the leaves are already passing their color peaks.

I took a 3 AM bus to Sofia Friday morning, arriving at 11. There I met Jeff and Kate, and we did a variety of things that all seemed to end at Peace Corps Headquarters. The day was freezing cold, setting a tone for the weekend's weather, but in the middle of the day it was nice enough to permit a lunch on an outdoor table. Several times Jeff went a bit overboard by saying that it was all "just like summer," and I'm afraid he got us cursed by the weather gods, but no harm done really. In the afternoon we met with Sharad, just another volunteer with a PhD in physics teaching English to noisy kids, and went to an Indian restaurant near HQ. Sharad seemed a little too ready to take the blame for a possible bad meal, and seemed to worry about it throughout the meal no matter how many times we viciously insisted he stop. Unfortunately, we didn't get to berate him about the meal since the food was great and we all had enough of it. Jeff and I each paid 20 leva for ours though, horribly expensive by the standards we'd gotten used to. Not really Sharad's fault of course, and the meal was worth it.

After dinner, we all went to Sharad's place in a city an hour from Sofia. We had an interesting discussion over the process he sometimes uses to take a shower. It involves a garbage bin, which puzzled some of us. Fortunately, the shower head was working most of the time while we were there, no garbage bin was needed, and the night was spent incredibly well, what with the wine and snacks Sharad provided like the great host he's turned out to be. We all woke up at 9ish, got ready for the day, and hopped aboard the bus back to Sofia.

Getting there around noon, we all thought we were a little late for the day's event, a softball game between PC volunteers and the volunteers from Japan. Japan's volunteers are here doing pretty much the same things we are, only with a focus on Japanese, of course, and athletics. They have volunteers devoted entirely to baseball and Judo, for example. They were all great people, and some spoke English pretty well. When they didn't though, we managed to squeeze by well with our Bulgarian on both sides. We were told that they'd be waiting at the field and we had to get to Peace Corps Headquarters in order to get a ride out.

Luckily, we had been given the wrong information about the start time and things were still getting started when we got to headquarters. Most every American volunteer from the general Sofia area was there and the usual conversations began. The guys in the back of the classroom won't stop talking. The water in my apartment shuts off 4 days out of the week. Who married who and when. My boiler burst and left the whole apartment in a steam bath. Things like that. My war stories weren't as exciting as some of the better ones, but I'm more than willing to accept that.

The day was, of course, absolutely frigid, with temperatures near zero (Vanya, my counterpart, told me that it was even colder in Silistra over the weekend). Most of us talked about what a perfect day it would be for say, American football or basketball. Softball didn't seem to fit for any of us. I probably talked about demanding a rematch on a basketball court a few times too many, even before the competition started. It's my sport, is basketball, and I have to defend it here in Bulgaria. Since I hadn't swung a bat since middle school, I wasn't exactly feeling in my element on the field either.

Because of the weather, we had a hitting contest and a very short 3-inning match where everyone played for at least one inning. This is Jeff hammering a shot good for third place on the day. I went next and couldn't really get one off the ground. I was connecting on just about every pitch, I just couldn't get under the ball. Not too pleasant, but again, baseball--not my sport.

My turn at bat overwith, I hung out among the bystanders. We were all enjoying the company of Sally, the stray dog who became the day's mascot. Nadia named her, and I think the name fit rather well for some reason. She seemed to recognize it after a couple of hours. She was the friendliest thing you'd ever hope to meet, stray or no, and she chased baseballs, rolled on the ground, and hopped around everybody. She probably gave us all fleas and worms, but she was a fun dog, so what the hell.

Despite the temperature, a lot of people came out just to "cheer" and "support the team." Also to wait for the after-party where we had been promised sushi. I donated my prize of Japanese stickers to Christen and Yadira and they had a happy time arguing over which they would each get and discussing whether certain actresses were "No" or "Kabuki." They finally got a Japanese volunteer to figure it out for them. Dylan was in a T-shirt or light jacket most of the day. I have no idea how or why. He's from Manhattan, as if that explains anything.

Mike, seen here tackling an unsuspecting Kate, spent much of the day apologizing for giving me the wrong start time as I heckled him about it. Mike's great, and no one has really gotten the hang of my candid shots better than he. I have some pretty good photos of Mike. It's too bad he's clear on the opposite side of the country in Sandanski. They've effectively split the B-13 basketball team in half. Andrew and Mike are in the southwest, and Jeff and I are in the northeast. The backcourt and frontcourt of our four on four team, torn asunder. These are sad times in Peace Corps--Bulgaria.

The softball game was underway and Carl, Country Director for Bulgaria, was throwing a flawless first inning--2 up, 2 down--until he allowed two runs with the last out. This pitch actually started the run, unfortunately. But he pitched a good inning, nevertheless.

This is Jonas, the brains behind this whole shindig, walking off to get back on offense, maybe. That story fits the narrative, and I have no idea when I took this picture. Jonas has appeared in a few of the movies made by the brains behind Sofia Sideshow and has decided to hang out in Bulgaria after his three years of service, working as a teacher. His girlfriend speaks flawless English and Jeff actually lost a bet with her when he didn't believe she was Bulgarian. She had to show him her ID card. Funny stuff.

The group after the game and before we all crammed into cars, and...

This is the final score posted at the after-party, where we ate "American food"--pizza, "Japanese food"--sushi, and actual Bulgarian food--banitsa. Most of the Americans ate most of the sushi, since you really can't get good sushi in Bulgaria. Or any sushi for that matter. Pizza, particularly shoddy pizza, is all to common. They also offered a choice of Heineken or Kamenitsa--the Bulgarian beer. Any bets on which bottles disappeared first? It's not that Bulgarian food or drink is bad or inedible, it's just that the rare things are just so scarce that when they appear, the stuff we get everyday just disappears. Incidentally, Heinekens aren't all that few and far between in Bulgaria. They're just awfully expensive, and considering that we all had to pay only three leva a piece to get into the party, it was all well worth it.

The party was spent singing songs, making speeches, and meeting volunteers we never see, really. It turns out I have a Japanese neighbor, he lives ten minutes down the street from me in Silistra and works as an ecologist, watching birds at the nearby Sreberna Lake. We had a good chat in "Bulgish" and managed to exchange addresses and phone numbers.

The party was over too quickly and we all went our separate ways. I went to the train station to catch a train to Septemvri, realizing that a four day weekend would be a good chance to visit the host family from three months back. My host mother, Kalinka, was in Italy studying and working it seems, but the rest of the family was there and glad to have me.

We spent the night talking about the past and present. They fed me my favorite meals and we all shared a little rakia, although their newest crop is a lot stronger than their last. Really took the old enamel off. Still had a little grape taste to it though, which I thought was quite a feat. When we were all tired, they showed me down to my old room, which was without a heater. Never to be bad hosts though, the Gavarovs had made sure that the bed was piled high with heavy sheets, and I couldn't have been warmer or slept better until little Slavi woke me early in the morning so we could eat breakfast and play.

After the food and games, Slavaeko, Slavi, and I went for a walk around town. Septemvri felt very different in the fall. I'd never really experienced the town cold, and with all the leaves on the ground, it looked much more sober. We talked about the future on the walk, had a cup of coffee at a cafe, and went to the house of someone I had played basketball with a couple of times. Despite the fact that it was really just to say hello, we were plunged into Bulgarian na gosti and the high schooler and I talked for about an hour about very little while drinking tea prepared by his mother. It was all pleasant, but I would have rather spent that hour with my host family. If na gosti is a game, I won when Slavaeko stood up and said it was about time we got going, since I had to prepare for my long journey.

I got back, took a shower and had lunch before getting some final photos with Slavaeko and Slavi. I took the one of Slavi with me, and Slavi was really the only one around who could take the picture of me with Slavaeko.

This was the best result of four or five photos. It has its own impact I suppose, and I'm glad Slavi took it.

Just before I left, Slavaeko inexplicably brought up the "times used to be better under communism" conversation. I parried as I usually do, saying that Bulgaria will, one day, be better than it ever was under communism. I don't really have the Bulgarian to push the argument that switching to capitalism wasn't really a nice suggestion that the US made, but a necessary move from a system that supported towns of 8,000 like Belovo with multiple toilet paper factories in order to keep everybody employed. Everybody may have had jobs, yes, but there was no way the system could have supported itself, and the collapse was bound to have happened sooner or later. Capitalism and democracy simply offered a better alternative than, say, fascism. Perhaps not coincidentally, the English teachers waxed nostalgic about school cafeterias today and my tutor later brought up the same employment conversation. In both cases, I simply nodded and let it go by. I think the fall and winter, when there isn't heat to keep every room in Bulgaria warm and when vegetables start to get scarce makes everybody a little pessimistic.

The 10 hour trip back was pretty unremarkable but for the fact that the woman sitting next to me on the 7 hour bus ride only once got out of her seat to let me get out at the rest stop. The rest of the time she was still, staring at the seat in front of her, not doing a thing, not so much as saying a word. It was very strange, and a little discomfiting. But somehow I managed to make the trip without demanding she do something for my benefit.

This morning, I went into school to help sort through textbooks with the other English teachers. We found some great old books, and I collected some of the ones that would be put into reserve. There was a book in English from the early eighties on programming in COBOL, as well as about ten copies of a book on BASIC. Several textbooks from the seventies have priceless illustrations and content, and I'll see if I can post them later. It was quite the morning and tomorrow we'll all head off to Varna for a seminar. On Wednesday we might actually see some of these student people we're supposed to be teaching. Hopefully, they won't have forgotten me by then.

2003-10-23T15:55:00.000+03:00

SOMETHING ABOUT NOT NEEDING STINKING BADGES. I DON'T KNOW. I'M TIRED.
For any student out there thinking that it's not fair how little work teachers have to do compared to the homework required of students. Well...They can go, um, clap erasers or something. I've been up since 6:00 yesterday morning, rapidly approaching that ever-crucial 36 hour mark. 48 isn't going to happen this time, but unfortunately the 36 was necessary. As mentioned yesterday, I had asked the kids to bring in their workbooks so that I could correct and grade them.

Couple of problems, there were a lot of workbooks and 15 lessons to cover. Also, Tuesday evening, I had still been tired from the weekend and told myself that I could finish grading all the workbooks by today so that the students could have them back for the weekend. I'd actually gone to sleep early that night, to my present regret.

I began plowing through the books yesterday at 4, after classes and my Bulgarian lesson. I finished at 5:30, thirteen and a half hours later. Thankfully, my rigorous grave shift training at SEARHC in Sitka helped me through the night. Well into the morning, I never felt like I was giving the students less than could be expected of me. Although, if a bad grade did spring up, I double-checked to make sure it was as bad as I had labeled it.

My first class was at 7:30, and before I could successfully begin a light doze before class, my alarm went off. I showered, ate a light breakfast, and headed towards school through an incredibly thick fog with an immense pile of books.

My first class was the one I knew would be disappointed by their grades. I had given both of my eighth classes the same instructions, been clear on both sides that I wanted every activity completed, and what happens? I wind up grading them based on completion. Easier for me, probably, but incredibly disappointing nonetheless. It seems many of them haven't been writing down much of their work at all these last few weeks. You could say then, that it's a good thing I checked, but it's not as if it were a surpirse, and these are smart kids who live off their grades. They all should have perfected the book before giving it to me. It wouldn't have been a hellish thing to do. I did a lot harder work grading their tripe, after all.

So I got past the class o' let-down with only one student in a light state of tears, and even she was laughing by the end. Mission accomplished there, I reckon. She learned her lesson about keeping her work up-to-date under my regime, and had a halfway good time too.

The next two classes were 2 hour things with different 12th classes. With the knowledge that I'd be going on no night's sleep, I had constructed a lesson plan that would allow me to do next to nothing in class. The plan also turned out to do a great job pointing out the vast divide between the English level and attention spans of the two 12s.

I brought my collection of the Newsweeks Peace Corps sends us and handed them out. I asked the students to use them as an idea source and come up with a 5-10 minute scene they'd act out at the end of class. Nearly all of the first class was there and instantly leapt on the magazines and the project like it was the first food they had seen in weeks. An hour and a half later there were 5 good performances. We had also had an additional set of wet eyes. Something was really weird there. Normally she's the most chipper person in the class. Today, she asked me how to pronounce "Jewish," accused me of hating girls because I always talk to the guys in class, then wandered into and out of the room at odd intervals, talking into her cell phone and sniffling. It certainly wasn't my fault, I figured correctly, but there was also nothing I could do about it. Just plain odd.

As for the "talking to the guys accusation," I make every attempt, every day to figure out just what it is the girls would want to talk about with a male teacher. The guys come to me wanting to talk about vocabulary in American football, rap, or international econ publications, and all the girls do is sit on the sides of the room and giggle to each other for the time during class when I can't spend every moment calling on one of them to give me an answer to a question. I understand if they want to flirt occasionally, and I certainly understand the perpetual jawing, but I have to ask them to not come literally crying to me with accusations of neglect when they do nothing but act coy for the bulk of class.

Where were we? Great performaces, right. One of the groups staged a brilliantly censored hostage situation ("Put the gun down....stupid!") that ended with the culprit casually reaching for a cigarette behind his ear, only to be shot in the process. The "cop," holding a yardstick like a rifle, ran to the chalkboard and wrote in huge, scrawling letters "SMOKING SEVERELY DAMAGES YOUR HEALTH." They'd taken their cues from an article about trafficking, and a nearby cigarette ad, with the EU's warning that boders on parody and makes a person wonder why the company would place the ad at all. The upper two-thirds is the usual Marlboro ad, with horses and cowboys riding around, but the bottom thirs is a huge white block with that smoking sentence written in large, clinical black letters. I don't think anti-smoking ads are as powerful in the states. Anyway, they had pulled all that together in less that an 1 1/2 hours. Amazing.

Other sketches, all great, came from articles on Harry Potter, drunk driving, war in the Middle East and Halloween. The class was entertaining even, and they'd done it all in English (mostly). They'd even picked up some new vocab from the magazines. It was a good couple of hours.

The next class wouldn't have any of that "let's make the class easy today" stuff. For one, 18 of them were missing and had been gone the entire day. "Too cold out" was the excuse offered by the rest of the class. I had managed to gain one back after their class before mine, though. Go me!

I introduced the idea that had been so successful just minutes before to the 12 remaining students and sat back to watch the magic happen. A half hour later, it was pretty obvious the magic wasn't happening. The guys were all deep into conversations in Bulgarian about the cars in "Tip Sheet," or Arnold the body-builder, not the politician. The wall-hugging girls needed to be told what to do three times before they came up with the only "sketch" of the class, which was basically the four of them sitting around talking about the obesity epidemic in the world today.

I called the project DOA after the girls had done their thing before the break. And in the last hour I prodded, poked, and did whatever I could to figure out just what these guys wanted out of their English classes. They swear on their lives they don't want textbooks or worksheets, but that's really the only way to keep them in line. The hour was pretty hard to slog through.

I went through the motions in my second eighth class and, the day over, I went down to drop off the class' register in the teacher's room. I unwittingly stumbled on the teachers' meeting I had reminded myself to avoid not ten or fifteen minute before. My counterpart and another teacher beckoned me over to a seat and I listened to an hour and a half of Bulgarian prattle, where the biggest news was the unsubstantiated view that there was an increase in drugs on the premises. The door person doesn't know everyone, and can't keep the strangers out. The solution? Badges. Small badges with the school's logo attached to a strand like the kind a person would find on a nice hooded sweatshirt.

I asked my counterpart what the things would cost, seeing as the example displayed was pretty nice looking, and she had no idea. It turns out that students without badges will be turned away, and that all teachers will be expected to wear them too, to set a good example and all.

I swearm if half the money this school seems to dig up out of nowhere went to reasonable projects, it would be better off than a lot of schools in America. Instead we get this badges nonsense, and it's suddenly made me very tired again.

I'll be going to Sofia and Septemvri this weekend, and Varna on Tuesday for a seminar with an Oxford Prof of English, apparently. That last one is the school's deal, not mine, but I'm still looking forward to it.

2003-10-22T16:02:00.000+03:00

A LONGISH, INTERESTING WEEKEND: CONT'D
This is and will continue to be a hellishly busy week, so we'll have to finish off the weekend story in a quick way. Where was I? Oh yes, Saturday morning quickly turned into Saturday afternoon and while eating passable Chinese for lunch, the group discussed whether the afternoon would be better spent visiting a museum or napping. Somehow, the whole thing took so long that by the time we got around to it, the museum had closed, so the four of us went back to Kate's apartment for some relaxation. The rest of the night involved dinner at a mehana and a trip to one of Pleven's fine discos. Nothing of great interest happened until the next morning when I made French toast for most of the crew (Ryan backed me up when the next wave came over for brunch) and we all watched Rambo, dubbed on Bulgarian TV.

Never has that movie been so cleanly picked apart. We didn't even have full access to the dialogue, and frankly, with the first Rambo movie, you don't really need it. There were six mildly cynical volunteers in the room at the time, and every scene was ripped apart. "First Blood" became comedy, and it really isn't that bad a movie to begin with. It was all very good fun, but when the movie ended at 3:00, so did my time in Pleven.

I lived the farthest away and was the first to leave. It's awfully sad being the first to leave a weekend-long party. You know that it's Sunday, and chances are that everything will wind down without much fanfare. But there's always that tinge of fear that something really cool or fun will happen right after you leave. It hurts. But I had to go, or wait until 3:30 in the morning for the first bus out of Pleven to Silistra the next day, which really wasn't an option.

I had learned from reliable sources that a bus stops in Pleven at 3:30 in the afternoon, but that it was on a private line and not on the bus station's schedule. When I got to the station, I asked information if she had heard of such a bus, and she flatly denied knowing of such a bus or where it might stop. Since my faith in Bulgarian information services is approaching zero along an asymptotic line, I allowed her pessism to caution me, but not put me off of the bus option entirely.

I waited out in the cold rain until 4:00 for the bus to come, and it never came. 4:00 was my cut-off time for one reason alone: 4:15 was the last possible moment I could get any kind of a ride north out of Pleven. Another volunteer and I had worked it out when he needed to get out of town one day and we learned too late that the last scheduled bus was at one or thereabouts.

The plan involved taking a train from Pleven two hours east to Gorna Oryahovitsa. From there, one waits a half hour for the train from Gorna to Ruse. Three hours later, one gets to Ruse and waits an hour for the last bus out of Ruse east toward Silistra.

A bus ride from Pleven straight to Silistra would take four hours and cost ten leva. This trip would last from 4 until midnight and cost 11 leva. I'm not planning on going that route again.

The trip to Gorna was the biggest pain. As mentioned, the day was wet and ice cold. The train I had to catch was a "fast train" from Sofia to Varna. "Fast trains," despite their catchy names, can be iffy. This one, for example, seems to stop at every town along the way as it goes to the coast. By the time it reached Pleven, it was already full to bursting, and I had to ride the two hours standing up next to a packed passenger compartment, trying as best I could to read in order to pass the time.

Finally reaching Gorna, I hopped off the train, bought a ticket to Ruse, and got on the waiting "passenger train" to Ruse as soon as possible. "Passenger trains" are the slowest trains, and tend to stop at sheep paddocks and tents along the track if they think someone will get on board. Fortunately, this train was nigh empty at Gorna.

I relaxed in an empty compartment until an elderly rail worker came in with a flashlight and a plastic bottle of beer. I was worried that he'd pound me with conversation, but we just exchanged a few pleasantries, told each other where we were going, and went to our activities. He drank and ate peanuts, and I read and ate Kit Kat bars (my only food since the morning's French toast). He got off at some village halfway to Ruse, but two more people quickly came into the compartment.

Neither was too chatty (It's not that I'm anti-social around Bulgarians, just that I was already a bit tired of the whole day) and both were in fact very helpful. One gave me the time when I asked for it since my cell phone's batteries had petered out earlier in the day and left me without a watch. The other pointed out that the dark blur of nothingness we were approaching was Ruse when we got there.

I trudged to the bus station, bought a Bulgarian hamburger at the snack bar, and waited for the 10 o'clock bus with about five other people. When it came, I collapsed into the warm, comfortable seat and slept until we hit Silistra at 12:15 or so. Weekend over.

Tuesday, my eighth grade students turned in their workbooks for grading. I hadn't gotten a strategy for grading the things going until last week or so, so I have 15 units to check for each student. Each unit is 2 pages, and there are about 60 students in my two classes. 1,800 pages to look over. Hopefully before tomorrow. It'll be a long and tedious night. See you on the other side.

2003-10-20T17:43:00.000+03:00

A LONGISH, INTERESTING WEEKEND
A more provacative headline has never been written. I'll bet you're just begging to know what made this weekend so "interesting," aren't you? Well, I reckon I oughtta tell you, maybe you'll agree with me on the "interesting" part. 'Course, you might agree on the "longish" part too, but such are the chances I have to take every now and then.

It started on Friday, as weekends often do, with a bus trip down to Pleven, a city in centerish part of Bulgaria. I left Silistra at eleven, and hopped a bus that got me to Pleven around 3:30. It's a four and a half hour trip that would probably be closer to two and a half or three with a proper highway system in the country. Friday was wet and cold, just like the rest of the weekend, and the bus' windows were all fogged over, precluding any kind of view. It gave me time to keep reading through The Once and Future King, which I can't say gets better as it goes along, but certainly maintains quality. Anyway, I wound up in Pleven about a 150 pages ahead, what with the frequent breaks required when one reads at the tail end of a packed bus. I hoofed it to Kate's apartment (Kate was the birthday girl this weekend) in the rain and went upstairs.

We talked for a while about the fun times and the hard times we've had teaching, then we went to the classes she still had to teach that day. Working together, we quickly got through two hours of eleventh grade English and laughed without end at the funny things the British call people. "Dustman" for "garbage man" really cracked us up.

After the teaching, we went to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Josh, another Plevenite volunteer, was having dinner with a friend of his, and we joined him. We had a great conversation about everything and an okay Bulgarian meal, and Kate and I split off to finish off the evening at a cafe. When we got back to her place, we flipped on the TV, laughed at MTV's "Shady Family Weekend," and went to bed.

The Shady Family was a conversation piece throughout the weekend. Kate insists that it shouldn't be called the Shady Family because Dr. Dre is the patriarch and has nothing really to do with the whole "Slim Shady" identity. But since Eminem, "Fiddy Cent," and Obie Trice all fall under the Shady Records label, the rest of us were pretty content to argue that the "Shady" nom should stand. We all agreed that the whole MTV idea has become self parody and a 24 hour-a-day SNL sketch. We're particularly fond of the "Artist Bite" featuring the Black Eyed Peas talking about being "conscious cats." This is the kind of thing Bulgarian volunteers talk about when the TV is on and we want to get away from our lives in country.

The next morning, Kate made some French toast and I cleaned up the kitchen while she was getting ready for the day. We met other volunteers at a cafe and I went into a small fury when I heard that Aaron, a former Septemvri pal and incredibly close neighbor of Pleven in Lovech, had bailed on the weekend. I called him, and he said "it's too cold." While wondering what the hell he was planning on doing when winter actually hits, I told him the weekend would be a little less perfect without him around, but left his life in his own hands. He then expected me to use my cell phone bill to talk to him about how life and teaching were going. I gave him a quick summary and shuffled him off the line. Sigh.

Sadly, we're going to have to continue this little tale tomorrow. "The Italian Job" is playing at the theater and I have the idea that this might be the only day when I can squeeze in time to watch it. Till tomorrow then.

2003-10-16T16:05:00.000+03:00

SIX MONTHS OF SERVICE AND ONE MONTH OF TEACHING GONE. TIME DOES FLY
Next Tuesday, we B-13s will have been in Bulgaria for six months. All in all, time has blazed by with incredible speed. There were the strange weeks, like the first one in Strelcha, where each day seemed to last forever, but for reasons no one seems to be able to put a finger on. We were all having fun, learning the basics of the language, exploring a village in a country none of us had seen, and none of it at all was very boring (There were some exceptions. But those will have to go unnamed). It all led me to believe that the Strelcha life was the way to go about doing things. I'd certainly never want to spend my gray years in that..um...interesting place, but the week itself seems to be a good way of doing things. Go into a country or place you've never seen before and learn as much as your mind can in the span of a week. It will get a person to see the world, that's for sure. Might be a little rough on the wallet though.

After Strelcha came the longest, strangest day ever. It was the day before the orthodox Easter here in Bulgaria, and we were all to meet our host families, the people with whom we'd be living for the next three months. I knew four questions then, and fewer other phrases in Bulgarian. My host family's daughter was a nursing student in Sofia, and spoke a little English, but toward the end of the three months, we wound up speaking in Bulgarian to each other. Looking back, her tour of Septemvri (my new 3 month home) probably confused me more than it helped. Nice enough girl, though.

Once she had shown me the house, she let me stay in my room and get things organized, shutting the door behind her. I think my family had really taken the Peace Corps' lectures on privacy to heart. Every ounce of my privacy was protected. Not that I'm one to go around feeling violated when a stranger asks me the time, but it was nice knowing that I could always go to my room and read for a while. That day I didn't read, as a matter of fact I don't remember doing much of anything for the two hours between the time she dropped me off at the room and dinner. I just sat there and wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into. THESE PEOPLE DIDN'T EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH! Maybe I napped for a half hour or so. Who knows.

Later that night, round midnight actually, we all went to the church to celebrate the first moments of Easter with the rest of the town. We had collected one of the town's English teachers on the way and she served well as a translator. She also turned out to be the teacher Aaron and I would work with for the three months in Septemvri. She spoke English well, but, well...she was a pretty good teacher. We'll leave it at that.

At the church, we walked in and lit candles, placing them on candelabras already overstuffed by the horde outside and inside the church. It was a fire hazard, if you ask me, and I noticed that most of the carpeting and icons had been removed for the Easter festivities. When we left the church, we huddled in the cold outside the church (It was the last cold I'd feel until September, as it turned out) and waited for the big walking around the cathedral ceremony. While we were waiting, Christen (another volunteer in Septemvri) and her family came up and I had my first "Thank God it's another American!" moment. It was my first, and still the greatest. Just seeing Christen and talking with her on the walk home got me through the rest of the weekend. I have every second of her approach burned happily in mind.

Three months of Bulgarian and TEFL lessons. Chess games on a terrace at sunset. Herds of oxen and cattle moving through city streets. Weightlifting using the host family's kid as an ecstatic dumbell. Home-cooked meals whenever I decided to come home from basketball, the internet club, or class. Gone in a blink.

Then came Silistra, where 2 months of anticipation of teaching turned into boredom, then complete and utter confusion when school actually started. Now classes are fun, I go to school ready to get through a day and get these kids speaking English, and even though it's still confusing, the schedule offers new challenges every day. Today, for example, it said I was supposed to be in room 307 with 12A. There was another class in 307 that claimed they had some kind of right to be there. A student from 12A and I went back to the Teacher's Room, looked at the schedule again, and sure enough, there was 12A: room 307. There was one free room in the building listed, we checked that out, but it wasn't free. I was forced to give into the students' demands for a field trip to a local cafe. There we talked about all kinds of things, and in English too. I explained the rules of American football to a few of the guys, who then pointed out a few of the finer aspects of soccer. It's all about building vocabulary.

At any rate, everyone in the class spoke English at the cafe, when I was within earshot anyway. So I'm calling the class a success. My only other option, as I see it, was to cancel the class, and that would have been unacceptable.

This weekend, I'll be going to Pleven, to help celebrate another volunteer's birthday...and discuss busines, of course. So there won't be anything new until Monday, probably. Changes are coming to the site soon, too. I promise.

2003-10-14T17:01:00.000+03:00

IN MY FREE TIME I WALK AND SOMETIMES I SHOP
There's some good, old-fashioned basic English for ya, the kind of stuff we're still working with in my eighth grade classes. The strange thing was that for the first few weeks (The first month retrospective will be coming soon) it was like a different language, and gave me the same kind of headache I still get speaking Bulgarian. Of course, it's a lot easier to learn the basics ofyour own language than it is to learn the details of a foreign language, so the headaches are gone after class. And I can safely write headlines in basic English without fear of reprisal from my head.

Now, the preamble.

Getting to the internet club today, I did what I normally do when I'm not pressured for time. I took a route that I'd never walked before and saw the small things about Silistra that aren't necessarily worth writing about, but are somehow interesting nonetheless. What may well be worth writing about is the Romanian-Bulgarian border, which I walked along today. I didn't mean to walk along it, and it was pretty out of the way, but it just kind of happened.

It started with some small farms. There were tukeys and chickens out in the street nibbling on seeds; Goats penned up eating hay and goats free in yards eating garbage and leaves; And, as always, the usual menagerie of animals that I've gotten used to seeing on my walks. New these days are the vineyards I could see beyond the farms that gave me the first idea I was skirting along Romania. The leaves are all turning orange and brown, giving the hills a nice burnished look. Leaves are beginning to change along the streets too, but they seem to rather enjoy just turning brown and dying, without all the pain of turning to beautiful colors.

I finally placed my location when I saw the fence. The chain-link border fence is an interesting thing. It stands 3 meters high, is painted black along its length and is topped with 4 strands of barbed wire jutting out a foot on either side. It doesn't necessarily look imposing. Barbed wire is common in Bulgaria to keep animals in yards, and it certainly isn't razor wire at the top of the fence.

It simply manages to look just a little too imposing for the thing its guarding. Here, it seemed to be surrounding the farms. Down the road, it runs along the east end of the graveyard. Both are certainly worthy of a fence, but the border fence just looks a little inappropriate. Makes it easy to find the border though.

Which in no way leads us to the body of this post. As promised yesterday, I'm going to discuss the horrifying phenomenon of Bulgarian grocery stores. Pictures will come later, but for the moment imagine a large empty room with a tiled floor. Line the walls with food stuffs and general household supplies, and put in a counter running along the walls a meter in front of the shelves of food. That's your Bulgarian grocery supplier. The middle of the store, often some 20 or 25 square feet of space, is left empty and never used but for the fleeting moments when a customer pays it some attention by stepping on it to leave the store. There is always a backroom, and presumably a large refrigerator. Tucked near the counter or in some available crevice are the small freezer units containing ice cream and ground "whatever" that passes for meat.

Behind the counter stand as many as 3 attendants manning never more than 2 cash registers. It is the attendants' job to grab the food for customers. If the customers touch the food before money is exchanged, I think a little part of the employee dies of sadness. For most people, the workers demand that they, and only they, should have access to the freezer units on the other side of the counter. Since this means that they have to walk all the way around the counter to get my cup of ice cream or slab of pseudo-meat, I always take the liberty of opening the lid and reaching in for the thing myself. It's hard, but I have years of practice at Sea Mart and Ralph's to thank for my ability to pull my hand out before it freezes to the contents within the tricky box.

This counter-based system also means that lines, not really a joy anyway in express check-out America, only get more annoying. If someone has a miles long list, they're bound to bring it out when a half dozen people are standing behind them. And of course, by discussing lines, I lied about their very existence in Bulgaria. Anyone only wanting one or two items can push his way to the front of the mob surrounding the man or woman with the Christmas list of food. Put money down, and demand that he be served now. It adds to the atmosphere quite a bit.

Is there anything positive to add about grocery stores here? No, not that I can think of. They have the examples to make themselves better. There are convenience stores here and the larger cities have grocery stores the size of your average Ralph's or Albertson's, but the corner grocery (the heavy majority in Bulgaria) stands in stark defense of their traditions, and the vast middles of thousands of stores around the country remain unfilled.

2003-10-13T17:04:00.000+03:00

THE JOY OF BEING TUTORED
Every Monday and Wednesday, I go to an apartment up near the river to visit my Bulgarian tutor for a couple of hours. I say "visit," because it's probably the most relaxing time of the week. I ring the bell, she greets me, invites me in and sets me down at a table in the living room. Every day, and for every lesson, she has a cup of coffee and a small plate of snacks set out for me. I sit, we talk for a while in Bulgarian about the day, and jump into the lesson she's prepared. Today, for example, I did exercises about the finer points of the past tense and the Bulgarian versions of "who" and "which." This goes on for two hours, and Dora refills my coffee cup whenever it gets low.

I have no idea why the lessons themselves are so particularly relaxing, I guess because there isn't any pressure. Dora's constantly telling me how fast I work and study, and I think she has a bit of trouble creating lessons long enough to get me through two hours of study alone. The problem so far, as I see it, is that even though I may study quickly, it's only because I comprehend what's happening and correct myself quickly. I have trouble remembering the little details that trip me up, so we had to spend most of the first month of study on pronouns. While remembering the finer points of "cvoyat," "moyat," etc. may well be one of the harder parts of Bulgarian, I still felt bad when she had to correct me on the same mistake I had made two days before.

I do think, though, that Dora understands that she is essentially my only source for conversation in Bulgarian. While I speak about business matters with other non-English teachers in school, and get by with a little more than a series of grunts and pokes at a grocery store (Ooh--grocery stores--that's tomorrow's post. Unless something else comes up), I don't really have that many opportunities to just talk in Bulgarian. This probably explains why she's so forgiving and why she's surprised when there's any progress at all.

She doesn't really speak that much English, but knows enough to make certain parts of the lessons easier. Though much of the time on vocab is spent looking at the dictionary, she has used the textbooks given to her by me and a past volunteer to figure out the key words in grammar. So we can either say "glagoli" or "verbs." Makes things go a little bit easier at times, and it means lessons never devolve into some half-English lesson/half-Bulgarian lesson monstrosity.

At any rate, I go in each Monday and Wednesday counting on a time of relaxation, no pressure, and at the same time education. It's an awfully good way to spend an afternoon.

2003-10-11T12:53:00.000+03:00

LOOKING TOWARD BETTER TIMES
This week, the third of teaching, was better than the first two. I'm learning to balance discipline and being the cool teacher, looking for some kind of way to keep the kids happy and keep them from talking all the time. The classes, across the board, are getting easier to teach and leaving me with fewer and lighter headaches at the end of the day. But, I'm still tired it's been a long week and a it'll be a busy day, so I'm going to have to slack once again. We'll get back to semi-regularly scheduled programming Monday.

2003-10-08T16:19:00.000+03:00

ARNIE WINS: THE CRUCIAL BULGARIAN PERSPECTIVE
"So, did everyone hear that Arnold Schwarzenegger won the election in California?" I asked my eighth graders this morning. I got a couple of surprised looks, but most, understandably, didn't seem to care that much. It's big news here in Bulgaria, but even in America it takes a lot to get eighth graders interested in politics to the point where they flip on CNN before school to see who won last night's election.

Before I could shrug and move on to the textbook, a kid named Zladtko raised his hand and started talking before I called on him. Zladtko's the kind of kid on whose report card I would write "A joy to have in class!" if I were the kind of teacher to write that stuff. He's always in class, participating, and has this intense desire to learn English. Good kid.

Anyway, he says in solid English "There was this movie on TV, with Sylvester Stallone, where twenty years in the future Schwarzenneger is president."

Demolition Man. A Stallone classic from a decade ago. I knew what Zladtko was talking about before he had finished, for the very thought of the scene in that movie had scarred my own mind weeks before when I watched a dubbed version of it on Bulgarian TV. I remembered the key dialogue because it was pretty much the only clever line in the movie.

Unfortunately, it isn't on IMDB's memorable quotes page for the movie. For some relevant details, you can go to Blogcritic's post on the subject here. Basically, the gist is that, many years in the future, Sandra Bullock and Stallone pass the Schwarzenneger Presidential Library in the futuristic city of San Angeles. "Schwarzenegger Memorial Library?" Stallone's recently unfrozen caveman policeperson asks, begging for Bullock's exposition/joke. "Yes, in the early part of the century, because he was so popular, congress passed an amendment allowing a person not born in America to become president," Bullock says, more or less. They move on without comment, the joke completed.

What really bugs me is that the movie seems to have the whole thing right on schedule. Granted, it would be nigh impossible to get the necessary amendment through congress and all of the necessary states, but if Arnie turns California around...who knows.

Later, my Bulgarian tutor and I spent the last half of our lesson going over vocabulary for elections. She wanted me to clarify a report she had heard on the news that Arnold hadn't yet won, and that they wouldn't know who had until November. I told her that it was all up to counting, and that every vote had to be counted, but that it wasn't really close enough to warrant any fear of a recount.

In any case, there aren't any riots in the streets or parties in the bars. Just a mention of Demolition Man. Back to you in the studio, Richard.

2003-10-06T16:31:00.000+03:00

TRAPPED!
Watching CNN's weather report this morning, I noticed the heavy read and yellow patch spread all over southeastern Europe. Maybe it was because I was too busy enjoying the French toast I had made for myself, but I chose to overlook that mess and went to school in nothing but a light wool shirt and khakis. The cloud cover was thick, but high. If rain came, chances are it would probably come late. Well, it has come, and it's left me in the internet club twenty minutes away from my apartment.

Of course, it's hard to take CNN International seriously when, a day before voting even starts, they're already doing around the clock coverage of the California elections. And not a lick of it is taken seriously. They've sent Richard Quest to LA, and the whole thing is coming off as a poor man's Daily Show. He went to Muscle Beach, where the guys said that since it was so hard to get and keep a good body, Arnold must be the kind of guy who wants to work. Then Quest stands on Hollywood Blvd, giving live reports and reading graphics that detail what the porn star candidate would do to balance the budget.

I'm okay with not taking the California elections seriously. They're pretty silly to begin with, and if I were a resident I would have no idea who to vote for. Probably Bustamante, but that's a close call among 3 or 4 just slightly greater evils. But if a channel devoted to news isn't taking something seriously, should they really open each half hour with a splash graphic and a live report from goofy Brit extraordinaire Quest? And do the latest polls need to be repeated every half hour? Maybe we could get more news on Syria, maybe, hm? That somehow seems a little more international than rumors about Arnie's groping habits.

Anyway, rain, we were talking about rain. It has completely blown my plans for the evening. I was going to stop by the market and pick up some fresh veggies for dinner tonight, but since the little rooves over the market stalls do little to protect the vendors, all but the most desperate pack up and leave by late afternoon, and I'm really tired of getting Siamese twin tomatoes from desperate vendors. This leaves me with a dinner of rice, ham, and whatever else I can toss in the mix. Good, but not what I was hoping for.

The best thing about the rain will be the opportunity to curl up and read after I've finished grading and planning for tomorrow. For some reason, The Once and Future King is the most comfortable book I've read--ever. Alone, reading it is somehow like wrapping up in a woolen blanket, but if you factor in rain, a heater, and an actual woolen blanket, it's heaven. I can't quite describe how this works, but White really makes you feel like Camelot was just about the most perfect place a boy could ever grow up. Almost every paragraph makes me chuckle and feel pretty good, and when they don't work out like that, it's usually to better set up a later paragraph that does comfort and bring ever-increasing joy. Quite a book by page 200, I kind of wish it would never end, and that Arthur would never grow up. But, some things just have to happen. Like rain, I suppose.

BY THE WAY...This is one of my favorite photos...ever. The idea of a human being getting this much attention, let alone dealing with it without splitting his skull, is mind-numbing. I haven't the foggiest idea how it's done.

2003-10-05T18:13:00.000+03:00

THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF BULGARIA
We can't worry about (the distraction factor), and I don't think he's going to worry about that. If we go out on the basketball court and win basketball games, y'all will start talking about us winning. If we go 30-5, y'all ain't going to talk about nothing else. If we go 40-2, what (are) you going to talk about? Y'all going to want to talk about how we got 40 wins and two losses. So once we start playing basketball and winning, y'all ain't even going to talk about that. Y'all going to talk about how dominant of a basketball team we are.

If--in any other season--Gary Payton, in a Laker uniform, predicted that his team might go 40-2 before training camp had even started, the press would have freaked over just that one sentence. An entire news cycle could have been created out of this one quote. Mindless predictions, of course, being the professional player's main weakness and the media's great joy. That's why, in an odd way, I think that Kobe Bryant's little court issue is good for the team at this point. If he's convicted, well, that's another story for both him and the team. But as it is, he's putting most of the team's media weight on his shoulders.

Instead of reporters flocking around a team with Karl Malone, Gary Payton, and the thus far under-appreciated Bryon Russel, everybody wants to talk to and about Kobe. The other Lakers have little or no pressure entering the season. Payton can say that the team will go 81-1 if he wants, and no one would even bother to ask him which team would beat the Lakers once.

If there's one thing I am worried about, it's the flow of opinion in the case--at least the opinions I can read about on ESPN.com. On TV CNN International only gives monthly check-ups on the case on World Sport and Euronews would sooner be caught dead than discuss rumors in that silly game involving a basket. Most lawyers seem to think the DA must have some kind of mountain of evidence behind him to even try pulling off a case like this, and Kobe's saying "terrified" a lot lately. We'll just have to see how it goes.

European news has a habit of doing three things: portraying all US military soldiers as inept, bumbling yokels; Using for a story's interview segment one staff sergeant (usually eating) who isn't at all happy with the direction things are going and hates his government for leaving him in Iraq; And refusing to show the slightest bit of good news or positive developments.

European news can only be called a necessary evil and left at that. I need some news, some info, and CNN and Euronews are really the best I can do. Again, the internet comes in handy. Although this isn't news about developments or hard facts about what's being done, it's something far more important. I got it in an e-mail from someone presently serving in Iraq, and she seemed to find it inspirational. For those of us not dealing with the living hell of Iraq weather and fear, it's a good reminder that there are people risking themselves to keep America secure. WMDs or no WMDs, a solid and democratic government in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole will help America and is something to fight for, and the people that do the fighting deserve immortal respect for it.

And that leaves me here, in Bulgaria, where I have answered the president's call (even though my application was already in before the SOU address where he asked for more of them) and constantly discuss with other volunteers our role in America's future. Cultural imperialists, some would call us. Maybe that fits, but as far as culture goes, if you accept it, that's really your problem now, isn't it? I mean, an Eastern European country doesn't have to line up around the block to eat McDonalds' swill, but they do. They also carry bags that say "Abibas" in large letters because they recognize the logo.

As it does in America, the size of my shoes (17 in the states, 52 here) comes up in every conversation. But when I leave, I really couldn't care less if a few more Bulgarians wear New Balances because they saw my shoes. I'm here, in the best of my estimation, to show Bulgaria the best of America, and that the country goes far beyond what they see on CSI. And also, when all is said and done, to bring back the best of Bulgaria and convince Americans that it is not, in fact, in South America. That's all part of the goal anyway. We all have to do something.

2003-10-04T17:28:00.000+03:00

STRANGE WEEK, STRANGE DAYS
This morning hopefully saw the end of a very odd week. It all began Monday (as weeks usually do), when I had seen some orphans in town and told them I'd come up to the orphange Saturday. However, with Thursday came news of some kind of school picnic in a nearby village. The orphans would have to wait until next weekend. A bus was supposed to pick up all the teachers at 8:45 this morning at a place near the school. For some reason, I somehow misremembered this as 7:45 and had set my alarm last night for 7:00. Come this morning, I woke up and noticed that it was far too light out for 7:00. I looked at the clock and read 7:50. Well, shucks. I have, in the past, had a habit of sleeping clear through the motions of shutting off an alarm, and I suppose that's what happened here. It's the first time it's happened in Bulgaria though. Looks like I might have to go back to a double alarm system. Oh well, best to learn it in a situation like this. I decided to take the morning slow and visit the orphans later in the day.

So I recieved a call at 8:50 from a teacher wondering where I was. I told her that I had overslept and asked her to give my apologies to other teachers. Then I had a small breakfast, watched a little news and prepared to head up the hill.

The morning with the orphans sums up this week pretty well, a lot happened, but it was all very random, very tiring, and not very easy to write about. There was no common theme, nothing to hold things together, so I just kind of sat around and let the kids drag me wherever they needed me. I arrived at eleven so I would have a set time limit of two hours that I could depend on. The other volunteer in town who spends time with the orphans taught me the little trick of using the kids' lunch as an easy out. When I arrived, all the kids who recognized me shouted batko(brother, or, I suppose, "bro"), and ran to greet me. I shook hands, picked up some of the kids who wanted to be picked up, and went down to the basketball court, which seemed to be where the majority of the kids wanted me to go.

Unfortunately, other kids were having a soccer match, so I told the kids who were with me that we should do something else. Then began what must have been an hour of lifting kids, piggy back rides, thumb/arm wrestling, describing the various details of my shoes, and doing chin-ups. When the basketball court finally opened up, I wound up playing while giving kids piggy back rides and listening to every single kid's constant cry of "look!" They were all over the baskets and jungle gym, climbing, hanging upside down, doing anything and everything to attract my attention.

Before I collapsed from exhaustion, we went inside where I helped a kid with his English, and watched some Bulgarian music videos with the kids. Lunchtime came, goodbyes were exchanged, and vague promises for a return in a couple of weeks were made.

The afternoon is all about relaxing, letting the week roll off, and preparing for next week. Relaxing has been big recently. For that very purpose, I saw a bunch of movies this week. The summer movie season has finally arrived in northeast Bulgaria, and it's only October! On my way home from Balchik last weekend, I watched Charlie's Angels 2 for the equivalent of a buck. About what it was worth, too. It was entertaining, sure. Good? No, but entertaining. Would I have payed 10 bucks to see it in a good theater in LA? No, but as long as you're not in a major city in Bulgaria, every movie is cheap, and every one is worth going to. I watched Half Past Dead a few weeks ago, for crying out loud, and was actually able to enjoy myself without asking what I was paying for.

I closed the week out with the Hulk in its last day on Thursday and Bruce Almighty on Friday. The Hulk is probably the first movie I've seen this summer that I might possibly consider remembering when I walk through the hallowed aisles of Best Buy after the return home. Not to say it was a vision of comic book movie perfection, but it has that feel of a movie that'll make me say, five years down the line, at about 8 on a Wednesday night, "gee, I'd kinda like to watch the Hulk right now. Let's pop in the DVD!" Can't explain it, and it's pretty rare with me. The best I could do is compare it with The Fugitive, Gladiator, and Braveheart, but those are really on a different level than The Hulk. Oh well.

Strangely, I remember very little about Bruce Almighty, except that the Bulgarians didn't laugh at anything I laughed at and vice versa. They were huge on the scene where Bruce messes with the new anchor's words, but I chuckled and then after 10 seconds thought the gag was running a bit long. And most of the one-liners that got a guffaw out of me went right over the heads of everybody else in the theater. It was strange. But stranger is the fact that Jim Carrey seems to be embracing Michael Keaton's career at this point. This movie had that Multiplicity edge, the kind of movie that'll come on at 9:00 on Cinemax and cause my mom to say "Wow, I could go to sleep with this!" And Jimmy, ever since Liar Liar, has been caught in a groundhog day of movies that use a story like the one from Groundhog Day. Each has involved a troubled relationship, him getting some weird power, abusing, but finally using it to fix the relationship. It's a standard storyline sure, but it's all Jim Carrey does these days. Not sure what to think about that.

Oh well, teaching went well this week. The combination of afternoon and morning classes has actually reduced complications a bit and done little harm except pack the school and cause the little store on the first floor to run out of every snack or drink I'd want to buy during the day.

Thursday, my busiest day, was a bit of a pain. I hadn't brought my own water and the store had run out, so I went through my last four classes thirsty. The fact that those last four classes were also getting bugged by the heat of the day and weren't in much of a mood to speak English didn't make things easier. We managed to crawl through together and get actual learning done, but five minutes before school was supposed to end my eighth graders escalated into rowdiness. At the peak, one girl who had been annoying all day asked if the class could leave early. This made me laugh. I went into my fanciful dreamland voice, adapted from Homer's, and said "Of course you can leave early, because you've been so good and attentive all day and haven't bugged me once." Most of the class laughed, but two of the day's more annoying kids (including the girl who had asked), taking me seriously or testing me, stood up. It's actually what I wanted. I changed on a dime and shouted as vicously as my dry throat would allow "sit down!" More chuckles from the good kids, and actual fear in the eyes of the annoying ones. Perfection.

It's always been my motto that ruling through fear is never the way to go. But I guess that sometimes getting respect means making sure the kids know that rule by fear is a possibility.

2003-10-01T20:55:00.000+03:00

BETTER TEACHING THROUGH LYING
One of those strange memories of mine is an activity my first grade teacher, Mrs. Knudson, ran. We were looking at a map of the United States with Alaska and Hawaii tucked away into the lower left corner as they often are, and she asked which state was largest. Being the good student I've always been, I raised my hand and answered "Texas," as it was the largest state on the map. She happily told me I was correct. Only after I moved to Alaska two years later did I reflect back on the blatancy of that lie, and I've kept track of teachers' little hypocrisies ever since.

Flash forward to yesterday afternoon. An activity in the textbook I was using for my 11th graders asked the students to identify words in a box as verbs, nouns, or both. The first three were "bank," "bus," and "buy." Now, how am I supposed to explain to students taking English as a third language that the correct answer to each of these is both? The book lists them as noun, noun, and verb and I was willing to go along with it. Even though I know several verb forms of bank and buy, explaining them to these students would be pretty irrelevant. So I lied, what else can I do? Little white lies make the teaching world go round, I suppose. I forgive Mrs. Knudson now, of course.

Beyond (or maybe because of) my now ritual deception, the school days are flowing along much more easily with every day passed. I'm building a solid relationship with most of the students and there's only one class really bugging me. But we'll leave that a mystery for now. Hopefully they'll settle down soon enough.

It's been a sparse week, but it's more because of my state at the end of each long day than a lack of things to write about. I'll try to get a giant, double entry out this weekend to make up for it. Of course, I've promised the orphans I'll head up the hill to visit them and play basketball on Saturday so relief from fatigue isn't necessarily expected. We'll see.

2003-09-30T00:11:00.000+03:00

THE LAST SHREDS OF SUMMER
There's something about an early fall afternoon, maybe the way the shadows stretch across a hot room at 3:00, that brings a sense of finality and doom. That's not to say I had a bad day--the opposite actually. Even though new bouts of confusion ran throughout the school, I've already developed a nice little shell to it, and have figured out ways to get the information I need without bugging half the faculty. Now the gloomy looks come from other teachers, who, thanks to the mastery of their own language, seem to be a week behind my curve. Wednesday is the big day when the afternoon and morning schedules come together and everyone looks forward to it like a hiker looks forward to a tick.

Until now, the mornings have belonged to the 8th, 9th and 12th grades and the afternoons have gone to the 10th and 11th. This strange bit of scheduling came out of the school’s move and the ten-odd rooms left unfinished at the start of the school year. Now that all of the rooms have chairs, the school is consolidating the schedule and all classes will be in the morning. What does this mean, of course? That the entire schedule has to be rearranged yet again. While other teachers see this as a crisis, I’ve already had my little emotional purge for the year (just scroll down if you haven’t seen it), and have a nice solid shell built up against change. I’m just going with the flow and enjoying the insanity as it comes.

Today’s class, then, went pretty well. Lesson plans can be constructed now that the expectations for what lessons I should be teaching are becoming clear. The school finally gave me textbooks, and I can see what lessons other teachers are teaching my classes. No more teaching the third conditional while other teachers are giving them the finer points of the letter ”c!” Miraculously, we also managed to get the mystery 11th class together for the first time. Granted, only 2/3 of the class showed up for the first lesson. But I’ll be darned if I didn’t give the ones that came their money’s worth.

All this has followed a weekend that saw the last remaining days of summer on the coast. I went to check out hotels in Balchik with two other volunteers. We need a place to hold the boy’s camp next year and it has to be relatively large, so we spent Saturday hitting every open hotel in the town and found 3 that are more or less suitable. We’ll see what we can get out of them. The evenings were spent complai—er, talking about—the first two weeks of school and our myriad problems. We also spent a last few minutes at the beach, where the water was warmer than the air after the long summer. The rest of the time we spent analyzing the three things we have full access to here in Bulgaria: music videos, cartoons, and the news.

In the course of these discussions, I learned that I completely misunderstood Dido’s “White Flag,” and that The Black Eyed Pea’s “Where is the Love” has a “We are the World” kind of popularity. It’ll make you feel good in an activist way now, but you’ll laugh at it a few years from now when everybody’s going overboard singing at karaoke clubs. I also learned that when the Simpsons, South Park, Futurama, and King of the Hill aren’t available, Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls become the best damn things you’ve ever seen on television. I mean, I liked Mojo Jojo before I went to Balchik, but after sharing the joys of these shows we all never had a chance to watch in America, he’s the best villain ever created, under any circumstances, although some have a certain, respectable fondness for “him.”

So that’s the overview for the moment, I wish I had time for more, but I began this post at home, went to dinner with a couple of other local volunteers, and came here right after. As it is, it’s getting past midnight and my first class is at 8ish. I might have more tomorrow, we’ll see.

2003-09-25T18:04:00.000+03:00

A BETTER TOMORROW
So, I'm confused. Why on Earth would Microsoft send me such a terrible patch? And so many times, too. I mean, they must have customer service reps sending this to everybody on their mailing lists 10 or 15 times a day, that's a lot of man hours. And all for something that makes my computer work worse. I haven't been this angry at Microsoft since I bought Windows ME.

Is this what certain people think when they open the "use this patch immediately" e-mails? I mean, I've been incredibly selective as far as handing out my e-mail address. I only leave it posted on the web site because there haven't been many, if any, bots scanning the site. Knock on wood and all. But now, I get as many as ten of these patch e-mails a day, which means somebody somewhere is opening them and running the program. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Anyway, the week has finished on a reasonably high note. All classes went well today. I tested the 12th class a bit by having them read a couple of articles I had printed off from The Onion. A lot of the vocab tripped them up, and I more or less had to explain all of the jokes. But I think many of them were nonetheless entertained while learning good, old-fashioned American English. Things will be awfully different when the students actually get textbooks.

I had a brief Bulgarian lesson as my tutor understood I was about to collapse after an incredibly long week. Then I came here to the internet club and have been relaxing in the peaceful glow of the computer monitor for the last 2 and a half hours.

Yup, it's another short entry and there won't be another until Monday I'm afraid. Tomorrow I have to go out to the coast and check out hotels for next year's boy's camp. I'm not particularly happy that the cloudy skies have made a reappearance these last couple of days. But business is business anyway, wouldn't have too much time to head down to the shore.

Until Monday then.

2003-09-24T17:10:00.000+03:00

DO I EVER FEEL BETTER
Thanks to everybody who expressed concern, commiseration, and good ol' get over it attitude about last night's post, but it really wasn't for you. No, it was all selfish, and it made me feel a heapload better. Today went by smoothly, but I have things I need to take care of so this post and all stories herein will have to be short.

I figured out most of the 11th grade issue today, woke up fresh and ready to go despite the ungodly hour, and have managed to squeeze in a good chunk of internet time.

Anyway, apologies for those who've come today expecting a nice, long conclusion to last night's tale o' woe. But duty calls.

2003-09-23T21:56:00.000+03:00

THANK GOD IT'S A SHORT WEEK
WARNING: Unmitigated and at-length venting and bitching ahead. Little evidence for claims, just venting. Read at your own risk.

Boy, do I have a headache. This isn't the kind of stress one expects after a four day weekend, but the perils of the first weeks of school in Silistra aren't things a person can prepare for. Yesterday was Independence Day here in Bulgaria. It was a national holiday but there wasn't a lot of celebration here in Silistra. A brass band played in the city center all afternoon, and there was a small ceremony in the evening. The day was relaxing and passed quietly. I prepared my lesson plans for today, watched a movie on TV ("The Mirror has Two Faces." It's terrifying what I'll watch if it isn't dubbed into Bulgarian. Oh well, Jeff Bridges is always fun to watch), and went to bed. Getting to school at nine for what I thought was my first class during 3rd period, I realized that sometime during Friday afternoon, when I had no classes and was at home, the schedule had changed and I had missed a class that had been moved to 2nd period. I sighed, muttered something or other under my breath, and went upstairs to teach my remaining eighth grade class.

I dedicated the hour to explaining my rules for the class. I'm going to enforce through grades, something these language school kids respect. I've decided to not go zero tolerance on attendance, but I warned them that skipping class will severely affect their participation grades, and will adversely affect my opinion of them when grading papers. After all, I said, I can only be so objective. They got the gist of what I was going for. The rest of the rules seemed pretty standard to me, lateness means loss in grade, I'll allow Bulgarian to be spoken, but not when I ask them to speak English, etc. Of course, I also made sure that they understood the rules can change, but only with warning. As far as that class was concerned, I thought things went pretty well.

When I got back to the teachers' room, the other English teacher teaching the class I missed brought up the fact that I had misread the schedule. I agreed, said the schedule had changed under my nose, and that I would take care of things with the students tomorrow. She understood, said that all teachers are going through schedule hell right now, and that the students will understand.

I'm not worried about their understanding, I'm worried about their respect, which seems to be the only thing one can gain in this first month. There are no textbooks, there is no permanent schedule. Teachers and the direcor keep telling me things will be better by the first of October, when the school's clean-up will finally be completed (supposedly). I see that date as just the beginning. I'm sure two more weeks of frustration will follow as the schedule is rearranged yet again to encompass the new rooms. In the meantime, the students aren't learning much of anything. I'm doing my level best to review everything they may have learned and establish new concepts, but they aren't here to learn. As other volunteers have noticed, the first month everywhere in Bulgaria is essentially one last month of vacation for the kids and they know it. What pisses me off is that there were two or three months of summer where all this scheduling crap, moving the school crap, and textbook crap could have been taken care of, but BY ALL MEANS THE PRECIOUS MONTH OF AUGUST MUST BE PRESERVED FOR TRAVEL TO VILLAGES AND THE BLACK SEA. NO WORK MAY BE DONE DURING AUGUST.

And the problem is, it really isn't anyone's fault. And there isn't anything that could have helped the situation. I know I pointed out the flaws in waiting until the last minute several times and my counterpart agreed. But the director could only shrug and give perfectly plausible reasons for the fault being higher up the bureaucracy ladder. These are the challenges of Peace Corps Bulgaria. There may not be a vast need for potable water or toilets, but there is a need for teachers and community workers who can deal with the mind games the country continues to play with both those who want to help and its own citizens. I brought with me the DVD of "Brazil," a Terry Gilliam classic about a man's fruitless struggle against an impenetrable wall of red tape, offices, and numbers. I can't watch it here, because on some days it just rings too true, and in some ways I fear the EU will only complicate things when it enters the picture five years down the road.

So what can be done? I always ask that to people who complain, I suppose I should ask myself here. And I, of course, have no ready-made answers other than the good ol' sword through the Gordian knot, to adopt a new school system and start over from square one, maybe with the US's system as a role model. The US is far, incredibly far, away fom perfection itself, but is probably a better model than the likes of Germany, which will probably have to reset its own terrible system. But reset isn't the answer for Bulgaria, too long/too much money. All we can do is keep complaining and hope enough of the right people hear sooner or later. Unfortunately, a malnourished education system isn't the stuff of riots or revolutions. I suppose strikes would be used elsewhere in the world, but that implies some kind of unity among the teachers. Here, the teachers are more worried about getting food on the table than organizing powerful unions in their spare time.

Of course, I'm still new here. Maybe I'm missing something.

Anyway, day goes on, I have Bulgarian lessons at 3. But as the assitant director sat at the table, changing the schedule by the hour, I noticed that my mystery 11th grade class had been shifted to Tuesday afternoons. No room was listed because the class is supposed to be an amalgamation of various classes within the eleventh grade. "Where is this class?" I asked the assistant director in Bulgarian. She sighed. "I don't know. There aren't any students for it yet." The teachers in the immediate area all chuckled. "So will there be a class, today?" I asked. "Probably not." She said. Phew. That clears things up for me.

So I waited in the teachers' room for the arrival of someone, anyone, who could help me get a straight answer about the mystery class. A Spanish teacher, who also speaks English and works on the local paper, asked how things were going for me. HAH! She didn't know what she was getting into. I explained to her the problem, she did a little detective work, and said that no, there probably wouldn't be a class today. But by tomorrow there might be information. "Probably," "might," these are the words I've been hearing a lot lately. Also, as an aside, this Spanish teacher told me that most of the English teachers think I talk too quickly, and they're disinclined to help me because they can't understand me when I speak. Good to know, and it makes sense seeing as I feel like I have to interrogate some of the English teachers to get information, but why was I hearing it for the first time from a Spanish teacher? I went home, set to come back after lunch and clear this stuff up.

Fortunately, Vanya, my counterpart English teacher and incredible person, was in the teachers' room. Unfortunately, I let most of the days frustrations fall upon her and we spent the next ten minutes apologizing to each other. She apologized for not keeping me informed, and I apologized for implying that some of it was her fault for not keeping me informed. I explained to her my tutoring predicament, and since she's a staunch supporter of my need to learn Bulgarian, she agreed that if there was no class, I should go learn the language. She said that she would stay behind, take care of the students when and if they come, and that we'd have a big meeting with the eleventh class and relevant teachers to figure this stuff out tomorrow. Vanya is, in every way, my only means of survival and sanity in this system. She seems just as confused as everyone else, but at least she regularly provides solutions that I would be incapable of arranging at this point. Despite my protestations to the opposite, she always acts like she's doing something wrong or as if she's not doing enough. Sometimes every other sentence begins with an apology. All I can do is laugh, thank her as much as I possibly can, and tell her that sometimes she seems to be the only one doing anything to help me out.

So I got to go to my Bulgarian lessons where my tutor continued to absolutely pound me with new vocabulary and grammar work. After the first lesson I thought she would ease in. A bit wrong there. These last few lessons have really been workouts. Bulgarian headaches after every oe of them. It's good stuff, and I know it, but it's hard work at the end of a long day. Fortunately, she always has coffee and cookies ready at the start of each lesson.

Vanya called in the middle of the session to tell me that I should really pay my phone bill, something I've forgotten about since I got my cell, and stopped using the wretched, but cheaper landline. If I don't, she told me, they'd disconnect the line and charge 200 leva for reconnection. The line is already dead, though still connected. I am incapable of using the phone. Why would they disconnect the line if it would be so expensive to reconnect? Who knows.

So I paid the 23 leva bill after class and went home to watch the UN speeches. Sigh. The usual stuff. Nothing inspiring there. Chirac seems just as obstructive and Bush seems just as disinclined to negotiate. Annan continues to be the ideal, soft-spoken moderator, which is something wholly inappropriate when dealing with the likes of Chirac and Bush. In a perfect world, Annan would be a perfect leader, but here his words just seem to float along. They sound good, but they can't be applied to anything short of a utopia where everybody has agreed to disagree and get along beforehand. I like the world as Kofi Annan imagines it, I wish it were that way, but Bush and Chirac live in the disappointing world as it is. And Annan seems to think they'll want to live in his.

Then dinner and the internet club. On the way here, I walked by a couple of kids who I know aren't in my classes. They said "hi," I said "hello," and walked on. They started giggling, and I more or less knew what was coming. At about 20 yards, the breeze carried me my first Silistra "motherf___er." I stopped, squeezed my fists until I noticed the pain, and decided that the day certainly didn't need any of that. Deep breath, and I walked on. These are the days that make the best days worth having. You live with them and move on.

Tomorrow'll be another long day of teaching and figuring things out . It all starts at 7:30 with 1st period 8th class. Yay!

UPDATE:Apparently, an organization is executing massed, all-purpose strikes in certain Bulgarian cities. Schools are participating. It's something, I suppose. Something needs to be done. Reorganization can only come from teachers who have the time and financial stability to be active [Note: This is, as always, my opinion. It does not reflect the opinion of the Pecace Corps or PC - Bulgaria.]

2003-09-21T19:19:00.000+03:00

STUCK IN LIMBO
My favorite computer is failing me. Of course, I should have known better. It was the only one available this time and it's never the only one available. The problem is that certain programs and web sites are crashing at very specific times. When I try to access my mail account, for example, IE gets a page fault and shuts down. ESPN.com is also a no-go. Fortunately, Blogger seems to working well, and I haven't had a problem with any of the blogs I usually check. So here we are, me writing. As soon as the two kids at the computer next-door leave, I'll probably take over their computer. They're playing a game new to these computers called "Neighbours." It's apparently pretty popular, there's always at least three or four kids playing it in this internet club. Let's see what happens if I google it.

Here we go. Took me three tries to find a page that didn't crash Explorer. It's apparently called "Neighbors From Hell," and it involves playing tricks on people in their homes. The linked review says "The original game play, excellent graphics and humour should prove to be a lot of fun for players of all ages." What I can't understand is that it's an adventure game, with English instructions and text. Ie, one must be able to read English to play the game, and I'm getting the idea that most of the kids playing it don't have a knowledge of English required to get by. Maybe I'm just underestimating them.

Anyway, the manic depressive fall weather happily continued its heatwave today. I'm doing all of my laundry under the assumption that the weather may go on a bender any night now and get all rainy and sad again. It's nice being able to leave the windows open again, and really nice being able to do more than a single load of clothes without draping them all over the apartment to dry.

That more or less covers the news for the evening. It seems like the kids next to me have settled in for a while. One of them went to the store to pick up one of the great Bulgarian lounging around snacks, straight pretzels. They may mean to stay for a while. Maybe I'll play that Neighbors game to see what all the fuss is about...

Nope, nothing doing. Picks up a page fault before it even starts. Oh well. What can I babble on about now? Ooh hold on, another computer just opened up, maybe I'll hop over to that one. Later.

2003-09-19T16:34:00.000+03:00

A LONG, STRANGE DAY
Thursday was the kind of day that reminds me why it's so hard to wake up when the alarm rings at 6 in the morning. I had an early class to teach at 7:30 and it can be a half-hour walk to school. I rolled around for a while in bed after turning on the light to make sure I wouldn't fall back to sleep. A bed just feels so infinitely comfortable when you compare it with the hazy mysteries of the day ahead.

At sometime around 6:20, I finally lugged myself from under the covers and did the things I need to do to get out and go to school.

Thursday, as the schedule is now, is my longest day of the week. I have two eigth grade classes sandwiching four hours of twelfth grade. The eigth graders were great again, and it's awfully nice teaching with some kind of plan as I am now. There aren't any textbooks to teach from yet, and as is the case in most Bulgarian schools, there won't be for another week or so. So, since I can only have so much "conversation time" with a group of students that have only a basic knowledge of the language, I've decided to teach with the materials and books I have on hand. Just getting the basics across. It seems to be working well enough.

The twelfth class is a bit different. I have two twelfth classes, once a week, for a block of two hours each. These students know what they're doing, and just talking to them would have been educational and fun, if I had only known where and when I was teaching them.

The last time I had seen the giant schedule for all the teachers was when it was in the teachers' room on Tuesday. It had since disappeared, and I figured that if there were changes it would reappear in the teachers' room. So my schedule said I was teaching 12B, and the list of rooms showed 12B in room 404. I went to room 404 and tried the door. Locked. This confused and worried me a little, so I went downstairs to the 2nd floor lounge, checked the list again, and saw that it was indeed 404. Since there were no English teachers in the lounge, I went into the smoking room, where I spent a little bit of time explaining my situation to one of the teachers there.

We went downstairs to the key room to get a key, and the people working there told us that there are no chairs in room 404, so there is no class in 404. Disgruntled, we walked back uspstairs to the director's office. Nope, there are no chairs in 404, we learned again, and nope nobody knew where 12B was. It turns out that this English teacher who was walking around with me had a class she needed to get to herself, so she told me to look for classes without teachers and went off. I went back upstairs to the fourth floor, walked past every room and saw nothing. Third floor, nothing. After checking all of the second floor, I came upon a Bulgarian teacher and asked her in Bulgarian if she knew where the twelth class was. She thought they were either in 103 or 104.

We went down and checked, 103 was locked and 104 had a class in session. The class was 12B, but they had Bulgarian literature. After a short conversation, a student was sent up to see what the schedule really was, I went with her to the director's office where we looked over two different schedules sitting on the desk. The newer one had me teaching 12A for the two hours in question, the older one had me teaching 12B. We went with the newer one since that seemed to be the one everybody but me was following, and I went back to the teachers' lounge to see where 12A was.

Getting to the classroom about 20 minutes late, I found half the class sitting around playing cards. The other half had left. I knew most of the students from my trip to Silistra during training and we had a great time talking about a variety of things mostly involving the meaning of lyrics in songs, my favorite movies, and how a person is supposed to follow the soccer season. I also, at their request, explained the rules to blackjack. Midway through, half of the half that had left came back and joined in on the conversation. The hour passed by quickly.

Moving on to 12B, I learned from the Bulgarian teacher leaving the class that they had to do a class thing for the video yearbook halfway through class out on the lawn. So we filled the time while they waited for the time to come. After the yearbook session, the class lost most of whatever rhythm it had and we wound up outside, just talking about whatever came to mind.

Things will be much more concrete next week.

So, after all that, I taught another eighth class for an easy hour and then went across town for two hours of tutoring. Despite being exhausted, or maybe because I was exhausted, I breezed through the lesson quickly and, after I had worked through the material prepared by my tutor, said I'd appreciate heading home a bit early.

I spent the rest of the night relaxing at home, happy in the knowlege that I have Fridays off. Ray Liotta was on Slavi Trifinov's talk show, promoting a movie he's making here in Bulgaria called Control. He did well in the interview, despite the strange "Godfather" sketch awkwardly thrown into the middle of the interview. He compared Slavi to Conan in the States because Slavi did things in a fresh way, unlike the stale way he said Letterman and Leno do things.

Most impressive in these Slavi interviews with American stars is the translator. They sit between the two and the audio shifts on to them or Slavi when appropriate. They're always on the ball and translating in mid-sentence. And, from what I was able to pick up from both sides, this one did a remarkable job on accuracy and meaning in what was said. It's almost fun to watch just for their work.

After the interview, I flipped off the TV and managed to make it back to the bed it had been so hard to get out of. Day over.

2003-09-17T20:51:00.000+03:00

BULGARIAN GOSSIP
Gossip in Bulgaria is a fascinating monster. In Septemvri it was pretty obvious that, living in a small foreign town, we’d be under a microscope. Aaron and I would play chess every night at a specific café around nine in the evening. By the next week, the employees on the day shift at the café were talking about our every habit to the other two volunteers in town. They told them what we drank, how many games we played, when we left, etc. And we were just minding our own business there.

Bulgarians in Septemvri also invented relationships among us, knew when one of us was sick or not in class, and could pretty much give a summary of each of our personal lives. They had us nailed down pretty well. Of course, this was the kind of town where kids yelled hello at us from 100 yards away, and where adults, working in their yards, would randomly call us over for conversation.

Here in Silistra, about three times the size, things always seem a bit more quiet. But I’m learning quickly that in most cases, this perceived quiet comes more often from my not living with a host family willing to tell me anything and everything they know. My Peace Corps philosophy so far is to mind my own business, pay attention, get into conversation when invited, and offer my opinion when asked. There will be time for offering the benefits of my weeks of teaching experience later. Until then, I’m learning from the teachers who know what they’re doing. Anyway, I suppose I’m not exactly asking to hear what’s being said about me.

Various little windows into the parallel universe of Rob-related gossip do come every now and then though. Last Friday, I went to a regional conference for foreign language teachers here in Silistra. At the end of a seminar, one of the other English teachers in my school carried on a conversation we’d been having since I arrived in town. It seems that the language school is the only major school in town without a language lab or resource room. As I do whenever it comes up, I told her that there isn’t much money for resource rooms available these days, but that I’d make it my project to determine cost and find whatever I can to get a room established.

Today Michael, a volunteer in nearby Tutrakan, was in town to attend a meeting discussing the new rules for testing eighth graders. He asked me about my language lab project and seemed surprised when I said I that, for all intents and purposes, I didn’t really have one. It seems one of his colleagues had taken back news from one of my colleagues that I already have a lab well underway, a budget drawn up, and the money accounted for. He then said that this “evidence” was used as leverage to try and get him to scrape together a language lab.

So there you go, the gossip may not be as evident in the bigger towns, but when it springs up, it’s usually for a reason beyond simple conversation. I still have to pay attention not only to what I do, but to what people want to think I’m doing. I guess you just have to accept it and hope it never gets painful.

2003-09-16T19:59:00.000+03:00

THE SUN SHINES ON THE NEW SCHOOL

Day one began and ended well enough, with an exception here and there. I arrived around 8 o’clock in order to be well-prepared for my first class at 9. Getting to school, I learned that Vanya, my counterpart and lifeline to understanding all things Bulgarian and school-related, was on sick-leave to help her ill daughter. This set me back a bit when, for some reason, no one teacher could give me a straight answer on the time schedule of the day. I’m still not sure exactly how long the breaks are between classes, or what particular bells mean during the “big break.” It isn’t as clear-cut as our practicum’s had been, but the school I had been in then was at the end of its year and had all of its schedules in place.

Despite the confusion, I easily managed to make my classes. The first was more or less identical to the second. Both were with the eighth class, and both surprised me. Coming from the classes in Septemvri, where I had taught classes of students often in their sixth or seventh year of English study and had to nevertheless pound through, these language school eighth graders seemed nearly fluent. Granted, we only did simple introductions and self-descriptions, but they were all able to figure out and understand precisely what it was I was asking and talking about. Often, I had to explain things in my basic Bulgarian to get instructions and descriptions through to the Septemvri students who, honestly, didn’t care much at all about school or English.

These eighth graders though, are at the top of their game. They’ve had to take a test to ensure their admission into the language school, and English is the language they’re there to learn. Even the five or six students who haven’t had English classes knew enough to figure out everything that was happening in the class.

Granted, things will be tougher when we begin actual coursework. Discipline will be a bit of a chore. Not only do I have to worry about leaving certain students behind, but I have to focus on the larger group of students who may become restlessly bored if the lessons are too static.

The eights are the bulk of my workload. I teach them 8 hours a week in tandem with two other teachers. At the moment, 11s and 12s are also on the roster. The 12s will stay, and I’m looking forward to seeing what I can possibly teach them, but the 11s may, at some point, turn into an “English as a third language” class. That would mean entirely new issues to deal with. But until then, the classes are looking great, and the weather’s rapidly improving.

And Now, As Promised….

IN THE BULGARIAN KITCHEN…WITH ROB

Today’s project: Slightly Scorched Musaka (moo-sah-kah. With an emphasis on the “kah,” I guess. I seldom get it right myself). While the slightly scorched variety is a Rob specialty, musaka is certainly from, well…it’s from the Bulgarian region anyway. My host family in Septemvri credited it to the Bulgarians, but I’ve also heard that it comes from Greece or Turkey.

The ingredients are taken liberally from the Peace Corps’ Bulgarian cookbook:

5 largish potatoes.
5 of your standard tomatoes or 1.5 cups peeled and canned
Something approximating a tablespoon of parsley
3/4 cup water or tomato juice
1 container (1 1/2 cups) yogurt. Plain yogurt ought to work here, although most would claim Bulgarian yogurt is awfully distinctive.
2 cups ground meat. Although for my veggie readers, I’m sure any of the fake hamburger meat would work just as well.
2 of your standard onions
3 eggs

First, prepare the potatoes. They need to be peeled and diced, then placed in a baking dish like so:

If you’re some kind of obsessive perfectionist about absurd things, like me, then this process will take you something on the order of a half hour to forty minutes. Experience has taught me that the cubes do need to be pretty small. Doing it again, I’d make them even smaller than this.

Then we can grate the fresh tomatoes or slice up the canned if you have it on hand. I went with the fresher option and experienced the untold joys of grating vegetables. And I thought grinding my knuckles while grating cheese was fun!

Next, brown the meat and onions. The cookbook says you shouldn’t drain, but I really can’t see it making a huge difference. I didn't, but I really don't think it saved the meal.

Finally, put it all in the baking dish with the potatoes, and dump on the water. Mine came out something like this:

I’d like to try this with a smaller pan someday. My musaka came out awfully thin. But this is the baking pan I have on hand, so that’s what I’m stuck with.

So…This thing goes in the oven at 200 C, or 392 F for 45-60 minutes or until the potatoes are tender. At least that’s what the cookbook says. When I returned to the oven 25 minutes later, the upper portions of it had already been burned black. Now, my Soviet-era oven has two dials, both with numbers 1-4. The Peace Corps cookbook helpfully tells me that 3/3 means something like 200 C. While I trust the cookbook, I don’t necessarily believe that my oven, in its present state, conforms to any standards whatsoever. That, and the fact that my musaka was probably too thin, contributed to its demise.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. While the thing is cooking for what you hope is 45 to 60 minutes, you can clean up what mess you’ve made so far and then mix the eggs and yogurt together in a bowl. Try not to watch Late Edition on CNN, no matter how rarely it comes on in Eastern Europe, as you may not realize that your musaka is scorching. If you want scorched musaka a la Rob, simply let your musaka cook unattended for 25 minutes in a Soviet-era Bulgarian oven. Couldn’t be easier.

After you hurriedly pull it out of the oven and try to poke away some of the obviously burned bits, pour the yogurt/egg mix over as much of the muddle as you can. Let it cook another 10 minutes as you now watch intently at the oven door until the top is light brown and reasonably solid and set. Dobur apetit!

Serves far, far more than the one person who set out trying to eat it all.

Review: The presentation was terrible, but it tasted just fine, and made a solid dinner, and lunch and dinner the next day. A tiring meal to prepare, but I’ll try tackling it again someday.

2003-09-15T16:58:00.000+03:00

THE “FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL”
Today saw the big opening ceremony in the new school building. Most of the rooms are in reasonable order, with the remaining rooms to be finished in two weeks (supposedly). For now, the school will have to run in two shifts: 8th, 9th, and 12th classes are in the mornings and 10th and 11th are in the afternoons. It’s nothing impossible to handle, just annoying. I’ll be teaching 8,11, and 12 so I’ll only have a few afternoon classes.

The ceremony began at 9 in the constant drizzle seen the last few days here in Silistra. The drizzle is better than the hard rain we saw before the weekend, but the fact that the rain is still going strong irks me. I may be new to this “four seasons” thing, but I always thought that fall and spring were supposed to transfer gracefully into winter and fall, leaving a person glad the heat or cold is going away and giving a few months of nice weather before the extremes of the heat or cold. That is not what we’re getting here. Fall is over-acting, literally chewing up the scenery as the rain and wind knock the leaves from the trees before they even change colors. This is an angry autumn; it came in on September 1st, and by God, it’s staying.

Wait, where were we? Oh, right, school. So anyway, the ceremony began at nine as chocolates were distributed around the teacher’s lounge, and the teachers in turn lunged for the rough draft of the school-wide schedule that was put upon the table. None of the teachers knew when they were teaching before today, and most still don’t, as the schedule is soft after Tuesday. Bulgaria, I’ve learned, usually likes to take things a day at a time.

After most teachers had come in and gotten a good look at the schedule, and after the gym teacher had asked me to help out with the basketball team should such a thing ever be created, the director came into the room with the mayor and gave a pep talk. The assistant director introduced all of the new teachers and we all went to various homerooms to see the students (oh, those people). The director and mayor went with me and a pair of teachers to a room on the fourth floor, there was a tape cutting ceremony at the door, and the introductory speeches were repeated. Since the classroom we were visiting was one of the eighth classes, and new to the school, some of the ninth class came and gave a speech in Bulgarian and English (show-offs).

All of the new students got balloons, wrote wishes for the coming years on them, and shoved them out the window. I made a short speech in Bulgarian because some of the eight class hadn’t had classes in English yet, and left with the director, mayor, and English teacher that had come into room. We returned to the teacher’s room, where bottles of champagne (not exactly the best I’ve tasted) were popped open, and toasts were made at eleven in the morning. It may have technically been the first day of school, but it was the teacher’s last day of freedom. And freedom in this case meant, in some cases, downing 3 or 4 glasses of Christal. Whatever works for people, I suppose. I had whatever I needed to toast everybody who wanted to clunk plastic glasses, and wandered off a group of teachers around noon.

So that was the big first day, the rest is for getting ready for tomorrow’s classes, and rearranging my schedule for the next couple of weeks to work around classes. Tomorrow, you can look forward to a summary of the day’s events and the first installment of “In the Bulgarian Kitchen, with Rob,” where I make something vaguely Bulgarian in a vaguely acceptable way. It’ll be good times.

2003-09-13T12:35:00.000+03:00

THE DANUBE AIN’T THE ONLY WET THING AROUND HERE
NOTE: This post was actually supposed to go up yesterday, the 12th. I had written it at home and was just about to grab my keys and coat and head out the door for the internet club when, all of a sudden, a bad cheese salad I had eaten earlier in the evening caught up with me and I stayed in the rest of the night. I'm perfectly okay this morning though, and as they say "It ain't the Peace Corps until you've had the ol' loose bowels." Oh, and it's still raining.

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It’s been raining solidly since yesterday morning here in Silistra. It’s a hard, driving rain too. What has surprised me most is that, even after the long, dry summer and a lack of any kind of efficient drainage system, the ground is absorbing the water incredibly well. The puddles don’t seem to accumulate, but grow and shrink depending on how hard the rain is coming down. Last night, after hopping across rivers in the streets, I was more than a little worried about flooding. Turns out flooding was the last thing I should have been concerned with last night.

The evening started when I came home from the internet club, wet from the rain and ready to relax. Unfortunately, I soon found out that the only food in the apartment was a bag of potatoes in the pantry, and despite the rain, I really didn’t feel like potatoes. So I trekked out once again in the dark, jumping over puddles and staying under eaves until I found an open grocery store. I bought the necessary food and turned around for home.

When I got home, I realized I still had to call Vanya, my counterpart, to discuss the times for a foreign language textbook seminar we’d be attending today. I dialed her up on the cell phone, but before it connected me, a chipper British voice came over the line and told me I’m low on time, and that I ought to charge up my phone’s pre-paid card. I put that on the list of things I’d need to today. So it finally connected me, and Vanya spoke perhaps 4 words before the phone cut her off. Nothing. So this is how the phone tells me I’m low on time, by giving me a 30 second warning. Good to know for future reference, I can just tell people to call me back, but bad when I still don’t know what’s going on with the seminar, Vanya doesn’t call back, and there’s a lot of rain between me and the nearest payphone.

But after a ten minute wait for Vanya’s call, I realized that I needed to go back out into the wet. So I put on my already wet coat, and my already wet shoes and made my way to the pay phone by the bus station, the nearest orange phone. There are two kinds of payphones here in Bulgaria, orange and blue, owned by two different companies. You need a card for both, but the card is different. I had no card for a blue phone. So you can imagine how peeved I was when the orange phone was out of order and the only other phones in the immediate area are blue.

I had to cross the park, where I discovered just how well the soil sops up water here when my shoes sank into several hidden mud holes. My shoes were then wiped clean when I just missed the other side of the river that stretched from the edge of the road to its middle. I finally reached the convenience store across the street, bought a blue phone card, and used their blue phone outside the store.

Vanya told me everything I needed to know, pointed out that a 9/11 documentary was on one of the Bulgarian stations, and told me that she didn’t think the rain would last more than the night. Well, she’s not a meteorologist, but she’s a darn good English teacher, so I’ll let that slide.

I spent the rest of the night drying off, analyzing Europe’s coverage of 9/11, and once again trying to figure out what I really think about the whole tragedy. CNN International played its documentary about the reactions and tales from CNN anchors and correspondents, then spent the rest of the night discussing whether or not America is an empire, and whether it being an empire would be a good or bad thing. The analysts decided that 9/11 sparked most of America’s quest to “occupy” the Middle East. Everybody agrees that Iraqis and Afghans are better off now than they were before, but the countries are far from perfect. Christiane Amanpour is repeated this paradox every hour on the hour. She talked about how wretched it is in Afghanistan now, with all the corruption and the increasing influence of the Taliban, then spent the next five minutes talking about how much better life is there. Sometimes she reverses the two tacks. In the end, I came away with no idea whatsoever about what the situation is in Afghanistan. All I know is that dissidents aren’t being hanged in the stadium as halftime entertainment anymore, and that’s a good thing.

Euronews and Deutschworld News both did objective pieces at the top of there half hour news shows. Just a description of the ceremony and who spoke. No commenting really done. I appreciated their coverage much more than CNN’s, but wound up watching CNN more because after you’ve seen one cycle on EN or DW, you’ve seen the cycle for he rest of the day. They’re exactly like Headline News in the States.

My own expatriate brand of memorializing done, I went to bed and woke up to more rain, a dull seminar, and dealing with the cell phone people today. And all this when I wanted to be relaxing before school starts on Monday. Oh well.

2003-09-11T16:14:00.000+03:00

SCHOOL DAYS APPROACHING
I haven't posted that much over the last few days because, quite frankly, there hasn't been that much to post. Life is in a pretty solid status quo at the moment. I go into the new school every morning to see what can be done about making it a better place before school starts. As of now, it's very dusty. Let me re-state that. If there is an ounce of dust anywhere else in the world right now, it's because the school hasn't heard about it and it's only a matter of time before it's collected.

Dust is everywhere and coats everything. Chalk dust comes flying off the boards, dust from the old layer of paint puffs off of the floor with each step, cobwebs roll out of the corners in giant tangles. The room I have been focusing on still has a layer of gray on the hardwood floor, and this after 3 or 4 good moppings. It just keeps coming back. Sisyphus' rock chore was a cinch when you compare it with what has to be done with the school's dust.

Fortunately, most of the painting has finished. This means there probably won't be any more dust, and most of us will be able to breathe when school starts Monday.

Tomorrow, there will be a big meeting where all the foreign language teachers will get together and figure out schedules, classes, etc. I still have no idea what my schedule will be for the first couple of impermanent weeks, and I won't have a clue about my permanent schedule for at least a couple of weeks.

Things are a little more settled than that in Bulgarian language classes, but Dora, my tutor, is quickly trying to adjust her lessons to how well she thinks I know Bulgarian, and happily overshooting. The last two lessons have been increasingly challenging, and I left today's lesson with a Bulgarian headache after only two hours of study. That's a time only the orphans have beaten, and there were 40 or 50 of them talking to me at once, so Dora's solo feat is that much more impressive.

Bulgarian headache comes when the foreign language part of my brain gets overworked and somehow I get this little sore feeling in my temples when I try to say anything as simple as "how much does it cost?" I think it's a good thing, like working muscles until they're sore. It's not really like pulling a hamstring or something. I'm hoping that makes some kind of sense.

So yeah, since I'm not totally sure I'm not babbling incoherently because of the Bulgarian headache, I'm going to stop writing now.

2003-09-07T14:55:00.000+03:00

THESE ARE THE DAYS OF SILISTRA

The Festival got off to a roaring start this weekend. It’s called “Days of Silistra,” and is supposed to represent the culture, traditions, and heritage of the town. Well, at least the beer is Bulgarian. The rest is pure west.

Although most of the festival itself is spread around the town—a Ferris Wheel here, a collection of booths there—the bulk of it is in Silistra’s city center. Next to the booths where you can buy cheap beer, there is a stage where, all night, cover bands try their very best to pull off songs from Bon Jovi, Guns n’ Roses, Alice Cooper, and Sheryl Crow. There’s also a small central fairground, with bumper cars, a tiny roller coaster, and one of those pendulum rides that swing back and forth.

Jeff and Dave, two other volunteers from the region, came up for the weekend on my promise that there would be beer and good times. There was plenty of both.

On Saturday, we played a little basketball at my new school. As it turns out, the rims are low on most of the hoops there, so for the first time I played “pig” with dunks. Jeff is about 6’4 and on some of the rims I can get the ball over the lip while remaining flat-flooted, so we were both able to try out everything we could. Dave watched and tried not to look too bored. I won, after only earning a “P,” on a one-handed alley-oop off the backboard. Sometimes it’s good to have giants’ hands.

After that, we watched X-Men 2 at a local theater (just as “Meh. That was an okay movie” as I remember it being the first time I watched it), and hit the concert at the festival. Most of my Bulgarian buddies were there, and Jodi (the other TEFL in Silistra) was with his girlfriend. I briefly met with the governor of the Silistra region, who was already pretty drunk and probably won’t remember me, and watched the concert. One of the Bulgarians wanted to do the bumper cars with us, so he bought us tickets and we went at it.

His fascination with the bumper cars baffled us for a while. He has money and was able to afford staying on the cars for hours at a time. The way we figure it is that communism, for whatever terrifying reason, prevented the release of bumper cars in Eastern Europe. This guy was trying to relive the bumper car youth denied him by his oppressors. It’s all very inspiring if you actually buy it as a reason.

Before we left for the night, all Americans present, with the exception of Dave, tried the pendulum boat ride. Now, I have a pretty iron stomach when it comes to alcohol and boat rides, and I had had a couple of beers before getting on. Fortunately, my stomach held. The first half was the usual “whee!” experience you get on a standard theme park ride, but then, after we had peaked and slowed down, the ride unexpectedly picked up again and the last half was “whee!” while worrying about my stomach. Of course, it all turned out fine. Jodi’s girlfriend was a little shaken up by it, but everyone else managed to make it back to my apartment to watch some Futurama on DVD before bed.

Good times had by all. We spent the morning eating cereal and drinking Danon “Za Piene,” a liquid yogurt drink that I know now I’ll miss more than anything when I leave Bulgaria. We entertained ourselves by watching the news and reading our books. A nice relaxing Sunday morning. Dave left on a minibus for Kubrat at twelve and Jeff left two hours later for his Isperih. The festival, though, goes on.

2003-09-05T15:55:00.000+03:00

SEPTEMBER IN RUSE

Fall doesn’t mess around in Bulgaria. The night of September 1st there was a raging windstorm, and since then it’s been cooler than I’ve seen it here yet, probably hovering around the high fifties or low sixties, but after it had been peaking in the hundreds during summer, those temperatures feel icy. August ended with the usual unbearable heat and September swept in the chill. I’ve had to use sheets to keep myself warm at night, it’s been quite a shock.

So it was with this new chilly backdrop that the volunteers in the Northeast region gathered in Ruse to talk about the upcoming school year. Ruse is a city of 200 thousand about 140 km upstream on the Danube. In feel, it’s purely European until you get to the river, but there’s so much before the river that the industrial zone along the banks is hardly worth thinking about.

The plaza in the center of town may not have the multitude of fountains like Pleven, but the architecture is incredible. The buildings all seem to have been built with some kind of actual design, much of it from the early 20th century, where most of Bulgaria’s architecture seems inspired by refrigerator boxes. It’s also a strangely large city. Mysteriously, distances seem short when you walk, but long when you take a taxi. I wanted to chalk this up to the taxis trying to rip us off, but they seemed to be taking the shortest, straightest paths possible. Must be some kind of warp in time isolated in Ruse. That makes more sense than taxi drivers not trying to rip people off.

We visited a Metro in town. Metro is a large chain owned by Germans that resembles a small-scale Sam’s Club, Price Club, or Costco. They sell in bulk, but the variety you’d find at one of the American stores just wasn’t there, and the prices for Western goods was only slightly less obscene than it is at retail. I paid twenty leva for two packs of Mach 3 razors and was mostly satisfied, although I remember the days when I could get four for 10 dollars, plus shaving cream, from Costco. Oh well, at least I can get Mach 3 razors in a Peace Corps country, some times I have to put these things in that perspective.

We also ate at a Mehana, which is Bulgarian for “restaurant designed for and waited on by Oompah-Loompahs.” A Mehana is, in fact, a traditional style Bulgarian restaurant that is usually found in the basement, to keep things cozy in winter and cool in summer. The ceilings are incredibly low to contribute to this cozy/cool atmosphere, and I have to hunch at all times. The waiting staff in this case was also dressed in the traditional Bulgarian garb, which is, as implied, is a more beige version of the Oompah-Loompah get-up from Willy Wonka’s factory.

Good food and beer though. We ate with Andrea, the Peace Corps Medical Officer, ad Dora, our TEFL Program Manager, and they ordered some things most of us hadn’t tried, and were willing to share. I got the safe roasted chicken, which was pleasantly served with tomatoes, lettuce, and ketchup and mustard cupped in tiny bowls made from onions. The whole thing was served on a cutting board, which added to the atmosphere. It was all pretty nice, although the chicken may have been undercooked a little. I guess it wasn’t that safe. No unpleasant side effects from that so far, though.

I also continued my role as the table’s garbage disposal, since Bulgarian restaurants don’t believe in the strange religion of doggie bags. If something doesn’t get finished, I’m more than willing to eat it when it’s offered, so I got quite a sampler at the end of the meal.

The bad news is my blood pressure is still running just high enough to get Andrea feeling like she needs to do something about it. So we decided to double my dose of Atenolol and see how that works. Oh well, good times with the bad, I suppose. I need something to complain about.

2003-09-03T14:20:00.000+03:00

BULGARIAN EDUCATION (PART 1 of 102049495959)
My first Bulgarian tutoring session went very well yesterday. I had some strange concern that my tutor would be disappointed in me, as if, even though we’d only had one conversation together, she would see me as a hopeless case. The other worry was that she wouldn’t know what to do with me and that we’d spend the two hours trying to figure out what I need to learn.

Well, I was thankfully terribly wrong on both counts. I had given Dora, my tutor, my textbooks from training in our first meeting. From those she created her first lesson and a schedule for the first month. Her plan was to spend every session reviewing the units, one-by-one. It was fun going back five months (FIVE MONTHS! Egad, it’s been that long already?) and seeing where I was then. She had prepared a worksheet based on the exercises in the textbook. Each exercise focused on the verb for “I am.” It wasn’t exactly hard, but after the Peace Corps’ policy of throwing us into every deep end possible, easing into something feels pretty good. She had planned to do a unit a day, but we both decided to speed up the schedule and cover two a day. It will mean she’ll have to come up with new units faster, but it will also mean I’ll get to learn new things sooner.

In the meantime, the review is good for picking up new basics. Although the Peace Corps did an outstanding job preparing us with “survival language,” some basic verbs and grammar slipped through the cracks. We already started clearing up some of that yesterday, and the easier pace means I can ask questions about any topic that interests me. Although Ani, my language trainer in Septemvri was a genius of a teacher, she also tried to keep us from learning too much, too quickly. So she would often get cryptic when I asked her questions, saying things like “That’s not for you to know right now,” or “That might be for later.” It kept us focused on the goals at hand, but I missed out on certain things. Dora lets me ask whatever I want, which is good now that I have a solid foundation in Bulgarian and she speaks little or no English. If she’d been cryptic, I would have wound up pretty frustrated in the state I was in.

Earlier in the morning, I had worked on one of the rooms in the new school building. Even though a team of students were helping, it was an incredible chore. There were reasons for this; namely that the painters the school had hired who did the walls don’t know how to paint properly. Sure, they put down plastic around the floor, but if one is painting a ceiling, one ought to make sure that the entire floor is covered. And one might also want to tape the plastic down near the walls, so paint doesn’t drip down onto the floorboards and the piles of dust and old paint that hadn’t been cleaned up before we came in. So the hours of the morning were spent sweeping everything up, scraping off about a half gallon of dripped paint from the floor and painting the door and window frames that had been ignored.

I left feeling about the same as I used to after a weight training class in high school. Every muscle had been attacked, and certain one I never really use even got in on the act. It was a good workout, but tedious work, just like weight training had been in high school!

So, there was a parent’s meeting last night, and apparently there’s money for more paint, so we can do the front podium thing in the room later. Fun.

2003-08-31T19:45:00.000+03:00

IT’S A HARD-KNOCK LIFE

Yesterday, Debbie and I went up to Silistra’s orphanage to throw a watermelon party for the kids there. Debbie is a community development volunteer from Texas who has worked in the governor’s office since she came to Bulgaria last year. She was able to get a good deal on watermelons at a fruit stand run by a friend of hers.

We met near the hotel in the center of town, took a taxi to the stand, and from there took the same taxi to the orphanage with fifteen watermelons. The taxi driver charged us a lev for the entire trip, waiting time and all. Now, this is significant for many reasons. When I was in Sofia on my way to Silistra for the permanent move-in, Vanya and I had to get from the train station to the bus station with all of my luggage. The distance to the bus station was no more than a half-mile and the two taxi drivers we talked to demanded four, then five leva. I bartered the second one down to three and settled on that, but it was still a ridiculous price to pay for the driver’s two minutes of work.

This Silistra driver had picked us up, listened to Debbie’s American accent as she led him ably to the fruit stand, and listened to our conversation in English. He had then waited 4 or 5 minutes as we loaded the backseat of his cab with fifteen melons, then drove us up the hill to the orphanage. The entire trip had lasted about 20 minutes, enough time for him, with a little luck, to collect at least 3 fares in Silistra. When we got to the orphanage and unloaded the cab, Debbie even asked him how much for the trip, an opportunity any Bulgarian cab driver will take to try to rip someone off. And he asked only for a lev. I should have gotten his name and done something to commend him with his bosses. But the kids has already swallowed me whole by then.

When absolutely full in the spring, fall, and winter the orphanage keeps something near 75 kids between the ages of six and eighteen. In the summer, many of them go out to their grandparents’ homes in the villages, some are allowed to go home to their parents, if their parents were forced to give them up due to financial problems and can handle them during the summer. For our watermelon party, there were about 45 kids.

I had visited once, two or three weeks ago, and had only spent time with 20 of them as the others had gone down to the pool on a field trip. I had played chess, shown them how to get through a couple of levels of certain games on their old computer, and been given a tour by basically all of them. The kids crave attention, they’re all hugs as soon as a new person walks through the door. As relaxing as I now remember that first trip being, they had still talked to me the entire time.

On this trip, with twice as many kids, my arms were wrenched in 20 different directions at once. Debbie, at least, split the herd in half.

After the watermelons were summarily devoured, the dragging began. Some showed me the soccer and basketball court, they wanted to see me touch the rims, they all wanted to grab the rims. I gave as many as wanted to a turn. We then played an impromptu game of basketball, with the light, inflated ball that was the only one they had left of the eight Debbie said she had brought just a couple of months ago. Among forty kids, eight balls don’t last long with a hill nearby.

We went up to the playground at the top of the orphanage’s little compound. They all wanted to see me due chin-ups on a bar none of them could reach, I obliged. We sat on a bench and thumb-wrestled, and they taught me some clapping games I’ve never heard of. One involved pig snorting, but I really never got the joke.

Going inside, thankfully, they sat me down at a table and two of them started to arm wrestle. Arm wrestling is a big sport over here. It’s televised more often than basketball at this point, all though I have no idea when “arm wrestling season” is. When one of them—a little twelve year-old—seemed to be winning pretty often, he challenged me. I played with him a while, but finally, with a great struggle, managed to pin him. Everybody else wanted a turn. When my arms were finally getting good and sore, the best of them—a fourteen year-old birthday boy—kept me at a dead-lock.

After that, I showed them how to get to a new level in Lion King on the computer, and left after Debbie had gone an hour before. I got an escort to the gate from ten of the boys and everyone wanted to know when I’d be back. I told them I’d probably come back sometime this week. I have to bring them a decent basketball, anyway.

I left drained, but satisfied. It had been, as usual, blisteringly hot all day, and even though I had stayed in the shade as much as had been humanly possible, I was still dying of thirst after only accepting a small, barely washed glass of tap water from the orphanage sink. Both times I’ve gone, I’ve left that way, drained. It’s great being there for them, playing with the kids, giving them a good time. But it’s also horribly depressing realizing that they have to be there for the bulk of their developing lives. All I can do is entertain.

2003-08-29T16:18:00.000+03:00

THE AWARDS AND THE TUTOR
So I probably stayed up way too late last night watching the MTV Video Awards live. I thought there was something about it that I had to stay up until 3 in the morning to watch. Well, Chris Rock was pretty funny I suppose. The rest was your usual awards show guk. Some of the clothes were interesting and fun to poke fun at, but it's a little different wondering which Times Square whore Mya stole her dress from when you're all by yourself, watching the awards in a foreign country. And sure Christina Aguilera looked like she had poached flamingo to get her entrance dress and then stolen another dress from the whore Mya stole hers from to perform Dirrty, but where's the fun in noticing that if you have no one to laugh over it with?

It was entertaining, but it felt isolated, I wasn't sharing it with anyone. Good God, why don't I just go and say it? THe VMAs made me feel a bit lonely. But I'm better now, good ol' website. Connecting me to people and all. Chances are it was Coldplay that made me feel tired, I went to sleep right after they performed. I love Coldplay, I really do, but was New Scientist really the song to perform 3/4 of the way through a 3 hour show? Chris Rock was right when asked if people had slit their wrists after that one. I went right to bed, anyway.

And woke up pretty tired after it all. I had to get to a cafe/bakery place where I was meeting with my future language tutor, Dora, and my counterpart, Vanya, who would help translate. The meeting went swimmingly, and we have everything arranged. I really do have to start studying Bulgarian again. Even though I don't use it that often here in Silistra, it does come up often and isn't avoidable. It's just that anyone who can speak even a little English, wants to practice. And since using even basic English is easier than Bulgarian, I'm more than inclined to let them speak in English without argument.

So now I'll get two hours, two times a week solely devoted to studying Bulgarian. It's a lot of time, compared to what's expected of us, but I really do want to get back into form and improve on what I know. It's time to get this thing going again.

Oh, and a friendly link to Owen's allegorical babble. Enjoy, if it's your kind of thing.

2003-08-28T16:02:00.000+03:00

THE INTERVIEW
Well, I think the radio interview last night went rather well. Rob Woolsey of Raven Radio in Sitka called me, we talked about what we wanted to talk about and then he put me on hold. I got to listen to the end of a nationally broadcasted NPR story, then Rob played a little Bulgarian choir music as a lead-in and the interview was on.

It lasted only about 10 minutes or so, but I got the story across rather well, and I may even have a few new visitors to the site. Glad to have ya!

To summarize for those who've come late, or missed parts, here's the story thus far:

I graduated UCLA last year with a BA in English and waited back home in Alaska for a year as the Peace Corps decided what they wanted to do with me. There in Sitka, I worked in a local hospital and took the dog on afternoon walks with my mom. If you go back far enough in the archives, you can find some details of my life in Alaska, including my opinion on shovelling snow. In April, I left for Chicago, where I spent 4 days getting to know the 42 people on whom I'd depend for all my American needs over the next two years. Our group is composed entirely of TEFLs, English teachers, and we all arrived in Strelcha, Bulgaria after an exhausting 24 hour trip that saw me get no sleep and arrive in Bulgaria confused and disoriented.

After a week's stay in a communist rehab clinic in Strelcha, we were all very excited to meet our host families with whom we'd spend the next three months. My family lived in Septemvri, a small town outside of Pazardjik and not a one of them spoke English with any degree of success. The first day in Septemvri was, as I've said before, the strangest
of my life, but I soon learned Bulgarian well enough to get on very well and wound up on July 9th realizing that I would miss these people quite a bit.

When I left the Gagarovs in Septemvri, I came to Silistra (a city of twenty-odd thousand and the last stop on the Danube before it enters Romania) with my counterpart, a Bulgarian English teacher named Vanya. Here in Silistra, I'll teach English for two years in the city's school for foreign languages. Although the school is still in the process of moving to a new building less than a month before the beginning of the year, the students all seem eager to go and ready to learn. In the time between my arrival in Silistra and the beginning of school, I have met with a group of volunteers with whom I'll work on a camp for Bulgarian boys next summer, run a twice-weekly English class, and done all the annoying paperwork and administrative guk required by the Peace Corps and the Bulgarian government.

At this very moment I'm typing this entry on a computer transfering data at a blazing 300 bytes/second. Not only was my favorite computer in my favorite internet club occupied, but the whole place was full. The owner there has just offered me a tab of sorts. I pay five leva for an account in advance, but I get access to any computer I want in the place and at the comparatively low price of 60 stotinki an hour. It requires that everyone that works the club knows me, which they all do, and that I can handle a computer by my lonesome, which I certainly can. Unfortunately, I'm here in the new place in town, where they're hopefully learning that charging 50 stotinki an hour doesn't help if your computers and connection run at the speed of slugs.

Tonight, I'm having dinner with Vanya, her husband, and her two kids, and tomorrow morning I'm finally going to meet with my new Bulgarian language tutor for the first time. And there you have it.

Going through the archives will give you a clearer picture of what's going on, and will also show you some purty pictures and a couple of awwww-inspiring doggie photos. In the future, I'm probably going to put in some permanent features for the site, but the arrival of those may well depend on how bored I am at any given time. Until the required state of boredom arrives, enjoy the journal! I'll try to be entertaining and informative. Or at least I'll try to try.

2003-08-26T16:28:00.000+03:00

HEAT, HEAT, HEAT
It's still all anyone really talks about here. It's always toplo (warm) this and goreshto (hot) that. I don't think Bulgaria has had it any easier this summer than they've had it in France, but I imagine Bulgarians are far more used to it. Despite having one of the most intelligent and able-minded working forces in the world, Bulgaria is - as a second-world country - relegated to being an agricultural society. Everybody here spends part of their life in the fields, even if the field is just the backyard filled to the brim with vegetables. Still, being used to something doesn't equal 10,000 lives saved. Something was wrong in France this summer, and I hope they get it fixed.

At any rate, what it means in Bulgaria is that everyone finishes the day coated in a film of sweat. It also means that most Bulgarians just add that layer to every layer they've had since the last day they took a shower. Doesn't bug me all that much, but it seems to be wreaking havoc with the other volunteers' abilities to stay in close quarters for extended periods of time. The weather seems to be getting slightly better, and word has it that September is nothing but rain. So, I have that going for me, which is nice.

The new school is actually making better progress than I thought it would be. Many of the rooms are already being painted. All are cleaned out pretty well. Of course, no one knows if there will be enough desks, chairs, and tables, and all of those have to be put in the rooms. But there are three weeks left until school is supposed to start, and it looks like we might make it, although some kids might have to sit on floors for a while. I'm sure they'll live.

The days carry on. Lots of helping the school, reading, and a little basketball here and there. I'm for some reason very excited about the MTV Video Awards this weekend. I have no idea what the nominees are, I've never liked the awards anyway (The directors are the ones that make the best videos. If it were up to me Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, and The Beastie Boys would have won every award for the past twenty years because of Spike Jonze. And I suppose you could throw in some of David Fincher's work for Madonna. And you could throw Hype Williams out a window), and I don't care a damn whit about who wins. I suppose I'm eager because it'll be a fresh dose of pure, unbridled Americaness. Chris Rock's hosting, and I haven't heard anything new from him in too long. It'll be a fun couple of hours, I suppose. Can't wait. Really, I can't.

Programming note: I'll be live on Raven Radio 104.7 FM in Sitka, AK at 8:15 AM Wednesday. If you're in the area, give a listen. Rob Woolsey will be conducting a phone interview with me. Half the fun will be hearing if I'm anywhere near understandable over that kind of distance.

2003-08-23T16:00:00.000+03:00

ACHOO
Well, I finally got a bit ill in Bulgaria. Oh, it's nothing to worry about. Just a cold, and a weakling cold at that. It been building for the last few days. I've been sneezing occasionally and I could feel my nose very slowly beginning to clog. It peaked last night and is already on its way downhill. It's not even bad enough that anyone has noticed. Bulgarians tend to be very superstitious about colds and the things that cause them. If someone had seen me with a cold, I'm sure I would have gotten chastised for drinking cold water or leaving a window open during the day or something. People here have blamed colds on chilled beer, and stranger still, they seem to like cold beer even if they think it habitually causes sickness.

Anyway, I don't really feel that far off my game. I just have to blow my nose occasionally and small things have a tendency to annoy more than usual. I was pretty peeved when I'd seen that some kid had taken my favorite computer, even though I've told no one that I have a favorite computer and every computer is fair game. And there's a little fly buzzing around annoying the heck out of me, but that's just more Bulgaria, and probably the fact that I worked out a little this morning and haven't showered because I'll be playing basketball in a couple of hours.

So I carry on. It's Silistra's turn to celebrate The River this weekend, but the party isn't nearly as large as Tutrakan's. Of course Days of Silistra is coming in a couple of weeks, so the city--and region--has that to gear up for. It's going to be quite a festival, I hear.

Short entry today. I must keep my health after all.

2003-08-21T15:05:00.000+03:00

THE CALM BEFORE A STORM I HOPE NEVER COMES
I wish there were something interesting I could write about . . . well, no. No I don't. These last few days in Silistra have been pretty relaxing. I help move the school a little, work out a little, read. Today, I payed the cable bill. I just told the woman where I lived, confirmed that my name is indeed Robert Young, and gave her ten leva when she asked for it. Simple. She even bordered on courteous. I have nothing to complain about as far as Bulgarian customer service goes. Of course, I haven't needed to visit the post office lately either, but thank goodness for small favors. Anyway, paying the cable bill was almost pleasant.

And a good thing too, for cable, as it turns out, is something valuable to have in these lulling times. Here's the breakdown of a typical Bulgarian cable set-up: I get ten music channels. These include European versions of MTV and VH1, two versions of VIVA, some station called Ezik that turns into p0rn around midnight, MAD, and a bunch of stations that just play Bulgarian folk. The European MTV and VH1 are notable in that they're so darn European. The narrations over the standard American shows like Behind the Music are all redone with British accents. The playlists are all abysmally directed to pop. VIVA occasionally plays something from Metallica, The Rasmus, or The White Stripes, but apart from The Stripes, I could do without those groups anyway. I could also do without MTV playing Justin Timberlake every 2 minutes and VH1 playing Blue every 5. Music TV quickly gets annoying in Europe, and must only be taken in very small doses.

Less annoying, and far more useful are the three good news stations I get. CNN International is almost entirely business-oriented unless there's some great tragedy somewhere and one of their correspondents can do a report every ten minutes. EuroNews has CNN Headline News down to a science. The special interest and entertainment stories are repeated ad nauseum throughout the week or month, but if one wants to know what's happening in the world, tuning in at the top or bottom of an hour is the best way of doing it. Finally, there's DeutschWorld, which is in German half the time and provides day-old news in English the rest of the time. Not much reason to turn to DW unless there's some special that needs watching.

And the rest. Inexplicably, I get two identical versions of Cartoon Network, just in case watching Tom and Jerry on one channel isn't enough. I also get Eurosport and some Bulgarian sports channel that seems to show either Spanish bull-fighting or Bugarian soccer, neither of which hold my interest. Eurosport was fun while the Tour de France was on, but now all they seem to want to show are Rallies or Motorbike Grand Prix. Of course, August is an unbearable sporting month in America, too. Pro Soccer just started in Europe, so I guess I can expect to hear about every cute thing David Beckham does for Real Madrid over the next few months. Yee Haw.

And finally there's the Discovery Channel. Good ol' Discovery. I can usually count on it for some solid entertainment if I'm absolutely bored out of my mind.

So yeah, TV here, as is also the case in America I suppose, does not nearly provide a universal way of staying boredom-free. Thank God for books and Newsweek. Oh, and participating and interacting in a productive way with Bulgarians and the community around me, thanks to that too.

2003-08-19T14:22:00.000+03:00

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
When I came to Silistra for my site visit in May, the school staff warned me that the school might/may be/possibly moving in the summer. I was okay with this as it would give me something constructive to do. In fact, I was looking forward to giving the school a fresh start. When I arrived in July, they still weren't sure whether the school would be moving. If it did, it would move to a building closer to my apartment, but if it wasn't decided by August, I was told, it wouldn't happen.

So August rolled around, and no news on the school came. I went to Teteven assuming that no move would take place. I came back dropped into the middle of the race to get everything moved from one building to another in a month. And to find out that the building they were moving to might have another school in it when the year begins. And that this new building is about twice as far from my apartment as the old building was. Joy.

We had a meeting today so the school's director could explain about what was going to happen. Turns out there aren't really enough chairs and tables to go around, and money will have to be raised to provide them. Also, the whole of the new building's interior will have to be painted white, apparently in an effort to make the place look as much like a mental hospital as possible.

I spent the rest of the morning helping some of the staff bundle and box books in the library to take them across town. Most of the newspapers were pretty old, and I'm guessing some will be tossed, but the older textbooks and journals seem interesting and will have to be looked through.

So we have a month to get everything moved before school starts, and I'll have to have all of my addresses changed. And all this for a building none of the teachers seem particularly happy with. Oh well.

2003-08-18T15:48:00.000+03:00

THE OBLIGATORY "I FINALLY GOT A CELL PHONE!" BS
We've all received the e-mails at one point or other. That friend who held his or her principles against cell phones for so long you thought they'd adopted anti-mobility as a religion. Well, here's another, only this isn't in e-mail form, and the phone number won't appear in the middle of the message with a space above and below, screaming "dial me!" Nope, there will be other times to subject friends and family to that torture. This post is all about waxing philosophical and social.

I had problems with cell phones in college because I firmly believed, and still do, that there is no way in hell I--or most other college students for that matter--needed one to maintain a proper social life. If a student had no other line or was already dipping their toes into the water of a business life, well then, cell phones were fine by me. But what really pissed me off was when I'd be walking with someone I was working on a project with, going to eat lunch with, or just talking with, and they'd pull out the ringing phone to have a conversation about their dinner and movie plans. In fact, most conversational snippets I caught in school were along these lines. What in the name of god kept these conversations from beginning and ending at home?

I never bought a cell phone at UCLA because my phone lines at home were always cheaper, clearer, and more "socially effective" than a cell's would be. Here in Bulgaria, though, things are very different.

The phone line in my apartment is abysmal. I can't hear what the person on the other end is saying very well, and they certainly can't hear me very well. The point of whole conversations on the phone have been lost, and I might as well not even try having a conversation with someone speaking Bulgarian.

Also, they don't sell answering machines here. Answering machines kept me alive in school. They were the last roadblock between me and cell phones. After all, there's no reason to make or take a call on the road if you can just wait until you get home and liesurely decide who needs to be called and when. But no answering machines meant the wall collapsed. I had to get a cell phone (GSM in Bulgaria) and soon. After all, everybody else was jumping off the bridge, might as well follow.

So I visited a local electronics store here in Silistra last Friday. The guys there were pretty helpful, and seemed very happy that I, as an American, had decided on a Motorola. It completed some cosmic circle for them. The comically tragic thing about electronics and high-end stores in Silistra and the rest of Bulgaria is the language of the store. In any other store or social situation in the country, Bulgarians are over-joyed if I even try to speak Bulgarian with them. I can say four or five words and get a compliment about how well I speak the language. But in the electronics store, the clerks seemed almost ashamed that they didn't know English to be able to properly sell their product to an American. They'd stumble across their Bulgarian until they got to a menu on the phone and could actually read the features to me in English. Then they would look at me for approval, and all I could do is nod my head and say "yes, it has a 'call services' menu, dobre."

So they finally sold me the phone at a solid price, but, as in everything in Bulgaria, there was one last problem. The only manual they had for the phone was in Greek. They're a Bulgarian store selling an American phone and all they could give me was a Greek manual. Hmmm. They told me to come back Monday and they'd have one.

Well, I returned to the store today. They took me to another branch on the other side of town and dug around for a good long while before they turned up a manual in Polish. I told them that that, also, would not help me very much. They understood and apologized.

Well, although I'm stumbling around a bit, getting the details of the phone down on my own, it's serving its purpose perfectly well. I can call, send messages, and play tetris and snake perfectly well. What else does a cell phone owner need? The menus are, of course, in English and are pretty user-friendly, so I'm happy. But if anyone knows where on the internet I could dig up a manual in English for a Motorola T190, could they let me know? I'd be ever so grateful.

2003-08-17T16:24:00.000+03:00

THE MIGHTY DANUBE

Let me begin this way: I have a great respect for competitive swimmers. Especially the long distance swimmers. I think water polo players are demigods placed on Earth to show us the maximum abilities of the human shoulders and legs.

Being able to swim great distances has never been my strong suit. I can swim well enough, sure. And if someone were at the bottom of a pool, I’d have no problem rescuing them. I can get from one end of a pool to the other just fine, although I’m usually out of breath by the time I get there. Anyway, I’m no machine when it comes to swimming.

But darn it, I had to swim the Danube.

The day began okay. I had slept in my own bed for the first time in a week or so, gotten a small breakfast, and I was supposed to catch a 1:30 bus to Tutrakan, a small town on the river about 50 km upstream. Yesterday Tutrakan was having its salute to The River. There would be a race across, various little competitions on the water, and a concert at night. The two volunteers there, Michael and Kevin, are both B-12s. They’d arrived in town last September and hadn’t had a chance to participate in the festivities that year. Both were going to try to swim across this year.

Well, turns out that Bulgaria’s public bus system had cancelled the 1:30 bus. I had to wait for the 3:30. The problem then became one of time. I rode a hot, 3:30 bus into town and arrived at about 4:45, 45 minutes after the praznik (festival) was supposed to start. I reached the center of town after trotting down a short hill, found a few other Americans in town, and they pointed me in the direction of the registration center, where Michael and Kevin had been for the last fifteen minutes or so.

With the help of a Bulgarian, I found the center, panting and with sweat dripping off of me from running everywhere in near 100 degree heat with a backpack. They were taking blood pressures. I muttered to myself since keeping a low blood pressure has never been my strength under normal conditions. At this point my heart was pushing blood hard enough to turn over a car engine.

As it turns out, Mike’s blood pressure tends to run high as well. They weren’t going to let him swim, even though he had been a swimmer in high school. When mine shot the top of the meter off as well, we had a hurried discussion and they agreed to let us both swim as long as we signed a form and promised to stick together in the water. Kevin’s blood pressure was fine.

Since we were holding up the race, we all ran once again down to the beach (still had my backpack on, mind you). We hopped in a small red barge and they drove us out near Romania where we received our instructions. There were boats all along the course to pick up those who couldn’t make it. If we thought we were in trouble, they told us to swim to the nearest boat. We stood up along the side, facing Bulgaria. I was at that point tired, hungry, sweaty, thirsty, and in no particular mood to swim. But there I was.

So we all hopped in the water. I’ll say this for it, it was warm. Other than that though, there was nothing to give me any reason to put my mouth anywhere near the Danube for the next two years. It tasted vile, and despite my thirst and the urge to drink it, I shut my mouth tightly after the first small gulp.

I hadn’t gotten anything like the best start in the world since I had no real inclination to race, so the main body of the race had already gotten far ahead of me by the time I took a look around. I was swimming slowly, leisurely, doing a backstroke. But that wasn’t very conducive to the race atmosphere. 100 yards from the start, I noticed the rescue boats starting to inch away from me and the barge we had leapt from motoring up and inching closer toward Bulgaria.

Not feeling any particular need to die for the sake of the race or a leisurely swim, I swam toward the nearest boat and tried to climb in. My hand slipped and I fell back into the water, taking a big gulp of the Danube with me. After climbing back in and flopping into the hull, I looked up at the guy who was paddling the boat. He was giving me this reproachful look, “why did you even try?” Of course, those were his eyes talking. He didn’t say anything until we got to shore and he told me to get off.

I certainly wasn’t alone in getting out of the water, though. At around the same time I did, about half of the people in the river were already getting back out. Kevin, the only one of the three American competitors with a decent blood pressure, had climbed aboard a nearby boat at nearly the same moment I had Several people clung to the sides of the boats and let go closer to shore, to finish off the race on their own.

The Americans on shore congratulated us all on even attempting a swim across the river, and some jokes about glowing green for the rest of the night were exchanged. Mike had come in fourth, and they weren’t even going to allow him to swim before I showed up.

We spent the rest of the night listening to a pretty good band cover some American songs and watching a “Miss Tutrakan” competition. I even got a certificate saying that I swam the Danube, along with everyone else in the race.

I may not have been in the best condition when I dove in the deep end of a deep river, and I’m not ashamed at all of wanting to climb into a boat. I could certainly use some time in the pool swimming laps. I’m not particularly happy with how well my speed in the water bodes for survival. But that’s another concern. I got in the Danube, swam about 100 yards, and got out. I’m pretty happy with that. And I respect swimmers a little more to boot.

AND OTHER STUFF

You're Iceland!

Most people think you're a cold and forbidding person, but
you're actually naturally warm and inviting. People just get scared off
by what other people have led them to believe about you. You keep to yourself
for the most part, and are pretty good at fending for yourself. More people should visit you and find out the truth.
Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

Either that, or Switzerland, wholly depending on whether or not I ski (I don't, so it's Iceland, I suppose). Thanks to Owen for finding the first internet quiz I've really had a bit of fun with.

Also, a word on the whole power outage thing. I feel really very grateful for "the sacrifice" made by all the stock brockers who CNN's Maggie Lake reported had to sleep on the chairs and couches of their friends to go into work the next morning. Here in Peace Corps-Bulgaria, we know nothing about sleeping on other people's couches, chairs, or floors, so I really can only imagine their suffering. My thoughts were with them as Michael's kitten was clawing and biting at my arms as I tried to get to sleep on a couple of blankets on his bedroom floor last night.

Stockbrokers of New York: I salute you.

2003-08-15T22:13:00.000+03:00

AIN'T THAT BULGARIA?

We'll just get this pillow out of the way right off the bat, even though it appeared miraculously before Kate, Ryan, and me on the last day of the trip. Last night to be exact. We were wandering around a 2nd-hand store in Pleven, a large city in the center of Bulgaria. Ryan and Kate were looking over clothes and sheets, I was a touch bored, and then BAM!

We all began cracking up, as is necessary when someone finds an ad campaign of this genius. The two little old ladies who were running the store were laughing because the silly Americans were laughing at their pillows. And when we could speak, the only question we could ask was "why?"

"How?" doesn't really enter into it. Nudity is all around Bulgaria. All one needs to do to prove it is to walk by a newstand or beach here. Ad campaigns occasionally feature brief nudity, even on television. But a freakin' pillow?

Let's look at it from one demographic angle. A woman walks into the store, perhaps she's even looking for a pillow. Are the designers expecting her to think that if she buys this pillow, her breasts will look like this? Maybe she's lonely and thinks that buying this pillow will allow her to find herself in this position. Women may be nuts occasionally, but I'd like to think they aren't crazy enough to believe in the magical ambrosial powers of a pillow.

Which brings us to men. Yes, sex sells. And most men are crazy enough to think small changes in a bed's appearance will encourage it. But, come on. Most stores selling this pillow are run by the same two little old ladies running the store we visited. Could a guy really take this pillow up to the register and buy it? With a straight face? Actually, if he's Bulgarian, probably. Moving on.

The trip I took this last week was primarily about getting a first meeting out of the way in order to organize a camp for next summer. We went to Teteven for this meeting and we met for a good solid 3 days and 2 nights. I've been named the logistical and safety coordinator for the camp, owing to my responsibility and medical past. This, of course, means I get to spend a few grueling weekends checking out potential sites for the camp along the Black Sea. I also have to make sure all the kids get to the camp next year, get home afterward, have food to eat and a bed to sleep in while they're there, and I also get to look at a sprained ankle, wrap it, and send a kid to a local hospital. Work. *Sigh*

Since Teteven was mostly meetings, I took few pictures of any interest to the site. But Pleven was the layover city on the way in and out, and along with the fine pillow you saw above, there were many more images of Bulgaria as it is a decade or so post communism.

I'm actually kind of proud of this photo, and of my camera for being able to take it so well. Coke ads are everywhere in Bulgaria. They're on newstands, they dominate stores, they're even used as marquees for internet cafes. This sign overlooks the central plaza of Pleven, where the fountains light up at night and seem to work far more consistently than they do in any other city. Pleven's center brought on Disneyland flashbacks. The buildings are multi-colored, the fountains are multi-colored, and the architecture is pretty similar to the stuff you'd find on Main Street. The kicker is the city's two war memorials, or the fences around them, at least. One uses bayonets on the cast iron pickets, and actual mortar shells for the nule posts. The other uses large cannon shot along the length of the fence. It's War Land! The imagineers have worked overtime to make sure that you're revisitation of the Russo-Turkish wars is as enjoyable and entertaining as possible.

While in Pleven, we also enjoyed a concert from the Bulgarian god that is SLAVI TRIFINOV. The man runs a late night talk show, he sings, he makes videos, and he does concerts for his hometown of Pleven. He is a machine. On the left we have Leslie, excited for the concert and sporting the "I Love Slavi" headband while Lauren makes an absurdly obvious attempt at Leslie's purse. The headbands were the highlight of the show. If you turned most of them over, you could see a faded "The Rolling Stones" on the other side. Bulgarian production values at their best. On the right is a dark image of Slavi, in concert, and a crumpled ticket from the show. For someone who ostensibly wants to be the funniest man in Bulgaria, Slavi looks serious quite a bit. He lets his supporting cast do the work, which I suppose is the way most American hosts run things anyway. Slavi knows his stuff.

So, to finish off this backwards narrative, we have this photo from the trip to Pleven last Sunday. It might as well come from any trip I've taken in Bulgaria. The sunsets here are reliably tremendous and work well over the vast fields of the northeast.

That's the trip in a nutshell. I probably won't get a chance to post tomorrow, but come back Sunday for more surprises and fun.

2003-08-09T21:41:00.000+03:00

GOING AWAY AGAIN
I never seem to stay in Silistra long. Maybe that's why so much of my time here is devoted to getting to know as many of the people and as much of the city as I can. I take long walks, spend time in cafes, and conduct my English classes on the sidewalks, museums, and hills around the town.

I don't think it's a guilt thing. Everything I'm doing when I travel has a purpose. This week I'll be going to a small town called Teteven to plan a camp for next summer with a group of volunteers. Seeing the town as I'm doing is more of a need. I'll be teaching in September, and I know that's when the serious projects will begin to arrive and my free time will begin to grow short. Best to get to know the town now while I still have the time.

So, since I'm off again, chances are there won't be any updates until Friday, when I return. But there will be pictures next weekend, and won't that be fun?

Other than that, it's been a pretty easy going day. Did some laundry, cleaned up the apartment, read a little Grapes of Wrath, and walked around the town. This town really does shut down during the weekend days. No one is on the streets at all on a Saturday afternoon. Everyone does come out at night though. The internet cafe is full now at 9:30, and so was every cafe I passed on my way here. And they'll only get more crowded in the next hour or so.

The clubs here open around midnight, and the diehards stay out until around 5 or 6 Sunday morning. Which explains why the streets are even more deserted on a Sunday than they are Saturday. People sleep or stay in clear through the day. This is vampire country after all.

2003-08-08T13:33:00.000+03:00

CARS AND THE PEOPLE THEY HIT
Walking home from lunch yesterday, there was a large gathering of maybe 20 in the street right in front of my building. I figured it was an accident, and settled it when I saw a woman lying unconscious next to a bike, with an open and empty taxi not ten feet away. The only official on scene was a policeman on a cell phone. I knew there was certainly nothing I could do to help in the situation seeing as the cop had certainly called the paramedics already. Standing around gawking wouldn't help anybody, so I went upstairs to my apartment.

The Bulgarians all stayed though. They didn't say anything, just stayed and watched. Two girls were crying and holding each other apart from the crowd. Minutes later, the ambulance finally arrived, put a neckbrace on the girl, loaded her on to a stretcher, and carried her off to the hospital. It was all very much like any accident you'd see in the U.S, except for a few crucial Bulgarian details.

The type of accident is a common one in Bulgaria, and it almost happened to me not two hours later. A taxi driver, after getting a fare that wants to go in the opposite direction, gets very zealous in his u-turn. He swings around at full speed and seldom looks at the point where the turn will finish. This happens in any world city where taxis own the streets, but in Bulgaria, pedestrians have no right of way.

Drivers have no need to worry about where they drive or who they hit. Cars approaching intersections will go at full speed to beat a red light even if a pedestrian is entering the crosswalk. It's the ped's job to realize a car is barrelling down on him or her, and if they don't, the best the car can do is squeal it's brakes and try to avoid a collision. Though that's really only a moral choice. Depending on the police and courts, the driver could probably get off on account of the pedestrian walking without thought or care.

But when the accident does happen, the police usually are the first on scene. In America, this would also be the case if a police car were closer to the accident than an ambulance, but here the circumstances are different. There are three emergency numbers in Bulgaria: 160 for fire, 166 for police, and 150 for the ambulance. Chances are, your average Bulgarian is only going to know one of them, and it will probably be the number for the police. It's hard enough getting Americans to remember 911 for all three services.

The hospital is only four blocks away from my apartment. I could run the distance in about 3 minutes at a solid jog. It took me about three minutes to get from the scene of the accident to my balcony where I looked down on the scene and finally heard the siren approach. The ambulance was moving at a good clip, if they were late, it certainly wasn't the fault of the medics. However, a large crowd had already gathered by the time I arrived and the police were already on scene. At least 5, maybe 10, minutes had passed since the accident happened and was reported. For a hospital only four blocks away, I'd like to think a response time of 15 minutes is unacceptable.

So what does this mean then? It means pedestrians and bike riders had better be looking to not get hit in Bulgaria, especially if the bike rider isn't wearing a helmet as this girl wasn't. You probably can't count on the drivers or emergency response to take care of you as well as you can yourself.

2003-08-07T12:45:00.000+03:00

THE OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVE
For the rest of the week, until late Saturday or early Sunday anyway, I have a visitor. He's an econ student at UC-Davis vacationing in Eastern Europe for some reason. He was coming to Bulgaria, found the site and said he was going to pass through Silistra and wanted to know if he could see what it is I do here. Well, he said he played basketball so I told him he was more than welcome but that he might be a little disappointed in the quantity of the things I have to do here during the summer and without connections among the students.

So he showed up yesterday, we ate dinner, played some basketball and checkers (a game I hadn't played in something going on 5 years), and generally hung out. What's interesting is that he's seeing everything Bulgarian for the first time. He's only been here a week, and even then only in Varna. Silistra is some kind of strange provincial town in his eyes. It's nice that I have an OMV across the street, but the rest is all a bit iffy.

Kind of proved to me that the Peace Corps knew what they were doing when they stuffed us all in Strelcha for a week. It really was the best way to not just throw us in the deep end, but the ice cold, icebergs floating on the surface deep end as well. After that first week, everything we get that seems even kind of luxurious is gravy. Good food of any kind is like mana from above and your typical Bulgarian stuff is always good enough. Showers are great if the hot water's there and fine if the water goes in and out occasionally. Life goes on.

All the volunteers were probably like he is now when we first got here. We were all talking about how weird it was to see and experience certain things that we now just take for granted. We were wandering around, fumbling our way through what little Bulgarian we knew (He knows only "thank you" and "how much," but is learning a little here and there as we go along).

He's a bit of a picky eater, which I suppose he'll be able to get away with in Varna and Sofia, and in whichever big cities he may find himself, but it's hard in Bulgaria when you don't want to be at least a little adventurous with your menu choices. Vegetarians get by here pretty well, but I don't think it's as easy as it is to meat occasionally - though the same could be said for American life as well.

He was surprised to learn about the general trend in Bulgarian bathrooms. He had so far only stayed at the best hotels in Sofia and Varna; hotels that try to stay western whenever possible. But when the toilet didn't really flush with the power of a thousand waterfalls, and when he couldn't find the shower because it was right smack in the middle of the bathroom, and when he accidentally dropped his clothes on the bathroom floor that was still wet from his shower, he was taken aback. We PC volunteers learned about this stuff from day 1 in Strelcha. We learned to avoid the pitfalls and deal with the things that can't be avoided.

Life is still, when I think about it, strange here. New things come up every day and things that I've adopted as routine I'll probably never see when I return to America.

The only small problem is, and I keep telling him this, is that he's going back to America in a month. Talking about all the things he's going to get at Costco or Ralph's when he gets back is all well and good as long as he doesn't try to appease me the same way. He seems to think that I'll be able to get gallon jugs of good milk whenever I want them at the same time that he will. I have to remind him that I'm here for two years, and as much as I'd like to take a quick drive to a store and grab four bags full of El Paso salsa, Pop Tarts, milk, mangos, avacados, Yoplait yogurt, and Dreamery ice cream the best I can do is go to the Billa or Metro in Varna and Ruse (2 hours away in either direction), and bring back what I can on the bus from there. And those are pretty rare trips. I'm usually stuck pointing around the local stores here, trying to find one that carries any fresh milk at all.

I'm okay with all this. It's my life and I'm making up for the things I miss well. It's just a bit of a new challenge to talk with someone who sees all the things I've adapted to as problems that will be resolved in a month for the both of us. Oh well, he plays basketball well and is good company. That's more than enough reason to let him stick around.

2003-08-05T14:37:00.000+03:00

NEW NEWS
The newbies come in today! The B-14s arrive in Sofia this very day. This is awfully strange. I've only been here four months and already I'm no longer a rookie. Of course, none of these new people are teachers, so I'm still a new TEFL, but they're new to Bulgaria. Some have written to me after finding the site, asking me about Bulgaria, life here, etc. They seem like good, hearty folk. The Youth Development volunteers seem a bit scared about possibly living in Strelcha (as I've previously described it, not as the decent town it really is) for three months, but I'm sure they'll get over it.

Also, I was - for some reason I can't remember - looking over my own archives earlier and found this gem from before I left.

--I've seen quite a bit of the ouvre Seinfeld and every Curb Your Enthusiasm, but neither show is among the things I think I might miss when I leave the States. In fact, I know I won't miss them. Life will go on without them and it seems ridiculous to me to think it would be otherwise.

Well, I was more or less right. I have no idea if I'll ever get to see some LD genius here in Bulgaria, and it really doesn't bother me that much.

What is interesting is the Simpsons/Seinfeld/CYE quote or reference ratio here among the volunteers. I think Simpsons wins out on quantity, but the best stuff often comes from Seinfeld, and both of these shows are referenced a lot in conversation here. Depending on who I hang out with, Simpsons will usually be brought up at least once a day in some form or other, and Seinfeld springs up every now and then, but mostly when describing people. I once, without really thinking about it, called someone a "close-talker" and the person I was talking to picked that one out right away.

Make no mistake, Seinfeld and the Simpsons are the stuff of life these days, and I really don't feel nerdy thinking that. When once people quoted the Bible or Shakespeare, we now have The Simpsons and Seinfeld to describe life anywhere in the world. Frankly, conversation is much more entertaining this way, and people laugh more. Whether it's intellectually or philosophically better can be left up to debate. But as long as I can say "To alcohol: the cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems," and know that people will know I'm paying homage to the newer Homer, life will be good.

Being original is always paramount, and the world would be nowhere without new stuff coming from the pens and mouths of people every hour of every day. But sometimes things have already been said well enough, and the humor and poignancy is only emphasized by a common knowledge. Thank god we have Matt Groening and Larry David to thank for a lot of that knowledge.

2003-08-05T12:33:00.000+03:00

OLD NEWS

Last Thursday, my little English seminar group took a trip up the hill south of town to visit the Turkish fortress there and get a view of town from the TV tower up there as well. We did both, seeing the TV tower first and getting the view you see at the top of this entry. It was a hazy day, unfortunately, and it's hard to see Romania in this photo, but it's there, and it's mostly farm land, so you aren't missing much. My apartment building is somewhere on the left edge of the photo, but you can't really see it here, either.

What you can see, obviously, is the center of town, and that much of the city is very green. There are trees everywhere here, and the parks and walkways are kept very clean.

We also got this view of the Turkish fortress:

The walls used to be about 18 feet higher, apparently. The main entrance is at the end of that cobblestone path going into the fortress on the right side. The arc-like building was the barracks. The acoustics are so strange that you can stand on one end of the arc, speak normally, and be heard on the other end. It must have boomed when the troops snored.

Near the upper end of the barracks is the tunnel that could - feasibly - take a person from the fortress down to the river. A sort of escape hatch. Of course, I haven't seen the river exit yet, nor do I know if it still exists or if the tunnel is still passable all of the way through. I don't think exploring that tunnel will be on my list of things to do. Especially since the people that run the fortress, you know, keep it locked up and say people shouldn't go down there. Not that that would otherwise stop me, but it helps.

The fortress was just recently remodeled and regulated so there was a little bit of vandalism, but the place has, on the whole, been cleaned up pretty well. It was built shortly after the Napoleonic wars in the 19th century and formed one corner of a square of fortress cities that included Ruse, Shumen, and Varna. This is the last of the fortresses still standing, all the others were destroyed by the Russians during the war that freed Bulgaria in the late 19th century.

This path runs around the inside wall of the fortress, and it would really be something with 18 more feet at the top. As it is now, the wall seems very formidable. Didn't really help the Turks too much, though. One fortress still standing doesn't really win a war.

Today, we visited Silistra's ethnographic museum, a gathering of artifacts and bits of Bulgarian life from about 100 years ago. There was nothing incredibly surprising there, but it was fascinating to see old black and white photos of some of the local houses that are still standing. Most of the houses along the river that show a date come from around the the turn of the century, although the earliest I've seen is 1879.

It's an old city, and the people here seem to have the desire to remember its history well. The next stop on our tour will be the Archeological museum Thursday. We'll see what that turns up.

2003-08-03T10:49:00.000+03:00

WHY DOES IT ALWAYS RAIN ON ME?
So, I'm in Sofia again, and it always seems to rain when I'm here. This morning seems okay, but yesterday saw a pretty nasty morning storm. Jeff, also here for the weekend, and I left Peace Corps headquarters and, not having umbrellas or raincoats, had to jog over to Dunkin Donuts a few blocks away. After donuts, we decided to wait out the storm in a movie theater and watch Terminator 3.

It wasn't a bad choice, the movie has some great action, one great car/truck chase in particular, but ends more strangely than any movie has since Alien 3. Up until the last 15 minutes or so though, the movie's very solid, nothing new or daring, but solid. The actress who played Robert Patrick's old part from Terminator 2 did pretty well looking good and acting evil, but I can't really say she made a name for herself here. In fact, I'll have to go and look it up. There we go, Kristanna Loken. Passable work, Kristanna.

After the movie we checked into a hostel and went to have dinner with Jeff's language instructor from Velingrad. She lives in Sofia and took us to a place whose name translates into "Savage." The atmosphere didn't really reflect the name, but the Bulgarian food was pretty good. You'd be surprised how easy it gets to judge the quality of Bulgarian food. Even though a Shopska salad is cucumbers and tomatoes anywhere in Bulgaria, some restaurants have tomatoes that are that much better. Really makes a difference, somehow.

So I'm here in headquarters, now, getting things squared away before the trip home this afternoon. Just another weekend.

2003-08-01T14:27:00.000+03:00

THE TURKISH FORTRESS
Yes, this was supposed to be a nice little photo exposition about my little English group's trip to the top of the hill south of town. We saw the Turkish Fortress, the TV tower and many great views of Silistra and Romania. Sadly, Blogger is acting up and won't let me upload things. So, today's will be a short entry as I say that I will be leaving for Sofia tonight to spend the weekend doing administrative stuff.

I probably won't update Saturday or Sunday, but I'll be back Monday with photos. Enjoy the weekend.

2003-07-31T17:42:00.000+03:00

POSTING ON THE FLY
I'm on the move this afternoon, sans backpack, so I have no disk with which I may show the foontastick photos I got of the town, Turkish fortress, etc. So I'm afraid you'll just have to wait, palms sweaty, eyes darting back and forth for my next entry.

Incidentally, I'm beginning to notice that this journal is more and more directed toward some audience that exists out there somewhere. I meant it as a cathartic thingie for my family, friends, and more than anything for myself. I would post my thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. (HAH! As if I have such petty mortal weaknesses!) and vent in general. If some guests passed through they would be more than welcome, but I never really intended this for the massive unknown.

Well, turns out some people have stumbled onto the site. More and more every day as it turns out. And many of these people have intentions of coming to Bulgaria. So, as I usually tell these people in my e-mails to them, after thanking them for making me feel a little less alone on this island Earth, DON'T PANIC.

If I get sarcastic, if I point out the worst of Bulgaria, if my site is, in short, not a tourist brochure for this fair country...Come Anyway. You won't regret it.

Look at this way. If you were an alien coming from some planet similar to Earth only a little more advanced, and you watched CNN on your way here, would you still want to come?

"Great Gluntthog! The best thing that ever happens on this planet is puppies being rescued from a river! The rest seems to be wars and riots. Kothyar, let's go home, where only occasionally do Gruntmings get eaten alive by the voracious mouths of the Knithing. It's better than more stories about puppies, anyway."

Yeah, see, it's just like that. Only I'm not CNN really. And I try to stay away from endearing photos of puppies. But you get the point. If I say a city is a filthy cesspool, that's just like, my opinion, man.

I could certainly say the same thing about certain parts of Seattle and Anchorage. And without doubt most of Los Angeles. Sections of my beloved Sitka even have their downside.

So, take my word for it. Bulgaria needs you, and you-probably-need Bulgaria. Everybody does at some point. Come on down and enjoy the pleasant beaches, ski slopes, and lush farmland that make this country the sublimely intriguing locale that every empire since the dawn of man has wanted to call home. BULGARIA...have you seen it yet?

So endeth the tourist brochure. Jaded and cynical comments to recommence tommorow.

2003-07-30T17:15:00.000+03:00

DRINKING BULGARIA
Tap water here isn't something to be dealt with lightly. It's full of various deposits from old pipes, and the most vile of the stuff may be diseased. The locals know this, and bottled water is more common here than it was when I left Los Angeles a year or so ago. Unfortunately, it's mostly mineral water, and the worst of it tastes like drinking ocean. The best tastes like decent, filtered mineral water, but I've never liked the stuff, and don't care for the extra sodium either.

Fortunately, the Peace Corps gave us all distillers. I've been saving the large bottles of juice, washed them out, and am now filling them up and storing them away. I plan on keeping a constant rotation of two bottles in the fridge so I always have something cool to drink.

Every time I get a new crop out of the distiller, I'm happily reminded about why I go through the trouble. The bottom is usually pretty well caked with white, crystallized calcium/lime/whatever deposits. The medical staff threatened us with the possibility of kidney stones. They could have said giardia and I probably would have taken my chances. Hey, it's the Peace Corps, what's a little diarrhea in exchange for life experience? But kidney stones is something else entirely.

When I look down into the distiller and see what I'm missing out on, I briefly imagine it coming to rest in my kidneys, bouncing around a little, not finding a way out, then five, ten years down the line...shudder.

So I use my distiller religiously. And am awfully glad I lugged it all the way up from Septemvri.

2003-07-29T21:44:00.000+03:00

SILISTRA'S RUINS
The entry's a little later than usual today. Normally I like to come in to the internet club around 1, spend the hotter part of the afternoon here where it's air-conditioned, then take a walk around town while the sun's going down. But today I actually had to do stuff. It was horribly tiring and a drain on my system. This "doing things" is hard work.

At ten, I led a small group of Silistra's students around town and up through the park. I was at first worried about this, seeing as there were many different levels of English in the group, I still don't know the town very well, and I feared they were expecting something enlightening out of me. Turned out to be a blast though, as most of these things that worry me usually do. We started out at the school and made our way up to the park, conversing in English, talking about what I think of Bulgaria, what everybody studied, how many languages people know, etc. Nothing wild, but interesting nonetheless.

When we got to the park, I brought the group to a place that had immediately grabbed my interest when I first discovered it. It's two structures packed into a dense field of weeds and trees. The first is this old covered pavement with stands on both sides.

Weeds, as they do in both sites, seem to have grown straight out of the concrete. Under the stands on both sides is a nearly identical field of garbage, with matching disposed-of tires from the three carts lined up on one side. Roma? Probably, but I never see too many in this part of town. They seem to live with the Turkish people in the Southeast corner of town.

Anyway, according to my group, this place used to be a rollerdrome of sorts. Although I'm guessing it was something closer to a skatepark. It shut down when the communists shut down shop and plants seem to have gotten the idea that the place had been abandoned almost immediately. The fence around the covering looks pretty much like a jungle. Ten years of no care and this is what happens. Just in case anybody was curious.

Here are a couple of views from the second structure. It's something that appears to have been a combination stage/basketball court. I'm guessing they could put seats around the stanchions if they really thought the house would be full. I asked who owns this now and someone in the group said "drug-users." I'm telling you, these Silistra folk are awfully clever. General consesus was that the city owns it.

I was asking because I'd really like to see it cleaned up. It's only about 50 yards from the river, and as nice and large as Danube Park is, once you go past it, you run across stuff like this. Beyond this is an old bread factory, and the small ferry port, then a restaurant and a couple of clubs and Romania. Besides the restaurant and clubs, it's pretty much a wasteland. The river may not be the lifeblood of the town, but it's definitely the source of high land values, and where revitalization has taken place along the river, the rest of the town below that point seems to have prospered a little bit more than the rest.

There is a small complex of buildings behind the basketball courts, and an empty concession stand and restroom (well the restroom wasn't empty, if you get my drift.) below the stage. I don't know what could be done with those. Sadly, I'm no structural engineer. But I'd like to see what I can do with the court, stage, and stands. Maybe fundraise a little, find some students to volunteer and help dust, pluck weeds, and paint. Then see what can be done about the buildings later. It's a project possibility, and now that I've put it here, I might actually have to follow through on it. I have two years after all. Plenty of time to do something with this place.

Moving on though, we took the tour through the park and walked through the Roman ruins further on. The archaeologists have had their fun with them and let the Beautiful Bulgaria Project come along and concrete everything up so all the Roman ruins in town look something like this:

There's also Roman tomb on the other end of town, but that's pretty well preserved. What's striking about this, when it's all sealed with concrete, is it's similarity to the basketball court and skate park. It's just a long-forgotten thing resting near the river. Sometimes kids come and sit on it, but it really serves no other purpose but to show that some other civilization once lived here. The two other sites serve the same purpose as they continue to illustrate that communists were once here. They're scars showing Bulgaria's history.

Thursday, we revisit another scar, the Turkish fortress at the top of the hill south of town. Should be some interesting pictures after that one. Stay tuned.

2003-07-28T15:41:00.000+03:00

SILISTRA--IN IMAGES. POWERFUL STUFF AHEAD PEOPLE

A relatively light e-mail day means that I have time to throw some photos on the site. I've noticed that I haven't shown anyone too much of the town I'll be living in for two years, so here are some poignant, tear-jerking images of a city in transition. I give you--Silistra, Bulgaria.

Here we have a statue of a man bearing a striking resemblance to either Charlie or Martin Sheen watching over the central plaza. You can't see the resemblance here, but it's there, and it's eerie. To the right is the art museum, and/or a precise reproduction of the house the Bankses lived in in Mary Poppins. It even has a weather vane. A weather vane!

I was walking by with my counterpart and talked about this with her. She agreed, but pointed out that in her experience, I make references to--or publicly sing songs from--Mary Poppins quite a bit. This is true, and disturbs me more than a little. The movie has cropped up in my head a few times recently. Bulgaria does wierd things to people. I suppose the Sound of Music will be next. Then I'll just descend into a Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang madness and it will all be over. I tremble to think on it.

Moving on! To the left of the statue you'll see the beginnings of a wide path that leads to the Danube through the park. Which brings us to this:

Here we have a line of Bulgarian senior citizens along the same path we saw earlier. This is generally the way a person finds these people in Bulgaria. Sometimes they'll be playing chess or backgammon or bridge, but usually they're sitting in massive rows on benchs outside of homes or in parks. It's always quite a community, but chances are that if you talk to one or more of them the conversation will turn to how much worse times are now than they used to be. They don't get too much money at all from the government, so for them, it's true. I wish there were a way to convince them that times will get better, but I doubt that they'd get much consolation if they believed that anyway.

Odd safety signs like this are all over Silistra. A few, like "STOP" here, are painted on the sides of apartment blocks. Some are on sign boards. They seem to pre-date the Beautiful Bulgaria Project's arrival in Silistra, and many of the blocks around town are painted with advertisments that go back to the communist days.

I'm inclined to believe that they come from some time in the late eighties. The shadow effect seen here was common in the eighties in America (I remember it distinctly on cartons of milk at Ralph's. I think certain cartons still have the design). It's used strangley here. It doesn't really imply forward motion in the motorcyclist's case. So it was used either to give the vehicular viewer the feeling of driving drunk with multiple vision or just to take up space on a wall that would otherwise be occupied by a bike rider and a pedestrian. Whatever the artist's intentions, his work is well-preserved for the moment.

Unlike this tragically misplaced masterpiece found in a Silistran back alley. Again, I'm not sure about the source period. The logo on the postman's bag, the horn, is the same used by the Bulgarian postal service here today. I'm not sure if it comes from commie days, the design of the work seems to reflect that period.

What's disappointing is that this great work of public space propaganda, no doubt commisioned on the cheap by some municipality, is now being used to patch up the gap between a wall and someone's house. Maybe the owner wanted a dog run and some mutt is doing his business on the rear of these classics. I didn't have time to investigate. Here's the photoshopped version, possibly as the artist originally intended it to be:

Now we see the glory of hard-working and friendly postal and telephone employees working side-by-side as they do in any Bulgarian city's post office. What the artist fails to capture, of course, is the endless amounts of bureaucracy, paperwork, dead looks, and unfriendly greetings that separate these noble people from their customers.

All we get is evil eyebrows on both of the employees. But perhaps that's all we need to imagine the malice these people have for those that come to them during their workdays with their petty requests. I see in the eyebrows of the telephone operator the command "Kazhete!" that represents the pinnacle of Bulgarian customer service in the public sector. I'll admire the unknown artist for that, at least.

2003-07-27T18:00:00.000+03:00

ROMANIA AND SILISTRA
When I point out Romania, Bulgarians usually look at it for a second and mumble one of two things. Sometimes, and especially with the more progressive Bulgarians, it's something bad about the country itself. They adopt a Marvin the Martian attitude and want Romania gone because it blocks their view of the rest of Europe. As if life would be better for Bulgaria if Romania were out of the way.

Usually, though, the Bulgarian will say something unpleasant about the Romanians themselves, or say that the country is full of gypsies, or something inflammatory along those lines. Most Bulgarians will acknowledge that the Romanians are really very good at gymnastics, but that's the reluctant extent of their praise.

Conversations about the "nasty" country come up a lot around here. Romania is right across the river, and at the east end of town the border cuts right through the river and forms the city limits on the east side. Most of what you can see across the river is forest with regular patches of clearcutting. Fires spring up along the shores at night, and in the forest you can usually see vast plumes of smoke all day long. It looks like a set piece for one of the Lord of the Rings movies. You have civilzed, cultural, industrial Silistra on one side of the Danube, and untamed, wild Romania on the other. I know there are cities somewhere in that wilderness. Some only 10 or 15 miles or so from shore. But when I look across the river they seem awfully far away.

The other border is very different. Looking beyond it, it seems awfully Bulgarian. Jeff, another volunteer and my closest B-13 neighbor, came up to visit this weekend. Not having gone far enough around town to really see the border since it's a 30 or 40 minute walk from my apartment and not particularly near any place I visit, I suggested we take a look.

I knew one of the main roads led to the border crossing, and, not really sure about which one it was, took the one more travelled-by. We were walking for about a half an hour when we came to the end of town and weren't entirely sure about the direction we were facing. There were no signs pointing out Romania, just a sign that pointed out the fact that we had left town. On the left was a massive vineyard, spreading out along the ridge of the hill. The right had small houses one expects to find on the outskirts of town and beyond that fields.

The whole scene reminded us both of any time we had spent in the country as kids. I talked about my cousin John in Ojai and my family's trips to the middle of California, Jeff talked about western Nebraska and Pennsylvania and how he and his friends used to run through corn fields and get lost because they couldn't see over the stalks. It was all very nostalgic.

We decided to find a way into the vineyard so we could get to the top of the hill and have a look around to see where we were. We walked by an apple tree and along a small corn field and up a dirt slope and everything felt very American. But when we approached the vineyard, we couldn't help noticing the large, 3 meter fence with barbed wire along the top that surrounded the vineyard entirely.

We both found these measures extraordinarily strong for an Eastern European grape field, but were willing to accept it as impassable and turned around for my apartment, since no Romanian border appeared to be in sight.

When we got back, I looked at my map of Silistra and discovered that the reason the vineyard got such outstanding protection was that it marked the border between Bulgaria and Romania. The main street approaches the border but turns before it connects and runs along the fence asymptotically, never really connecting with it.

We had seen the border, and South-Eastern Romania, and it might as well have been Bulgaria. I later walked along the other street to the border crossing, looked beyond it, and saw nothing that told of a vast difference between Bulgarian and Romanian style. The language was different, but that was it.

What, exactly, does all this come down to? Well, I haven't met a Romanian yet, and neither have many of the Bulgarians I've talked to about them here in Silistra. But when I do, I doubt I'll look on them any differently than I would a Bulgarian, or a German, or the Japanese. Of course, if the Bulgarians are right, I will then, in my naivete and general acceptance of strangers, get my pockets picked by a gypsy and my neck bitten by a vampire. But these are the chances we have to take I suppose, if we don't want to go around pissing on people before we meet them.

2003-07-24T16:13:00.000+03:00

KEEPING BUSY
So, every Tueday and Thursday morning now, until classes start, I get to take Silistrans on a tour of their own town and speak with them mostly in English. This was supposed to be a seminar/project thing designed mostly for high schoolers, but maybe only 3 out of the 15 that showed up were high schoolers. The rest were college students or adults wanting to learn a little more English.

One knows no English at all, but came with the expectation of learning. I want to include everybody in the group, so she and the others that represent different levels of language ability will provide an interesting challenge. It's something I'm working on until next Tuesday. Developing a program for the course and and allowing it to work for everyone involved.

As for the roach thing. The final answer appears to be boric acid powder. Our Peace Corps cookbook recommends it in its pest control section (all cookbooks should have a pest control section. In my experience, keeping bugs out has been an integral part of cooking), and every e-mail I've gotten from the States praises it too. I'm not exactly sure where a person can buy the stuff here, but it must be available somewhere.

Short entry today, I've gotta run. But odds are I'll be back tomorrow.

2003-07-22T15:55:00.000+03:00

WHEREVER I GO, BASKETBALL PLAYERS FLEE
In the center of Silistra there is a row of 4 cafe-looking places under similar looking umbrellas. One is a restaurant, and one of the few decent ones in town. One, I know for sure is a bar and offers no food. Tired of eating at the same restaurant whenever I don't have the time/inclination to fix a meal at home, I decided to give one of the other two a shot. When I last came to Silistra, I had eaten lunch at one of the places and it had been pretty good, so I tried my luck and sat down at one of the two mystery cafes and asked for a menu.

I knew I had screwed it up when the instantly present waitress gave me a funny look and huffed off to grab a menu from inside. The only food on the menu was peanuts. I chuckled, ordered a Fanta to give her something to do, and moved on after finishing the Fanta.

It's tough figuring out which places actually serve food in Bulgaria. Not just because some places that look like they should be cafes have full menus and that the heaviest food some places that look like restaurants offer is walnuts. No, it's also because Bulgarians never seem to eat. I could be walking past the busiest restaurant in town and see nothing more filling on a table than a coffee with two sugars and cream in it.

Another volunteer and I were walking down a Silistra street, and after noticing a place that she said was new, had to cross the street and walk all the way up to the door to see that place actually did offer food and have a kitchen.

The cafe culture is great, and gets people to meet each other, but it makes eating awfully hard. And I love eating one hell of a lot more than I like drinking coffee. It tends to give me, you know, usable energy, with which I can do things, like play basketball and badly segue into another paragraph.

I came to Silistra remembering that about half the guys in every class I visited during the school year asked me if I would play basketball when I returned. I said of course, and happily expected the courts to be full of guys looking to play some ball during the summer. Instead, what I get is a bunch of strange looks from people staring out their apartment windows at the odd American, shooting around all alone on courts where insects would mean a welcome increase in population.

Nobody plays here. At least during the summer. And I do not make this statement without research. I have visited every court I know about, at just about every time of day, and have not seen so much as one kid throwing a ball at a hoop. Septemvri had a similar problem, and once I started playing more kids began to show up.

Now, writing this, I realize I leave myself open for the pleasant surprise of finding a group of regulars playing at some set time on some hidden court. Yipee if it happens, but I haven't seen anyone playing yet, so I'm not optomistic. I guess I'll just have to play, and wait until the others start to play too.

Onto other business, cockroaches have reared their ugly heads in some apartments (cafes, basketball, and cockroaches. When you read Alaskan Bulgarian, you get the whole story). I've had one small one in mine and he suffered the same fate all other insect intruders have in my apartment. But some volunteers have been overwhelmed by armies. As a public service, I'll research possible solutions and post them on the site, and anyone who has a home remedy (that works people. If you heard something in your high school Dungeons and Dragons club about a level 5 mace doing wonders against roaches...I don't need to hear it) is welcome to send it in and help those in need.

I'm worried that all we'll be able to do in Bulgaria is poison the little darlings until our hair starts to tingle and fall off, but lets keep some hope alive. Help fight the roach hoard!

So, yeah. I'm off to shoot around and keep the game alive while Silistrans stand around and lazily watch. Later.

2003-07-21T16:55:00.000+03:00

ONE FLEW EAST...
If there's one thing I've done in Peace Corps Bulgaria so far, apart from hang out, learn the langauge, meet Bulgarians, play basketball, go to the sea, sing, make a general fool out of myself, and update this blog, it's read. There has been a lot of reading so far. And everyone else is in on it to. All the American classics. I've never seen so much Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis.

This brings me to the book I'm reading now, one sent to me by good ol' Grams. I'd been putting off reading it or seeing the movie based on it because 1.) I thought I knew every little thing that happened in it. The Simpsons has parodied it too many times to count, and when I needed a summary there was always someone who knew the story more than I did to ask. And 2.) I knew the story was, in some way depressing, and I despise stories that are depressing just for the sake of getting everybody in the author's sour mood. Bret Easton Ellis has made quite a career out of trying to bring everybody on Earth down to his own pissed-off level. I thought this book would be the same kind of thing.

But One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest isn't anything near what I expected. It's depressing at parts sure, and the protagonist dies at the end, yes. But the beauty of the novel goes beyond these facts. I have no idea how well the movie portrays it, but I have never read any changes in character that go so far, yet stay so believable. I knew about Big Chief and McMurphy before I began the first page, but even they go through things I'd never expected, let alone heard about. And the other characters in the story add more than any supporting cast should be expected to. Anyway, I don't want this to be a book report, but I gave this book a skip because I thought it was something it wasn't. I just want to say it's worth the read.

Beyond that, we have more photos today.

Here we have the other two photos of the big group from "graduation" two weeks ago. I photoshopped them until they were worth looking at, and I think they're both respectable. If anybody wants full-size versions, let me know and I'll e-mail them possibly or eventually. Enjoy.

Two views of Balchick. I just want to point out that a volunteer will have to live here for two years. We should all give her a pat on the back and thank her for taking one for the team. This place is just going to be swarming with tourists next year. And man those buggers get annoying.

Just think. All those tourists. Life will indeed be hard.

I talked about sunflowers a while back, and how this part of the country likes to grow them quite a bit. Here's a shot taken from a bus of just a small sample of this yellow ocean. It's really something to drive through, and I plan on taking a few walks around there to get a better feel for the place. It's not the size of the fields that's impressive, it's the mass of solid color. Indescribable really.

And here we close with a cute doggie photo. This is Balko, the family dog back in Septemvri. They got him after I came and named him Balko because the kid liked the movie about the sled dog and I was from Alaska. A perfect fit! Yeah, everybody needs a doggie photo every now and then.

2003-07-19T14:46:00.000+03:00

SAY IT AIN'T SO KOB'
Well, he did something, and admitted to it. The role model thing isn't there for Kobe Bryant anymore. All he is is just another NBA player that'll have to appear before judge and jury. And it isn't just a rumor, or a woman trying to make a name for herself (although that might still be part of the case), he did something, and can't hide behind his reputation anymore.

I always thought Kobe was a pretty good guy, at least in how he appeared in public life. And that's all I was able to judge him by. Now he's just a good ballplayer. Shaq has a better moral record than Kobe now. Kobe's no longer the kid, he's as much a screw-up as Jason Kidd, Stoudemire, Webber, or any other NBA star that's been in court recently.

The Lakers signed Payton and Malone this summer, and, as it turns out, Payton has a few questions to answer for the law enforcement community of Milwaukee. But any triumph for the team has been taken down several notches by all this that Kobe will have to go through. There may be a trial during the season that he'll have to miss games for.

Sigh.

Moving on, can't complain as much as that about what's going on here. Not that much is happening, but it's relaxing anyway, and that's nice. I kind of wish I were teaching already. I came here to do that, and September seems pretty far away. All the veteran volunteers here would give me this crappy knowing grin and say I don't know what I'm asking for. And I would say that I do. Give me a freaking challenge! All the extra projects are okay, but they don't add up to anything like actually teaching.

Moving the school will at least give me something to do, but I won't have to learn about and figure out how to best teach hundreds of students like I will in the fall. I'm ready to get going, I'm chomping, and I still have a couple months to go.

SIGH.

2003-07-17T14:50:00.000+03:00

IT'S PHOTO--AND LAUNDRY--DAY!

This, friends, is the control panel of a relatively common Bulgarian washing machine. For the last couple of mornings I have taken on the noble task of figuring it out. To my great surprise and pleasure, I have gotten two loads of clean clothes out of it. Although to do this, I have had to sit in front of the thing for hours at a time, watching it, making sure it doesn't spend an hour or more in the wash cycle and that it gets through the rinse cycle without doing something silly. I'm thinking the next load will be relatively painless, I've figured out what most of the strange letters and instructions seem to mean with the help of trial and error and a dictionary. Still, it's been a weird couple of mornings.

You see, I have grown fond of the laundromat when I live alone. I relied upon the one in my building in LA pretty heavily, as does most anyone in a reasonably priced American apartment complex. But here in Bulgaria, the popularity of these "laundromat" things that swept the rest of the world some fifty years ago has been resolutely ignored. I have yet to see one. Not one laundromat in the entire country. Sure they have dry cleaners in the bigger cities, but what's wrong with a simple place where a guy can deposit stotinki and detergent and get a halfway decent wash, and maybe even dry his clothes? Because, that's right boys and girls, as soon as the laundry is done it goes out on my little balcony to dry. There are as few dryers here as there are laundromats. Just thought that needed to be said. Moving on.

Here's the host family from Septemvri, the people with whom I lived for a good, happy three months. The one on my head is Slavi, the four year-old grandson of the two on my right, Clavaeko and Kalinka. Kalinka used to do my laundry, cook my food, and help make my bed. She also provided adequate Bulgarian dinner conversation. I miss Kalinka, and everybody else present in this photo, terribly. Of course, there is something to be said for not feeling like Slavi's equal in the familial scheme. I really did feel babied. And I'm eating well here, and I'll visit them sometime, so it all evens out I suppose.

The one taking the picture is Toshko, Slavi's dad and son of Kalinka and Clavaeko. He was the only one really amused by the digital camera and willing to take photos with it. Unfortunately, as great a man and chess player as Toshko is, he is no photographer. But neither am I, really, and the photos are there, so I'm not really worried.

This is one of three photos Toshko took of the giant group following our graduation last week. This is the best of the bunch, but if you look at each one after the other, they kind of fold into a really good picture in the mind. It's like an optical illusion. Anyway, you get this one. I'm the tall guy in the back next to the other tall guy, Jeff. The rest of the people in the photo are all extraordinarily good friends but out of expediency will have to go unnamed unitl they pop up in a smaller group photo later on in life's collection of group photos.

Here we have Group Septemvri. From left to right we have Sheryl, our explosives expert, Christen, our master of disguises, and Aaron, the point man. I usually just stand around in the back and point my finger at cameras. It's the way we got things done in Septemvri. I owe them all my sanity and continued enjoyment of the strange town and experience that occupied the last three months of my life. Great group, we were.

Jeff, Brian, Toshko's finger, and myself. Not much to say here that wouldn't piss off Brian. You'll probably see the both of them again, soon. Like right now, even.

HEY! HEY! WE'RE THE MONKEYS! PEOPLE SAY WE MONKEY AROUND! Either that or the Brady Bunch. Great photo though. I'm the one taking the shot, but the people in it are Brian, (B)Ryan, Kate, and Jeff. People could never seem to get poor Ryan's name right the entire weekend in Balchik. They had Brian's down pretty well though. We're the group that made the hard sacrifice of going to the coast to attend a camp during our first weekend of service.

We were at the Romanian queen's palace. The garden extends about 100 yards or so all around us and the beach is about 200 feet below the wall at the end of the stream behind us. Big cliff there, really nice view, beautiful place to live, visit, or bounce around in for a weekend. Good times, etc.

So that concludes today's slideshow. I'll try to bring more tomorrow, and photoshop thse so they look a little more respectable. Oh, and do more laundry too.

2003-07-16T17:03:00.000+03:00

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILISTRA, FOR...UM...THE SECOND TIME
Well, I was here a month or so ago and I really didn't get a chance to see the city as well as I have this week. It's really an interesting place, with dynamics I don't see in most Bulgarian towns.

Silistra's greatest landmark, the Danube, isn't nearly the defining center I first thought it would be. A park runs along most of it, and there are cafes here and there along the paths and lawns. A restaurant marks the end of the city's relationship with the river and kind of sees it off into Romania. Despite being in a distant corner of the city, the restaurant does pretty well.

There are people that walk through and play in Danube Park, but most people walk along the main drag through the center of the city. There are enough restaurants and stores along that street. None of them scream to be eaten at, but once you've grown tired of Shopska Salata in Bulgaria, no restaurant seems to be too inviting.

The town doesn't seem as empty as I remember it. There are enough people walking the streets and driving to give it a crowded look at midday, and certain cafes are packed at night. It makes me wonder what the city looked like with the 90,000 people, three times its population now, that it had before the communists packed up and left.

Silistra seems to have a solid infrastructure. It's commerce is set up, empty factories are there, and small, blank billboards line the main streets. It's just waiting for the rest of Bulgaria to catch up. As it is now, taking a bus to Ruse, the nearest city, takes about 2 hours. By train that goes up to 5 hours. The roads between cities are incredibly small, two lane things that prevent rapid transportation, and riding trains in any part of the country is a matter of getting over the annoyance of too-frequent stops.

The city used to have an airport that probably made things a little easier on commerce, but that's mostly deserted now. A busload of Germans comes in about once a week, but that's far less toursim than a Danube city deserves.

So what can I do here? I'm still working on that question. The best thing would be to teach the kids English and tell them to stick things out until the government can give the rest of the country and region the transportation infrastructure it so sorely needs. The biggest problem is smart kids fleeing the country for better work elsewhere. I'm hoping I can get a couple to make a difference here, but I won't know how feasible that will be until I start teaching.

Silistra's a fascinating city and will be an interesting place to live and work in for two years. We'll have to see what happens.

2003-07-15T14:01:00.000+03:00

THE WEEKEND
So, I spent the weekend on the Black Sea coast, in a small town called Balchik (aka terrestial paradise). Coming into the bus station, you drive along tall cliffs and bluffs of white stone. It looks like a bleached version of Malibu. The city itself is built on a series of steep escalations and plateaus that mean excellent views in the summer but will be a living hell in the winter, when even the coast gets frozen in.

Everything comes down to a rocky coast that has a couple of small beaches, but is otherwise a long walkway with a few stairwells down the rocks into the sandy ocean. On the other side of the walkway is the best series of cafes and restaurants I've seen in Bulgaria. The menus' translations were a bit strange. A person could order "sterilized cucumber" or "old, dried sausage," but at least the translations were there. The effort was solid.

But we weren't there to have fun and play ultimate frisbee in the ocean with Bulgarians. NO. We were there to have fun, play ultimate frisbee, and help out with/learn about Camp TO BE. The camp was set up last year, TO BE stands for "teaching our boys to excel," and it has been held in Balchik both years. The goal is to teach some smart Bulgarian high school students about life and how they can best contribute to their own success and their country's. From what I saw, it came off pretty well. There was great chemistry among the guys, and they seemed to be learning something.

We, the five attending B-13s, are expected to run the camp next year, with preparation help coming from B-12s until they have to go home next summer. There are already "junior camp counselors," Bulgarians who help run things, and the goal is to get the camp fully operated by Bulgarians by the time Peace Corps pulls out, whenever that may be. The locals in Balchik were incredibly helpful, and it seems like the camp will be an interesting challenge to pull off. Not impossible, probably difficult, and...interesting.

We did things like introducing the kids to marketing with the help of an economic volunteer from Pravets. There was the usual and requisite discussion of drugs and sex education. The first night, we went to a performance of various opera arias at a local church, and I decided that Bulgarian opera will be worth checking out after all. I'm going to have to make a few trips to Varna to see what they have going on there.

At night, we walked along the beach walkway and investigated bars and cafes. We thoroughly discussed the situation, and came up with the thesis that life was indeed "pretty good." It rained Monday, the day we left, and when I got home to a sunny and breezy Silistra, the weather seemed to imply that I'd gotten enough of that weekend.

Back to work today, I finished up the registration process at the police, although I'll have to go back in a month to pick up my identity card. Then Vanya, my counterpart language teacher, and I discussed a program we'll be putting on throughout the summer. Something about seeing Silistra through the eyes of an American and through the English language. More details to come, but I think it will go over well.

Oh yeah, I still have things to do on that. Back to work.

2003-07-12T11:44:00.000+03:00

SEAS OF BLUE AND GOLD
...And pretentious titles too. I'm writing this from a Varna back alley internet cafe. A cafe which, despite being in a back alley, is by far the best I've visited in Bulgaria. The connection is as fast as I would need an internet connection to be, the room is clean, and there are couches to lounge in. If only all Bulgarian internet clubs were so nice.

I took the bus in to Isperih last night and had a great dinner with a married couple, Skip and Carol Thompson, who will unfortunately be leaving soon. They've done their two years and are ready to go home, although sad to be leaving Bulgaria. They've established a library in Isperih and their living room was filled with books that were a joy to look over. They'd received tons of Dean Koontz for some reason, a Calvin and Hobbes collection, a juvenile version of Pride and Prejudice, and others too innumerable to name.

I stayed at Jeff's apartment (Jeff being another volunteer, my closest B-13 neighbor, and an otherwise cool guy) and we left this morning for Balchik by way of Varna.

Driving in, it was fascinating seeing how different Northeast Bulgaria is from the Southwest. Near Septemvri, there were fields, but before the communists left the fields were all for livestock. With the disappearance of the large companies, the livestock dispersed to private homes and the fields became thousands of acres of weeds and grass. It would be perfect for corn or wheat or sunflowers, but nobody seems to own the fields anymore. They just sit there and look empty.

In the Northeast, though, there are immense fields of sunflowers. Driving through, it would seem like this area of Bulgaria alone could produce the world's supply of snack bags of sunflower seeds. I'm sure the oil requires huge quantities of the plant, but it was simply amazing seeing the fields of yellow go off into the distant horizon.

So now we're in Varna, and for the first time in over 3 months I'll be able to see an immense body of water. Before I came to Bulgaria I had never left the Pacific for any great length of time. Although I doubt that the Black Sea will be any kind of a substitute, I'm sure it will be close enough for a Peace Corps volunteer in Europe.

2003-07-10T17:27:00.000+03:00

THE NARRATIVE
I'm in a Silistra internet cafe with some time on my hands, so I'll fill everybody in on the story of the last few days. Going back to Tuesday, we had our "counterpart conference" in Pazardjik. All 41 volunteers met with 43 or so representives from schools around Bulgaria, the people we'll be working with. My counterpart, for the record, is Vanya. She's in her late 20s, married with 2 kids, of medium height, short red hair, thin, permanently dressed smartly and well (an accomplishment in Bulgaria, where women often wear things that would make Hollywood's "best" blush), and an incredible English speaker. After I had asked her a question and she had responded and went away to look for an answer, a volunteer turned to me with a surprised look on her face and said "That was your counterpart? She speaks impeccable English. I thought she was one of us!"

She speaks English with the accent of an American who has lived in Britain for about 10 years and just gotten back. Occasionally a British accent filters through, but she's so soft-spoken that a Bulgarian accent is almost undetectable in her speech. She also absorbs new things she hears rapidly. I speak English with her most of the time, and although some of the things I say confuse her the first time I say them (I try to remember that English is her second-language and speak simply accordingly, but it's just so easy to get relaxed and let the conversation flow with her), she remembers both the context and my explanation after only one discussion. Speaking with her is easier than speaking with any other Bulgarian I've talked to.

So all these counterparts were with us in the big lecture hall in Pazardjik on Tuesday after the counterparts had had their private conference the day before. The first activity of the day called for us to break into groups (this time organized by birthday month and, of course, nationality. It's a different random and inane method every time) and talk about our expectations of those of the other nationality. At some point during the milling-around/discussion process I quietly sung "Never feed us castor oil, or gruel" from that letter song in Mary Poppins. Hannah, another volunteer, chuckled and at some point during the presentations asked if I'd present and sing part of the song. "It'll be funny," she said, and people have come to expect a little humor in my presentations. I told her I'd come up with something and began to think.

I let everybody go before me. Before my time came, the PST director told us we were running a bit over time and that the last group should only address things not discussed by the other groups. I walked up to the front, said something about keeping it short and apologizing if it's cheesy, and then sang:

If you want this choice position,
Have a cheery disposition.
Let us go on outings to the Black Sea,
Sing songs to our kids, and do fun activities.

Like us as friends and colleagues, uhhhh
And never smell of raah-kiaaaaa (Rakia is a brandy like-drink. Very popular around Bulgaria)

If you don't scold or dominate us,
We will never give you cause to hate us.
We'll teach our kids the way we feel we ought,
And teach the teachers too, if they're willing to be taught.

We're all ready to get started teaching...
All the volunteers here. Thanks.

And the only thing that kept me from collapsing into a bundle of withering nerves and embarrassment was laughter at all the right places and thunderous applause at the end. It needed to be done to loosen things up for the rest of the day. I'm glad I did it, and that it went over well. The rest of the day went along happily.

In our last session, the counterparts had their own session and all of the volunteers sat in a giant circle. They asked us to pass around a box of matches. We were all to light a match, one-by-one, and whatever time the match gave us would be ours to thank whomever we wanted or say whatever we wanted. My time came, I struck a match, held it up, and before I could say anything, it went out. Uproarious laughter. Someone said "I guess the song said it all." Everyone demanded that I be given another match. I struck it, same thing happened. More laughter, equally or more uproarious. Someone with a lighter then re-lit the match, and I, flustered by the whole thing, gave a babbling speech thanking everybody in general. I can't remember a single thing I said, though. It was really dull and anti-climactic.

Later someone almost set her neighbor on fire and several matches went out. Everybody had fun, and a couple of people cried. We all went home with some sense of poignancy.

That night, the last night with my host family, I had finished packing. I'd discovered that, as expected, I had no room for the basketball I had bought in Plovdiv. Slavi, the four-year-old kid, had been watching me pack and bothering me in general, so I told him he could have it. He beamed and began dribbling it all over the house. His father later came down to the room to invite me to some rakia and salad with the family (how could I refuse?) and brought up the ball. I apologized for the noise and annoyance it might cause, and he laughed and said that it was very nice and that Slavi told him that he wanted to be a basketball player like Robert. I noticed his eyes were red and he was smiling in a funny way. I hope he hadn't been crying. When he had gone to the living room, I let myself dream about 15 years down the road, when that next great Eastern European player comes into the draft. He would have oddly curled blond hair and blue eyes. A bit of a jerk, but he wouldn't need a translator. He'll be talking to Jim Gray or whoever and I would be trying to think of where I'd heard that name, Slavi Gagarov. It'll sound awfully familiar. I'm hoping I'll figure out the connection eventually.

So the next day, we all gathered in this immense conference auditorium in Pazardjik with all of our host families and counterparts in attendance. The volunteers all sat on one side of a stage and some dignitaries, the PC country director, and other staff sat on the other. Five minutes before the ceremony started, my chair snapped. I caught myself before anything obvious happened, and the two volunteers next to me helped me put it back together, and one switched chairs with me. It wasn't embarrassing or anything, just...odd.

The ceremony dragged on uneventfully. I almost went pale when, in his final speech, Carl, the country director, began moving his words toward singing and dancing. The previous day and before the ceremony, he had been very interested in the genius song he had heard about but missed. I was very afraid he'd try to call me up to sing a song that would seem brutally out-of-place at the end of this otherwise reasonably sober ceremony. But he didn't, so I relaxed.

The cocktail party afterward was short for me, I had a 1:30 train to Sofia to catch with my counterpart. I got in as many goodbyes as possible. Slavi cried, my host mom cried. I told them profusely that I would come to visit in a few months, but it wasn't cutting it with Slavi. Slavi's dad, Toschko, helped me get my baggage to the station and get on the train and the last thing I saw of Pazardjik was little Slavi waving the rose the Peace Corps had given me as "graduation present."

Two other volunteers, Mike and Rebecca, were also on the train for Sofia. But when we got off our paths diverged greatly. They're both in the southwest, directly below Sofia, and had a 3 hour train ride ahead of them. I helped move their baggage to their next train, halfway saw them off, and Vanya and I had the next great step of our journey to look forward to. We had to get our bags from the train station to the bus station. They're maybe three blocks apart, but with about 200 pounds of luggage it seems like miles. With great effort, we got our bags (Fine, she just had a couple of carry-ons, my bags) up and down the stairs of the Sofia train station and out onto the walkway. We walked up to one cab, 4 leva to go to the bus station. Expensive, but nothing worth arguing over, just move to the next cab. 5 leva. This I could work with.

I gave the driver my best, exasperated look, pointed in the direction of the bus station, and said in Bulgarian "5 leva? It's very close! 2 or 3 leva. 3 leva." He accepted and we went to the station. Vanya, looking at me like I had just cloned a dinosaur, said "Where did you learn to do that? I've never even seen Bulgarians do that." I smiled and shrugged. Frankly, 3 leva was still a bit high, but we had all that baggage, I was tired, and that was the best I thought we could get away with.

The bus station in Sofia is one of the worst places on Earth and someday I'll describe it in-depth. This is not one of those days. Just know that we managed to find and get on the five o'clock bus to Silistra. On the seven hour trip we talked about everything we could think of and kept a very solid conversation going. A little of it, very little, was in Bulgarian. It was around midnight when we got to Silistra and we were greeted by Val, Vanya's husband who said several very clever things at the station that I sadly can't remember right now, a teacher from the school, and the school's director. The five of us got my things into a nearby apartment.

They had planned on putting me somewhere else, but repairs would take a week. I had seen that place. The apartment they put me in was the Taj Mahal next to that pit that needed "repairs." I asked "Vanya, what's wrong with this place?" Val, an abnormally clever and sarcastic Bulgarian, said "the radio's bad."

Apparently, this is where the language school keeps it's Spanish teachers from Spain. No one was there during the summer. I made plans to convince the director that the Spanish teacher in the fall would be just as happy in the other apartment. I liked this apartment a lot, and I didn't want to move again in a week.

I went to sleep after checking the place out, and in the morning met Vanya at the police station to begin registration, the description of which is also for another time. Two hours later, we left the police station with still many things to do on later days. We went to the school, talked to the director, and the apartment is now mine. I actually and quite literally jumped for joy.

The apartment has hardwood floors, an immense bedroom, kitchen, and living room, and a suitable bathroom (WITH A TALL SHOWER! I would have killed someone if I hadn't gotten that shower). There are two small balconies and the apartment is very well shaded by trees and very cool. It came with a TV with cable already installed and an AV hook up in the front. I can now watch my DVDs on television. The bed is two twins tucked together with no footboard and I had a very good sleep. Oh and there's a small view of the Danube. It's a hard life, this Peace Corps life.

Later in the day, I ran into the other volunteer here. He led me on a tour of the town, checked his e-mail here, and wandered off when I said I might be here a while. He lives across the street from me and found this incredibly funny for some odd reason. Tomorrow night, I'm going to see what Jeff has in Isperih an hour south of here and then spend the weekend at a camp the B-12s are running in Balchik on the coast.

In August I'll have to help move the school to a new building. These days are just packed.

2003-07-07T15:49:00.000+03:00

THIS IS THE END
The end of something, at least. Training is all but over and formally ends Wednesday with a "graduation" ceremony. Tomorrow, we meet with our counterparts in Pazardjik, our counterparts being the teachers with whom we'll work most closely in our permanent sites. We'll discuss the weather, Kobe Bryant's absurd arrest, the Democrats' chances next fall, oh and our lives for the next two years, that too. Things will begin to move quickly again, but not as quickly as they would be if we were starting school immediately. We'll have the whole summer to figure things out, and some of us will be heading for the beach to take part in a camp that the B-12s (last years volunteers) have set up. The other guy in Silistra, Jodi, will allegedly be having a basketball/baseball camp, although he hasn't deigned to let me know about it. I'll have to ask him when I get there.

And then in September things will start moving even faster when teaching begins. Sigh. Work.

But wait! There's more! I have this store of stuff I need to get together into some kind of creative product for this site. Hundreds of photos need to be arranged into categories about Bulgaria. Stories need to be told and organized properly. I'm going to make up a glossary of commonly used terms so people won't be out of the loop if I mention a hub day or B-11.

So yeah, I'm going to be busy. And if you see fewer and fewer entries over the coming weeks, and I'm thinking a minimum of two entries a week, keep checking in and expect a grand re-opening sometime in the future, although I'm not sure at all when. I'll try not to be offended if the number of visitors drops, maybe I'll cry myself to sleep a little. But this is Peace Corps after all, and we all have to button down and shape up sometime.

2003-07-06T17:08:00.000+03:00

THE FOURTH IN BULGARIA
It's been a long and interesting weekend. I went to a big fourth of July party in Velingrad, a resort-ish town about 2 hours from Septemvri when you take the slowest train ever created by man as I had to on the way back. Five volunteers have been training there for the last three months and it must have been hell. There are paddleboats, as I've mentioned before, but beyond that there are hundreds of cafes and dozens of restaurants.

Friday, the fourth, we had a hub day where all the trainees in the villages around Pazardjik get together in that giant barbecue pit of a city and roast in a lecture hall for 8 hours. The party had been planned down to the smallest detail for Saturday, but I took the bus up Friday night with some other early goers. Four of us really wanted to play some ball, and one of the four, Jeff, lives in Velingrad and offered to put me up for the weekend. We played a few games with some very patriotic Bulgarians who insisted, in an almost suicidal way, that we play Americans vs. Bulgarians. We all kind of shuffled our feet and looked at the tiny high school kids challenging us, and then back to the four giant Americans that had come to play. We warned them tepidly that they would be destroyed, but they would have none of it. They played rough, they played with heart, and they didn't give up. But that doesn't change the fact that we trounced them and had fun doing it. Go America!

We cleaned up and went to one of the 50,000 cafes in one of the three centers of Velingrad. Apparently, some Bulgarian had made off with a purse that one of the girls had left on the back of her chair. She spent three hours in the police station as the guy that might have picked up an advanced score on the LPI (Not me, a guy living in Velingrad. He's cool, smart as a whip, but short. We give each other a hard time about being vertical freaks. It's fun) helped them out. She lost some stuff, and money, but not the more important documents that take forever to get replaced.

And hers was just the latest robbery. Guys going to Sofia have been getting their pockets reached into more than, well, more than something. I've been to Sofia three times. On two separate occasions Roma kids have made half-assed, bumbling attempts to fondle their way up my leg before they get shoved away. Usually it's somebody else that does the shoving. I'm too nice a guy to shove a kid over idle threats, and I get awfully amused watching them standing on tiptoes, trying to get to my pocket in some non-obvious way. It's hilarious and brutally tragic at the same time, and they have yet to get within six inches of the bottom of the pocket. Sometimes it's good to be tall. Okay, it's good to be tall a lot of the time, but on trolleys and buses being tall doesn't make much difference. So there I swing my backpack to the front and keep a hand in my pocket. It's all about vigilance.

Anyway, she had her bag stolen and was very composed in spite of it all. She managed to make it through the weekend well, she had already paid for her hotel room in advance.

So we spent the night chatting around a couple of tables and talking about things of great and wordly importance. We hit the hay sometime around midnight.

We began the real festivities at this terrace restaurant in the middle of town. Most everybody with an interest in our group of volunteers showed up, the country director was there, quite a few language trainers came, and a few currently serving volunteers came as well. No B-12s though, they're the group that's been here a year, and the ones we'll have to work with for our first year here in Bulgaria. They seem to love staying amongst their own, though.

Things moved along to a hotel pool situated in the mountains overlooking Velingrad. We had loads of fun, but were loud, obnoxious, and annoyed quite a few Bulgarians. When we brought out a frisbee, some Bulgarians gave off some grumbles and left the pool. Meh, life goes on, at least we had fun. And the staff didn't so much as warn us about keeping it down, so I think we were more or less in the clear.

Then there was dinner, a party at the home of a volunteer leaving in a month, and some dancing in the local club, where they attempted to throw everyone into seizures by using strobe lights during every song. Crashed again at Jeff's place and made my way back to Septemvri this morning. THese are the last days of training. And they're pretty good.

2003-07-03T16:03:00.000+03:00

BULGARIANS LOVE ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Today was the day of the BIG test. We all had a conversation with one of the language trainers certified in testing Bulgarian skills, we then did a little roleplay with them and called it a day. It would have been easy, even simple, but their were complications early on. Some volunteer in some other city had apparently thrown some kind of fit about having to be taped. Using a tape is a requirement for the test, so the tester can go back and review what was said. This guy apparently didn't want that and spent two hours arguing over it. So we had to wait.

The testers were supposed to show up around 9:30 or 10:00. The temperature at that point was around 95 and we all stumbled lazily into our training center, expecting to test early and go back home to our precious, precious fans. But we had to wait, and although calls were made, nobody seemed to know what was going on. We moved from room to room, trying to both make interesting conversation and practice what we needed to know for the test. By the time noon rolled around the testers still hadn't shown, the temperature was over 100, we were bored out of our minds from doing nothing, and hunger was being thrown into the mix. We called it a morning and went to our homes for a short lunch.

After coming back full and logy after 15 minute walks in 100+ degree heat, we found no one at the training center, not even our language trainer. We guessed accurately that the testers had arrived and that they had all gone to the one good restaurant in town. We got a ride to the restuarant in the Peace Corps' beautiful, heavenly air-conditioned van. And sat in the incredibly nice and air-conditioned interior of the restaurant as we each tested outside individually.

My test went pretty well. Hobbies came up, I gave off the list, basketball, chess, and foolishly tossed in reading at the end. I would have actually felt more comfortable talking about chess. Instead she latched on to books and asked me what authors I like, to which my standard response in Bulgaria is Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In America I'd be more adventurous and toss off John Kennedy Toole to see if the person I was speaking with had ever read Confederacy of Dunces, or maybe Douglass Adams, but talking about the Hitchhiker "trilogy" in Bulgarian would border on impossible at this or any point. But I've learned, and this conversation proved that Bulgarians love Hemingway. Fitzgerald, meh. Hemingway is America to Bulgarians.

So for this test, she asked me to describe Hemginway's life, in Bulgarian. I pulled it off rather nicely, I think. I couldn't remember what WWI would be in Bulgarian so I just avoided that altogether. I said he was a journalist and wrote books in Europe, oh and I added that he was a medic in Italy in lieu of anything else about war. She asked me why he went crazy, too. And I said jokingly that it probably had something to do with the heat in Cuba, even though he killed himself somewhere in Idaho, I think. She seemed to want an actual opinion, he was my favorite author, after all. So I just shrugged and said that I didn't know. Who does?

Anyway, I'm now here in the wonderfully air-conditioned internet club, and will be heading home soon to read under the flow of the fan. It'll be a nasty walk home, though.

2003-07-02T18:13:00.000+03:00

IT'S WEDNESDAY ALREADY?
This final week in Septemvri is pretty lax. We aren't actually learning all that much in classes anymore. We finished the textbook, so now we're just going through some tenses and vocab the book didn't cover. The final LPI (Language Proficiency Index. A big test.) of training is coming up tomorrow morning, and we're all looking at it as some dull chore that has to be gotten out of the way. Otherwise it's mostly just reflecting on the last three months and complaining about the heat.

Went up the railroad tracks to Belovo last night and watched X-Men 2. Meh. It was okay, entertaining at points, and if you're into comic books I recommend it. But it thinks quite a bit of itself and its politics. The whole story starts getting really heavy at the end, but never collapses into itself totally. My life could've gone on quite well without me seeing it. I suppose that makes it a disappointment. Anyway, it was a good way to get out of town for a couple of hours, so I appreciated that.

I wish I had some great, post-training insight to offer here. Some line or paragraph that summarized everything about the last three months. I can say that three or four days have been added to the top ten list of wierdest days in my life. The first day in Septemvri easily grabbing the number one slot away from the day I was born (Although time has worn down that memory quite a bit and it is a sentimental favorite, I'm going to go ahead and take away the trophy anyway. The torch has been passed). It was hot, really hot. The weather's strange in Bulgaria. It's sunny one minute, there's lightning the next, every other day. Very odd.

And the language is pretty rough. I'm managing well because I was placed with a great group, and I had a little knowledge of French and Spanish that comes back every now and then. Mostly though, especially in the first month, it felt like my brain was actively dumping trivial knowledge to make room for the new stuff. French and Spanish were the first things down the chute. I couldn't even pull out bon soir when asked for it in the first month, I spent the rest of the day wondering if there was something wrong with me.

Yeah, such is life, though. It's been nice here, but I'm ready to move on to Silistra.

2003-06-29T12:50:00.000+03:00

THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF BULGARIA, BUT FIRST BULGARIA
A friend sent this to me, saying that it reminded him of Bulgaria. Yup, that's it in a nutshell alright. Donkey's riding in cars, nothing else to see here.

Moving on, the NBA Draft was held this past week. For the best summary, I went to The Sports Guy's play-by-play on ESPN.com. The Lakers, my beloved Lakers, had a good draft. I think Luke Walton will be huge if he gets the playing time, and I don't think Bill Walton will ever be able to cover Laker games again. He's already biased enough toward Shaq and Kobe, if his son starts playing well, he's liable to sob when the Lakers win.

The other guy, that guy they took in the first round, Brian Cook, he might do well too. They're both veterans, these guys (you spend four years in school now, you're "a veteran" in the NBA), and big forwards at that. I think the Lakers finally have enough big men, now they just need to develop the ones they have. I don't know, make them have long talks with Robert Horry or something. But for God's sake these men need to be kept away from Samaki Walker. This is not just a suggestion, it's a necessity.

You know, it's kind of silly. I feel like Krusty the Clown when I make observations about the outside world from Bulgaria. There was that one episode where he tries to be a modern comedian and make witty observations about life, and he comes up with "the price of pizza pie is very high these days," and "what's the deal with having two colors for phone books? White and yellow, who needs them?"

I mean, I could talk about the Supreme Court pulling an emergency brake power turn left with its recent rulings, but that's been done, by people living in the States no less. I haven't settled fully into the ex-pat lifestyle yet. I still have an interest in American politics, but from the perspective of a Bulgarian internet cafe, it all looks like a highlight reel. I get glimpses of what's going on, and brief analysis. But commenting on it is kind of like commenting on a football game where all you see are the key touchdowns and fumbles. All I can say is, "wow did you see that court decision? That was something, wasn't it?"

But I can talk about Bulgaria, and this is huge. Bulgarians smoke everywhere, and everybody smokes, 4 out 5 adults as a matter of fact. I don't touch the devil sticks myself, I have something against putting burning things in my mouth, just doesn't make sense to me. But this law will be a killer. I find it hard to believe that it will make it through 2005 in its current form. But as is, banning smoking in public places will cause riots in this country. What's next, banning smoking in cafes? How dreadfully Orwellian. Why, if Bulgarians want to poison large numbers of their own, they should have the right to do it wherever they want.

Of course, enforcement will be a problem here. Seeing as cops have lit up in their station as I was speaking with them, I don't think they'll be too excited to go over to the Sheraton and evict whatever loser thought he could get away with lighting up on the eleventh floor. And I don't think the clerk puffing away behind the counter will be too inclined to call the cops in the first place.

But in some dark future, Bulgarian donkeys riding around in cars may not be allowed to smoke. That's not Bulgaria. That's not even Albania.

2003-06-27T19:17:00.000+03:00

LAST DAYS IN SEPTEMVRI
The kids here, whenever we pass by, shout "hello" and "goodbye." It started out nice enough, we were like celebrities! But it gets annoying. It's almost like celebrity fantasy camp, all the fun of being a celebrity: people stalking you, staring at you, yelling meaningless hellos from great distances at you. All that fun, without the money. The power's there. We have a lot of pull with the politicians around here, and the higher-ups will listen if we have something to say. But no money. This was bugging me for a while. The first time a kid yelled "motherf____er" at me (he was like, 11, I'm not sure if he even understood what he said but for the novelty of it being American. And he won't be saying it to me again...), I was feeling pretty pissed. I got that feeling everybody gets at some point in life. The "I'm not getting paid nearly enough for this" feeling.

But then I remembered that critical little fact: I'm not in this for the money. I'm in Europe, teaching English, learning a language few foreigners will ever learn, and hanging out in the cafes of a little farm town in the middle of Bulgaria watching the sun set as men lead their cows and sheep home and Aaron makes his next move in chess. Things, I think, could be worse.

Septemvri may not be the best of the training sites. It's position as worst site was more or less sealed when we heard they weren't putting trainees here during the next training session in August. They're going to Strelcha! STRELCHA! I spent a week in Strelcha, I know Strelcha, and as bad as Septemvri may be, it's no Strelcha. Actually, apart from the fact that it was nigh impossible to communicate with the outside world, Strelcha was a lot like Septemvri. Maybe a little more classically European, with a nice canal and cathedral, but pretty much the same as far as good cafes and crap in the streets goes. Apparently, there's also an orphange there, and since this group will have the inaugural youth development people, that's a big draw. But still, Strelcha?!

Nevertheless, Septemvri has had its ups and downs. The host family thing is chafing a bit. They're great people all, and they respect my privacy, but having my own space would be really nice. Let me offer an example. The bathroom I use, the one closest to my room, is through the kitchen. In this house, and most of Bulgaria, the kitchen is the kitchen of old, where the family gathers and all that. Anyway, it's usually okay, but the one thing that really gets me is that half the time, when I go to the bathroom with my bag of stuff to brush my teeth and shuffle off to bed, they offer the kitchen sink, a place where I don't normally feel comfortable brushing my teeth anyway, for whatever reason. So I have to explain, and it's the same explanation every night, that I have to actually use the toilet as well. And when it finally gets through to them, they give me this caring smile ("but, of course!") and offer me the bathroom. This has happened, just like this, on about half the nights here. It begins to annoy after awhile.

I can't walk home in silence anymore. I like quiet walks, and sometimes I really want one, and will be hoping for one, when all of a sudden, out from behind a tree, or a bush "HEWO WABUHT!" They have a whole letter devoted to the "luh" sound...it's not just "L," it's "luh," and they can never get "hello" out properly. That's kind of grated on my nerves. But I just say "hello" back, and walk on.

Of course, these are just trifles, mere fleas to be swatted away (Oh yeah, there's fleas everywhere in this town. I'm one of the lucky ones in that they haven't gotten on my bed yet. Little bastards. It takes vigilance.). Life here is good, maybe even great. And when push comes to shove, two years from now, I think I might actually miss this town.

2003-06-25T18:52:00.000+03:00

BULGARSKI EZIK (BULGARIAN LANGUAGE)
They judge our speaking abilities around here with a testing system called the LPI (Language Proficiency Index). There are 3 levels of novice, 3 intermediate, 2 advanced, and superior. There have been four volunteers in the history of Peace Corps Bulgaria that have attained superior. It implies complete and total fluency, or something close to it.

The legends that surround these chosen few are something to hear. Normally, they say that it would take Bulgarians something like ten minutes, maybe fifteen, to figure out that the volunteers weren't nationals, if they ever did. They had flawless accents, the language trainers tell us, and could spout off about anything. If any of us ever need motivation, we usually think about becoming number five. That gets us going a little.

Right now, we're looking at the end-of-training LPI test next week. All we need to remain a volunteer in Bulgaria is a Novice-High, and even if someone got lower than that, I'm pretty sure the Peace Corps would think long and hard before giving them the boot. Besides, according to the B-12s, the group that came last year, nobody fails. Nobody. Most of our group tested Novice-High on the mid-term, two weeks ago. I tested Intermediate-Low, and only one person of 42 tested Medium, and he has a few fluent languages under his belt.

Apparently, nobody tests Advanced at the end of training. It just doesn't happen, the testers aren't even looking for advanced speakers. I'll be happy with an Intermediate-Medium, but I'm shooting for Intermediate-High.

Of course, the only true measure of knowing a language is how well you use it when you're actually communicating with people. I'm able to get by with my family pretty well now, conversations are happening, whole paragraphs being said. I'm happy with that, for now.

2003-06-24T17:40:00.000+03:00

THE JOY OF A PACKAGE
Yesterday was quite a day. The Roma presentation went okay, the other presentations weren't dull, and hub day actually bordered on fun. The kicker was the package I got from good ol' ma and pa. Nothing beats getting a package in the Peace Corps. It really is like Christmas, you have a pretty good idea about what's going to be inside the thing, but until you open it you don't really know. The granola bars, Pop Tarts, and various cookies and crackers were one thing, and attracted all volunteers in the immediate area like groupies at a Stones concert, but the books were the real triumph. I had asked for books, I'm going to read them and then donate them to the school's library in Silistra.

(And incidentally, if you want to donate some books, know someone who does, or just want to send me something and don't mind the postage, send it to:

Rob Young
P.O. Box 259
Peace Corps
Sofia 1000, Bulgaria

And some good Bulgarian kids and I will be eternally thankful.)

So, where were we? Oh yes, the books. The line of day, repeated several times over: "Wow! Your parents sent the classics!" It's a darn nice collection they sent, I have to agree. It'll take me a long time to get through them and I'm sure the more advanced students will love them. The English library in Silistra is impressive by Bulgarian standards after having been stocked by volunteers since the fall of the wall, but more books will certainly help. And there are enough books here where they would have to make room for them, so that's impressive.

Anyway, there are more packages on the way, so jump on the bandwagon, get on the trolley. Be part of Peace Corps Bulgaria! And all you have to do is send some of those books you've been staring at all these years. You know, those paperbacks you've already read, that gather dust like nothing else and beg quietly to be read by somebody, anybody, before they're tossed into an incinerator after some apocryphal spring cleaning. You know the ones.

2003-06-22T16:28:00.000+03:00

THE ROMA SITUATION
Bulgarian Roma, gypsies, nomads, whatever you want to call them, are this week's priority. All the groups have fifteen minute presentations tomorrow at hub day, and ours is about Roma culture. The research for this ain't easy. For one, some Roma don't even speak Bulgarian, much less English. They have their own language, and use it often among each other. Add to that the general attitude of Bulgarians toward the Roma, which, if you must have a comparison, is something like the attitude toward blacks sometime during the seventies:

Sure, I have no problems with the Roma. It's just that they're lazy, shiftless, irresponsible, bad parents, untrustworthy, and horrible chess players. But apart from that, gypsies are great people. Some of my best friends are gypsies.

It's pretty hard to get an objective view of the situation. The line is drawn, and darkly. But something had to be done. So yesterday, Aaron and I took a walk through Septemvri's Roma quarter. Most of the streets are unpaved there and the houses unfinished. Garbage doesn't just line the streets as it does in most of Septemvri, it has been packed down until it becomes part of the street. Most of the neighborhood had the appearance of being built on a still operating landfill.

We began talking to a couple of Roma kids. We asked them if they went to school (Many Roma don't), what their parents did, and then, running out of things to say, asked for a tour of the area. They were more than happy to oblige.

As we went along we were invited in to a fantastic house owned by an English speaking 30 year-old. His story, which I'm inclined to believe though I think details were omitted, was that he had been to England and worked there 16 hours a day for five years, sending money back regularly to support his family and build his house. He told us that for the Roma, getting a business visa to England was impossible (although it's no cakewalk for Bulgarians either, he was willing to admit). He gave us some sketchy details about a complicated plan that allowed him to get to England with a ticket from Singapore. He had come back because he missed his daughter, but he has found life in Bulgaria so bad, he longs to return, although it seems more impossible than ever at this point.

We asked him about life under the communists, and he gave us another set of conflicting opinions. On the one hand, under communism, everybody had jobs in factories, enough money to get by, and security. But after some throat clearing and questions about freedoms, he told us that the police, if they found a group of Roma speaking the Roma language, would shave the heads of the offenders and set them lose, beating them if they felt like it, I guess.

He showed us scars from various encounters with police and discriminators, and told us that discrimination is still rampant. Even though he has plenty of money, most cafes in town won't even let him in.

It's all just one man's view and we have and are gathering other stories and views, and even then will probably focus on non-controversial subjects to avoid a lecture hall brawl among some of the more "interested" language trainers and other Bulgarians. So that's today's project, and what I'm working on.

2003-06-17T19:22:00.000+03:00

THE TOWN OF THE MOUNTAINS
Chepelare is, allegedly, the highest town in Bulgaria. Makes sense. The ride up was a bit long, and full of twists and turns around cliffs and blasted sides of mountains that looked like they were just waiting to come falling down.

It's a different experience here than in most other Bulgarian cities I've visited. The trees are mostly conifers, where most of Bulgaria has been leafy. It certainly adds to the ski resort feel of the place, and I'd imagine that this town kicks it up a few notches come winter. The set-up for tourism here is more solid than usual in Bulgaria. There are hotels everywhere, and I'm finally feeling the impact of the German tourist market. They seem to own this town.

There's a ski and ski boot factory owned by a German. The hotel where we're staying is owned by a man from Zanzibar, possessing a British passport, but who caters primarily to Germans.

And you know, I think the German are on to something here. They've invaded the best places in Bulgaria and set up shop, and when the world finally figures out how (and why) to visit this country, they'll be poised to get the most out of it.

Aaron and I were talking earlier today about what Bulgaria needs most, and I hit an idea that everyone seems to agree with. Bulgaria needs one great movie set here. It needs to gross some money and win a few awards. Then enough people will flock here to spread word of mouth that things will progress on their own. It's the little things in this scheme that are the problem. Tiny details like writing the movie and getting it made are really the only things holding Bulgaria back.

Anyway...an example of Peace Corps humor. We were all sitting around the cafe at the bus station in Plovdiv today and the conversation, as it often does, made it's way toward toilets. Naturally, we began discussing Turkish toilets and how, once gotten used to, they can be better than sit-down toilets for germ and bacteria-related reasons. So one of us, for some reason, thought it was the right time for her to bring up the fact that she had pulled her thigh sometime during the previous week.

Now, the image of pulling one's thigh while using a Turkish toilet is not one that easily escapes the memory. You have the pain, first of all, then there's probably going to be some slipping, and some contact with some stuff that...anyway, turns out she pulled it coming down some stairs. Gave us all a good laugh though. Horrible image, that.

Finally, some info and pictures of Chepelare, courtesy of good ol' Ma:

A site in German.
Ski Bulgaria!
And a general interest thing

2003-06-16T19:33:00.000+03:00

OFF TO CHEPELARE
Well, I'm going to Chepelare tomorrow to spend a week doing...something. It's in south Bulgaria, kind of near the border with Greece and in the mountains. If you say the name right, it kind of sounds like a typical summer camp. Pronounce each "e" as "ay" and the "a" as "ah." Good old Lake Chepelare, how green are your trees, and your water blue, that kind of stuff.

The Peace Corps once again shook things up and randomly placed us in small groups of other volunteers with whom we haven't spent much time. They seem dead set on keeping us from forming cliques, and maybe rightly so. They're incredibly precise with their shake-ups. I can look at the list and not see a pair of names of people that I regularly see hang out together, partly because few people do regularly hang out together. Everything is very fluid, people move from group to group. All is in motion. This means that I'm cool with the two people I'll be going with, but we haven't spent that much time together at all. Should be fun, we'll get to know each other, Simon and I will even have to share a hotel room.

So other than that, nothing to report. The weather here still acts like the kind of drunk no one wants to hang around. The second you think it might be kind of fun, maybe, it does something really weird, bordering on vicious. Today it was sunny, steamy, and hot. The lecture hall was full of people waving makeshift fans, but it was certainly livable, and may have even relaxed us. Then, around 3, a storm came in, thunder began to roll, and the wind kicked up. An open window in the back of the hall slammed shut and violently shattered. I was sitting a few rows in front of it, and was awfully surprised the people in the back came out untouched.

Not seeing any particular action to further resolve the matter, I hopped back and pulled out the remaining shards of glass so they wouldn't, you know, kill somebody in the next gust. Reaching for the first shard, the girls in the back started saying "no, Rob, no..." Not an emphatic warning or anything, it might have been a confused warning.

There seems to be an incredible instinct against broken glass that I don't seem to have. I mean, I'm not going to pet the stuff. It's just that, as long as I'm careful, I really don't mind picking it up and disposing of it, usually to the same confused cries. Fortunately, some kind soul explained what I was doing to the doomsayers this time, and I set the large shards aside peacefully.

Still have a fear of fire and heat though. Try as I might, I can't pull off the "putting a candle out with my fingers" thing, and pulling food out of ovens bothers me. But these things I can live with.

So, yeah, where were we? Oh yeah, Chepelare. I'll see what I can do about updates there.

2003-06-15T13:25:00.000+03:00

THE BEST TIMES AND THE WORST
Sometimes Bulgaria can be awfully frustrating. I get peeved, shudder, but always check myself before muttering "I hate this country." I realize that there's no real reason to be outright pissed, and I'm actually pretty fortunate, as far as lives and services in the Peace Corps are concerned.

Like today, the journalist from the paper in Pazardjik had asked if I could send her a couple of photos of Alaska for her story. So, I tried to send them via e-mail with a lovely little message in Bulgarian written with them. The first attempt didn't go as planned since the computers here are all networked to the one computer with a floppy drive, and this computer didn't recognize the network at this moment. These things happen in the states too. Only problem was, I had spent about ten minutes pecking out the cyrrilic on this keyboard and neither wordpad or word recognized it. I had to log back on to the computer and re-type the message.

It went a little quicker the second time, but then came the inevitable problem that yahoo didn't recognize the cyrrilic. So I sighed, muttered "screw it," and am hoping that when whoever gets the e-mail finds two jpgs and a short message written in English, they'll figure out what's going on.

So these are the tragedies I must deal with here in Bulgaria.

The best times come often enough. Last night, after sending off the last post, I wandered the streets around headquarters for a while before walking into Murphy's, an ex-pat hangout I'd heard about here, and a place where Carl, PC Bulgaria Director, had promised me I could get a halfway decent steak in this country.

I ordered an Irish Stout, an absolutely heavenly beer (although at 5 leva, a tad spendy for a volunteer's budget. Worth it though, so very worth it.), waited a while, ordered the steak, decided money was no object, went for another stout, and absorbed every last bit of this ex-pat heaven before going back to Septemvri. The steak was great, nothing I would have worshiped in America, but it satisfied my raging appetite for the things. And it was interesting being in a bar where everyone spoke English. Unless you listen really closely to other people's conversations, it sounds just like a bar where everyone speaks Bulgarian. Voices get all muddled up together, I'd forgotten about that.

So after a very good dinner, I paid the bill (Honestly, I haven't spent anything here. This was really my first splurge), and took the trolley over to the train station where I took the ten o'clock train back to Septemvri and got home around midnight. About midway through the walk home from the station, some Bulgarian I'd never met introduced himself and said he had heard I was a really good ballplayer and that he'd like to play me sometime. Tired, I sighed, told him (In Bulgarian, another sigh) I would be very busy this week, but I'd be back in Septemvri next week, and would most likely play every day then. This seemed to placate him and he told me to have a good evening as he went to talk to friends hanging out around the disco on the street where I live.

I got home, watched the last few minutes of Taxi Driver on TV with my host father, told him good night, and flopped heavily into bed. The day had been more full than I thought.

2003-06-14T18:57:00.000+03:00

SWEET SOFIA
Hmmm, Blogger has finally changed it's format on me, it's a lot cleaner looking now. I hope the programming is just as clean. There have been issues with archives, photos, everything in the recent past. Maybe this will settle things a little.

Anyway...I'm in Sofia again, watching the sun set from the top floor of PC Headquarters. I can't really say it's been a full day. The four of us came as a group, as we may be reimbursed if we take a group tour once during training. The weather reports promised that we'd see 100 degrees today, it didn't happen. It's actually pretty cool now, there's a fine breeze blowing through the city streets. The train ride in got a bit steamy at times, but all was well.

We began by dropping our bags at Peace Corps headquarters, and walking off in the direction of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. The scaffolds that the travel guide calls "permanent" were still there, and it did affect the drama of the interior quite a bit. But staying to the sides, admiring frescoes of the last supper, Lazarus, and other images only slightly faded by decades of candle smoke was impressive enough.

We wandered, grabbed lunch at McDonald's, then split up. Aaron, as he is often wont to do, disappeared. The girls, as they are often wont to do, went around doing "girl stuff." And I wandered south to check out out the parks and university.

There's not all that much to say about the south end of the city. It's pretty well-off looking. The parks are clean, and the statues they surround are impressive. There are clubs and cafes I could spend years trying out, they all seem pretty nice. The city itself is remarkably flat. There aren't any frustrating hills and it's a pretty easy walk. Going farther northeast there look to be some pretty good hills, but those just seem to lead to housing, so who cares.

I was halfway thinking about staying the night, but ran out of things to do in the morning, so I think I'm just going to catch the ten o'clock train to Septemvri. I'll be traveling enough next week as it is. We'll be spending a week in another volunteer's town, watching their classes (which are probably over now anyway, I think the school year's done nationwide), following them around, and mostly vacationing, I guess. We're all thinking it's going to be a week off, more or less. Who knows. I'm going somewhere in the south, near Smolyan. But the town's name I can't remember, nor do I know if my information is reliable. I'll get the absolute scoop on Monday in Pazardjik.

So, there might be an update tomorrow to look forward to, but until whenever, later.