Okay, so for the last several months I have been all too aware that I need to update this blog.  I was waiting until I had gotten my picture collection organized before writing something here, but then I kept taking more pictures before updating my collection.  And so it went and so it went.

 

Well, here I am, sitting at the airport in Chicago, trying to figure out what has changed in the last 27 months.  Perhaps in the microcosm of the airport, it's hard to tell anything different except that I don't recognize a lot of the cars in the advertisements.

 

I should have been in Nashville by now, but I got through customs here in Chicago and rechecked my bags and immediately thereafter noticed that my fligth to Nashville was listed as "cancelled".  Out of the hundred or more United flights listed, only two of them were cancelled. So, they put me on stand-by for a later flight.  After a few hours, I decided to see if they could put me on another airline and so she did, for a 6:40 flight on American.  Well, here it is 7:34 and I'm still waiting for that American flight to take off.  Right now it is showing and 8:20 departure.  Yay, cancelled flights and delays!

 

Let's see... Chicago is 8 timezones away from Bulgaria.  I got up at 4:30 this morning, which means I got up at 10:30 PM last night central time.  Just 3 more hours and I"ll have been up for 24 hours.  I slept when I could on the planes over here, but I had a restless seatmate who always felt the need to use the bathroom once I was in the deepest possible sleep.  Yay, seatmate!

 

Anyway, as you may have guessed, my Bulgarian adventure has come to an end.  I won't have time to type all about how I feel about that right now, but I'll see if I can make some headway in that regard.

 

First of all, the big question everyone likes to ask, understandably: What's next?  Well, I don't know.  I have been actively avoiding the question until finishing.  I just wanted to get home before thinking about it.  And so now... more active avoidance, at least for the first week or two... then we'll see.

 

I had originally planned to travel post-Peace Corps, but my heart just wasn't in it.  I could tell I had had enough of that and wanted to head on home.  I'm very excited that I'll get to see my whole family within the first few days of getting home.  That's no easy task with a family as large as mine.

 

What else... oh, I didn't bring home a Bulgarian bride.  I guess I just wasn't trying hard enough. :-)

 

Will I miss Bulgaria? Of course... it *was* my home, afterall.  Now I'm homeless and unemployed.  Well, not entirely homeless.  (Thanks, Mom!)

 

Packing to come home was an interesting exercise.  I was trying to get back down to the original two bags + carry-on I had come over with, and ended up having to leave behind a lot of things.  I donated a lot of stuff (i.e. set it next to the dumpsters) and gave away a lot of things to my sitemates.  I even gave them things they didn't want so that *they* would be the ones to get rid of the stuff I was finding it too hard to throw away.  On my last day in Sliven, I was taking a lot of donations down to the dumpsters and found a peculiar thing on the ground next to them: a US 1-dollar bill.  It's sad when a US dollar is considered garbage in a Peace Corps country!  A dollar is worth about 1.25 leva these days, by the way.  It was around 1.65 when I got to Bulgaria 27 months ago.  I should have traded all my US money to Bulgarian leva!  But: why was that dollar on the ground?  Why wasn't it in the dumpster?  Why hadn't it blown away?  I made the mistake of showing it to the cantankerous drunk guy that vexes me so and is always sitting outside our building.  He decided he'd keep it.  I didn't feel like arguing.  Go ahead, old dude... take the dollar. *My* lucky dollar.  Hmm...

 

That's about all I can say right now.  My battery is quickly fading, and so is my consciousness.  I need to stop before I become a completely blathering fool.

 

Anyway, hey... I'm back!  I can't wait to see you all and have you buy me a drink.  (Did I mention I'm unemployed?)  :-)

 

-Jamey

I just added another folder full of pictures.  The latest ones come from a small town called Koprivshtitsa.  There are lots of "house museums" that were once the homes of many important figures from the Bulgarian revolution when they were finally able to regain control of the country from the Turks.  The first shots from the April Uprising were fired on the bridge you see in the group photo.  I was there with a few of my PC friends for a nice daytrip after we completed our Close-of-Serice (COS) conference.  This is the conference where they tell us all the little things We need to be taking care of between now and the time we leave the country.  Our COS date is July 1st - "so wheels up on the 2nd" one PC staffer said.

 

Speaking of wheels-up... My plan right now is to travel a bit before heading back to America, but that's about as far as the planning has gone.  I definitely want to start in Romania because it would be a shame to spend 2 years here and never see it, so then I figured I need to see Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic too.  I have friends in London and Copenhagen, and maybe in Belgium somewhere.  Not sure if I'll make it to that part of the world.  The money will run out pretty fast the farther west I go.

 

After all my galavanting around, I'll head home to Tullahoma.  What I'll do from there is completely up in the air.  Right now I'm concentrating on finishing my service here.  I have this thought in the back of my head that I might just need to get a job once I'm through here.  Some of my Peace Corps friends have already been accepted at graduate schools.  Two or three of them are going directly to PC-China.  Many of us don't yet have plans other than to "travel for a bit".  We'll see!

 

Other things to mention about the pictures on here... I finally posted those Kukeri pictures mentioned in my prior post.  Take a look at them.  And there are a bunch of pictures showing Sliven in the fog.  There were 4 or 5 days in a row, maybe more, where I didn't see the sun here in Sliven.  There was nothing but a thick fog the whole time, and every day the ice crystals on every branch, leaf and grass stem got just a little longer.  I grabbed my camera and walked around in awe every day there, so not all the pictures are from the same day.  At their peak, I'd say the crystals were close to an inch long.  Quite beautiful.  Since I have been here, I have heard a lot of reports of flights being grounded, cancelled and diverted in Sofia because of the fog in the winter and I couldn't quite picture what that was like because it had never really been that way here.  Well, now I see what the problem is.  And I use the term "fog" loosely because there is a lot of smoke in there from all the wood people burn to heat their homes.  It doesn't smell too terribly bad, but you can't really hang your laundry out from November to April because everything will smell like smoke.

 

Okay, so as I write this, I'm 25 minutes into April.  Three more months.  Woohoo!  Can't wait to see you all again.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

I guess I've set a new record (again) for time between posts.  What happened, see, is I went away for Christmas and New Year's and took all sorts of pictures and when I got back, I uploaded the pictures to my laptop but never got around to captioning them.  I kept thinking I'd get around to that soon enough, then upload them here and then write an update.  Well, here it is March and I still haven't updated the captions, but I should at least write something anyway.  But don't bother checking for new photos because there aren't any yet.  Sorry about that!

 

For Christmas, I went to a city in the mountains named Gabrovo.  I had been invited there by a married couple serving in the Peace Corps, Lindsey and Casey.  (We like names that end in -EY around here.)  Gabrovo is "Bulgaria's longest city", whatever that might mean, but it's also the heart of Bulgarian industry, having been an important center for that during the Turkish occupation.  On Christmas day (I think - it has been a long time now!) we visited the nearby village of Etar, a.k.a. Etara, a kind of replica of an old Bulgarian village, with lots of craft shops where artisans must bid on the spaces every couple of years in order to keep their spot and to keep things from getting stale somehow.  All of the shops that require some sort of power have these little mini water wheels attached to drive whatever mechanism is needed for that particular shop, although it was a bit too cold for the water to be flowing through the channels at this time of year.  Whilst in Gabrovo, I introduced Lindsey and Casey to a couple of the board games I had brought with me to Bulgaria and Casey became instantly hooked on Settlers of Catan.  This game has since had a similar effect on my friend Brad.  It's neat to see what happens when someone who hasn't ever really seen games like this one and Carcassonne play them for the first time.  Seems most people never get much beyond Monopoly and Risk in their lives, and they are missing out on so much more!

 

Also joining us in Gabrovo was a volunteer named Sarah from Lovech, a city not too far away that we visited to "pick her up".  I use the quotes because, well, we rely on the bus transportation system in Bulgaria for all of our travel needs, with the occasional train ride, so really we just wanted to see what Lovech was all about.  Lovech has an old covered bridge with some shops and was the only covered bridge in the country until recently, when they built an eyesore of a bridge in Plovdiv.  This one is quite charming and hopefully one day soon I'll post some pictures of it.  After returning to Gabrovo, we mostly hung out cooking and eating and walking to the store to pick up ingredients for whatever we were making at the time.  Oh, and playing board games.

 

On the 27th, Sarah headed home, Lindsey and Casey headed for Austria and I headed to Sofia to meet my friend Lauren.  We walked around Sofia to see what it looked like for Christmas (nothing special, really) and the next day caught a plane for Spain.  We spent a week there with Lauren's friends Patri(-cia) and Juan, who were the best hosts ever!  Patri wouldn't let me pay for anything except for my hotel room in Forcall, a small village in the mountains not too far from where she lives.  Juan and Patri live in the municipality of Benicassim, Spain, which is in the Castellon region.  Benicassim is on the Mediterranean Sea and Patri's father has a small boat on the Sea, which he was more than happy to show off to us, so we all went out on his boat, although he never left the dock.  But anyway, now I can say I've been *on* the Mediterranean.  So... Now I've seen the Black, Adriatic, Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.  And you know what?  They all seem to contain the same stuff.  Weird.

 

Also in Spain, we visited Valencia and several interesting old villages near Forcall, where we rang in the New Year.  Lauren and I also managed to enjoy most of a day in Madrid before having to head to the airport and back to Bulgaria.  I really, really liked Spain and can't wait to go back to see more of it!

 

Since New Year's, I've travelled a bit more around Bulgaria.  Back in January I went to Pernik way over on the other side of Sofia to see the biennial Kukeri Festival.  Surprisingly held every two years, this biannual (Oops! I had to look up "biannual" just now and see that it means either "twice a year" or "biennial", which means once every two years.  Nice going, English.) festival brings together kukeri from all over the world, or at least from the parts of the world that have such things and feel like coming.  A kukeri is a person dressed up in a very strange costume, usually made up of lots of hair and/or feathers, with huge masks, and they wear quite a few cowbells around their waists.  They scare away evil spirits and such... you know, traditional shaman activity.  There were groups from Italy, Macedonia and Ireland to name a few.  The Irish group referred to themselves as mummers and I'm not at all sure how mummers and kukeri differ or are similar, but there you have it.

 

I also had a nice weekend in February in the city of Montana.  Montana is a couple hours north of Sofia, as opposed to the rather largish state in the U.S., which isn't anywhere close to Sofia.  I went there for the "chili con carneval" there and basically spent the weekend eating, which is simply a wonderful thing to do and I highly recommend it.  I didn't make chili, but made my famous butterhorn rolls and carrot cookies, which earned me admission.  Well, that and buying some of the beer.  There were about 12 of us there for the weekend, 8 or 9 of us staying at one PCV's apartment.  It's interesting to see how different PCV apartments can be.  You couldn't fit more than about 4 extra PCVs in my place, whereas I've been in some places that could swallow up 10 or 12.  I think mine is a good size for once person, and is certainly easier (and cheaper) to keep warm in the winter.  It all depends on what your host organization supplies you with, though.

 

Anyway... as you can see by the subject of this blog, I now have fewer than 120 days left in Bulgaria.  My close of service (COS) date is July 1st, so now that we are into March, there are just 4 months left.  I think I might just make it now.  Teaching school has never gotten any easier for me as I struggle almost daily with trying to come up with something interesting to talk about with the kids.  Discipline in my classes is pretty bad and my 12th graders, or at least the ones who are awful at English, have taken to skipping my classes most of the time, which makes it just about impossible to get anything done with them.  Yet somehow, miraculously, they are able to produce a doctor's note almost every time excusing their absence, despite the fact that they were well enough to attend their other 5 or 5 classes that day.  It's quite frustrating, and I'll probably find myself in a bind once again near the end of the term trying to figure out what grade to give them because I simply won't have enough scores to go by.  One student passed me on the stairs last week as I headed up to class and told me she would be right back, that she was just going to get some water.  She said all of this in perfect Bulgarian, mind you.  So I acted like I couldn't understand (or half-acted, really) and she managed to spit out "Go voda" ("voda" is Bulgarian for water) and I asked her what "voda" is and she couldn't come up with the word.  This girl has been in English classes since 9th grade and doesn't even know the word for "water", and meanwhile I have a student who likes to discuss his favorite movie "Airplane", which he watches in English and quite enjoys.  Most of the jokes in that movie involve some sort of wordplay, so being able to "get it" in English is no easy feat.  So... yeah, multilevel classes.

 

About 10 days from now I'll attend my COS conference with my PC group, which is now down to 27 or 28 people from an original 41.  We will spend 3 days discussing our Peace Corps experiences and will learn what to expect next, and what resources are available for RPCVs (Returned PCVs).  If we want, we can get advice on writing a resume as well.  Which brings me to the $64,000 question so common for PCVs near the end of their service: What's next?  Right now, I am not sure what is next.  The only thing I want to do right now is to just make it through these last 4 months, maybe travel a little in July and then head home to TN to readjust to America.  I still think about attending grad school somewhere, and there are special programs for RPCVs to help with that, but I am still undecided.  I've also thought about going back into the world of computers, but feel like I need to learn a new computer language or two to make myself more marketable.  I've thought about going somewhere else in the world to teach English, too, but would need to know beforehand that the students would be motivated as opposed to what I get now, which are mostly just students being forced to attend a class they care nothing about.  Anyway, the point is... I'm not ready to decide right now, so that's that.

 

After our COS conference, we'll have another month and a half before our week off for Easter.  I'm hoping to go to Croatia that week, although the travel through Serbia and/or Kosovo would probably be frowned upon at this time, so I may need to go around.  I guess i need to figure this one out soon.  Then, in late-ish May, the 12th graders finish school so I won't have to worry about them anymore.  Then on to the end of June and the end of my other classes.  I have no idea what kinds of running around I'll have to do between now and then to finish up my PC service here.  All I can say is to stay tuned.

 

Time to plan a lesson on Romanticism.  My students will be thrilled!

 

Take care, and keep up the good work!

 

 

Just wanted to make a quick update before the month changes.  That gives me 39 minutes.  Let's see how I do...

 

Today is Halloween. I went to a Halloween party tonight hosted by the Youth House here.  The Youth House is a group that works with the teens of a particular town, providing activities, guidance, etc. to hopefully keep them happy and out of trouble.  One of the new PCVs in town, Stacie, will be working with the Youth House for her two years in Sliven and she invited the other volunteers to come to their Halloween party.  Now, Halloween isn't something normally celebrated in Bulgaria, but all the teens are very aware of the costume party aspect of it - they just don't do the trick-or-treating.  And the Americans that pass through like to carve a jack-o-lantern or two with them.  I think they'll be trick-or-treating too before too long.  Some of them had really clever costumes.  Oh, and this band [3 guys with acoustic guitars and a girl singer] played a few songs and one of the guitar dudes was especially good.  I'm always heartened when I see Bulgarians playing actual rock music.  These 4 were plying some Evanescence and maybe Jimmy Eat World or somebody like that.

 

I spent last weekend in my favorite Bulgarian city, Veliko Turnavo.  "Veliko" means "great" in Bulgarian, and while it's no Paris or Vienna, I really like it.  Some PCVs rented a house called The Blue House for the weekend for the annual Halloween party.  The Blue House is a pretty house that is probably 150 years old or so. It has 6 bedrooms with 2 to 6 beds in each room, and two nice big rooms for a party.  I'd say there were about 40 or so volunteers at the party, about half of us staying at the house.  My Halloween costume was: a rechnik.  "Rechnik" is the Bulgarian word for "dictionary".  Pretty spooky, I know.  I bought a white shirt and some light-colored pants at a 2nd-hand clothing store (you buy by the kilogram in these stores!) and got out a couple permanent markers and wrote all over both garments.  I wrote the Bulgarian and English equivalents for as many body parts and clothing types I could think of, in a location roughly corresponding to the word.  And I kept it rated PG, thank you very much, which is really a good thing since I ended up needing to wear it to the kids' party tonight.  I almost threw the outfit away in VT just so I wouldn't have to carry it.  I mean, what were the chances I'd need to wear it again?

 

Anyway, I had a great time in Veliko Turnavo and am really glad I went.  I wish I had gone last year, but can't quite go back and redo that!

 

In other news, the teachers' strike continues here.  I am teaching 4 classes really early in the morning and 4 classes in the evening.  I spend the rest of my time, um, spending my time.  I do a bit of lesson planning here and there.  I have been reading a lot of books about teaching English for inspiration. I've been researching some of the literature topics I'll have to teach.  Some volunteers have complained about being bored because they aren't teaching even as much as I am during the strike, but I never run out of things to do, so at least I'm never bored.  I don't even really know what it means to be bored - I have an inexhaustible list of things I want to do when I have time.  I'm quite amazed, though, that the strike is still going on.  All of those teachers have gone about 6 weeks now with no pay.  It was thought that the union and the government had come to an agreement on Saturday evening, but on Monday the teachers voted against the agreement.  There is a lot of speculation about what they will do to make up for lost time once the strike ends, including talk of cutting into Christmas and spring vacations and having classes on Saturday, but it'll be tough to get people to go for that to make up 6 weeks of school.  We can only wait and see.

 

This weekend I'm heading to Sofia.  I have my VAC (Volunteer Advisory Committee) meeting on Friday and need to pick up my iPod Shuffle from the Apple service place.  I got the shuffle back in May or June so I'd have it for jogging, but by the time I got it, I had hurt my knee and couldn't jog.  So then my knee finally got better and the Shuffle's battery stopped taking a charge before I could even start running again.  (And I still haven't started running again. Oops!)  I think I only used the Shuffle 10 times or so, mostly while cooking, before it stopped working.  Kind of disappointing, but at least it's getting fixed under warranty.  Only problem is that I had to give up my personalized unit, which affirmed my love for llamas, and will get a generic unit as a replacement.  That inscription always made me smile.  I hope I don't have any trouble with this Shuffle.  It really is an amazing little device when it works.  About the size of a postage stamp, has a built in clip, holds 250 of my favorite songs and weighs next to nothing - maybe about as much as a pancake.  (I was trying to find something weird to compare the weight and think that I did okay.)

 

Also, my birthday is on Friday, so I'll go out with a couple of the other VAC members staying in town.  Maybe the one brewpub that is in Sofia will be finished with its renovations and we can go there.  On Saturday, I hope to catch a movie in town.  Still don't know if I'll come back Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon.  Let me know if you'd like me to keep you posted.

 

Okay, I'm going to go now.  I'll try to post some new photos very soon, so hopefully there will be some by the time you read this.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

-Jamey

 

 

Okay. So this is the blog I thought I was going to write last night - the one that ended up being about Austria and Slovenia.  This is the one about Bulgaria.  You know - that place I've been living for a while now.

 

School began as usual in Bulgaria, on September 15th, even though the 15th was on a Saturday this year.  But since the first day is not a real school day, it's not that big of a deal to anyone that it's on a Saturday.  Plus, the prior weekend was a 4-day weekend, Thursday through Sunday, where Thursday was a holiday and Friday was added as a day-off in exchange for working the following Saturday, so in a way it was a "normal" workday for the Bulgarians anyway.

 

I had spent part of the 4-day weekend in Kiten, Bulgaria on the Black Sea.  The weather was very nice right up until that Thursday, when a cold front moved through the whole country.  Most of the weekend was gray with occasional showers, but the sun came out in the afternoon long enough that we went into the water, even though it was probably not even 65 degrees out.  Too cold to come out of the water, but too cold to stay in, too.  Still, it was a good bunch of people to hang out with for a few days, but I felt like getting back home after a couple of days, so took a bus back to Sliven Saturday afternoon and spent the rest of the weekend holed up at home watching movies, or, more likely, downloaded TV serieses.  (I know that the correct plural of "series" is "series", but me no like-a that.)

 

Back to the opening ceremony for the school.  The teachers had decided that they could no longer continue to work for what the government has been paying them, so they went on strike.  Here's how the strike worked on the 15th: The kids showed up at 9 o'clock for the opening ceremony and were met by the director and a handful of other school administrators/teachers.  Meanwhile, the other 95% of the teachers met in the teachers' room at school and waited until 10 o'clock to head over to the ceremony.  They had also decided that it would be most appropriate to wear black that day, and most of them did.  They came out and met their classes for 30 minutes or so.  Then the kids headed home and the teachers headed back to the teachers' room, where they had to remain until 4:00 or so as part of their strike.  If they weren't on strike, they could have just gone home.  Seems kinda weird that they'd hole themselves up (there's that expression again) to be on strike, but I don't make the rules here.

 

I don't even follow the rules, actually, in that I'm not allowed to strike since I don't work for the Bulgarian government.  We were told that we are expected to be in our classrooms at our assigned times and if students show up, we are to teach them.  More on that later.

 

You may or may not remember, but last year I had a pretty bad teaching schedule. I only had 4 teaching hours on the schedule and the rest of my classes were optional classes for each of the grade levels.  Only most students opted not to come.  If it weren't for some adult English classes I picked up along the way, I wouldn't have been doing much last year.  I only had about 8 students total in my optional classes by April, and by June was down to 3 or 4.  This year, I realized they wanted me to have essentially the same schedule as last year and I refused.  I talked to the director and the assistant director about my classes.  I told them that above all I wouldn't teach the 4 hours that were on the schedule last year because I felt like I had failed miserably in those classes.  In case you don't recall, these classes were called "Technologies" on the schedule, but had nothing to do with Technologies and I was just told that I should "get the students to speak."  I had no textbooks, no outline, no anything, and to top it off I only saw the students one time per week each for 40 minutes.  If there was a holiday, school meeting, election, fog, etc., I wouldn't even see them once.  And with 4 groups of 26/27 kids, I didn't even know all of their names by the end of the year because I simply didn't see them often enough.  To top it off, the discipline in two of the groups was pretty much non-existent by the end of the year.

 

So... I hated those classes and wasn't about to take them on again.  In talking to the assistant director, I still felt I was being given the classes that none of the other English teachers wanted.  He proposed that I teach the 12th-graders who are taking English as a second foreign language.  I felt like this was an even worse situation than before I talked to them, in a way.  Last December I had been a substitute teacher for the 12th-graders who were studying English as a *first* foreign language and they had all pretty much dropped out of the class mentally.

 

I'm going to have to head off into a digression here for a minute that I hadn't realized I'd have to head off into.  To get into a university in Bulgaria, prospective students have to sit for 3 or so exams in specific subjects.  High school GPAs don't really mean anything here.  Once they decide in 11th grade which university exams they'll study, those are the only subjects that are important to them.  In the rest of the classes, they just have to show up and make a passing grade.

 

In December, out of the 75 or so 12th-grade English students I taught (as a substitute teacher), only about 4 of them were planning on taking an English exam, and the rest just talked during class, or played cards, or played games on paper they didn't even try to hide from me.  I was thinking, okay, if the ones who have been studying English intensively for 5 years don't want to pay attention in class, the ones who have studied *German* for 5 years *really* won't want to pay attention.  I have always felt that I will be the most beneficial to the ones who are studying English intensively and aren't distracted by university exams, i.e. the 9th, 10th and 11th graders who study English as a first foreign language.  (It turns out these are exactly the groups that new sitemate is teaching at the language school, where it would seem they know what to do with a PC volunteer.)

 

So, they wanted me to teach 4 hours per week Technologies, 4 hours per week English-as-a-second-foreign-language and a 2-hour per week optional combined class for the 5th and 6th graders.  This is only 10 hours per week, only 8 of which are scheduled, and we're expected to teach 18 hours a week as PCVs.  If my school hadn't demonstrated a complete lack of need for me last year, this year they were rubbing it in.

 

I talked to my managers in Sofia and they told me it wasn't realistic to move me to a different site at this point.  They called my school and told the director I wanted to talk to her about getting a new schedule and explained my problems with it.  Back in Sliven I managed to call a meeting with my school director in which she agreed to take the Technologies and English-as-a-2nd-foreign-language classes off my hands.  In exchange, I was to teach literature twice a week to the 11th graders and 1 time per week to the 12th-graders, plus one hour per week co-teaching the 5th- and 6th-graders.  And also, she wants me to continue the classes for teachers.  This brought me up to 14 scheduled hours and sounded promising, although I was worried about trying to teach literature to the 12th-graders if I was only going to see them for 40 minutes a week.  I mean, how much English can you teach in 40 minutes a week?

 

Meanwhile...

 

About 4 weeks before school was to start, they started doing some renovations to a couple of the classrooms at school.  Then, with only two weeks to go, they started replacing *every* window in the school.  They had to knock out all the old windows and rebuild the walls around the new windows.  Our school consists of the original, old building and one floor of the connected building that houses the language school.  The only usable classrooms at this point are the ones in the newer wing.  The old building is a complete mess, with desks stacked in the halls, all of the administrative offices gutted, the library shelves covered in plastic sheeting and construction trash everywhere.

 

Simultaneously, by the way, they've been renovating the *exterior* of the newer wing.  Because of a shortage of classrooms in an already crowded school, they've had to switch from 2 shifts per day to 3, reducing the classes to 30 minutes each, and the breaks from 10 to 5.  (The only good thing here is that I always felt that 10-minute breaks between classes (and 20 minutes for the big break) was a bit much.)

 

Anyway, I show up on school Monday to find out when I'm teaching.  Because all of my classes are shared with another English teacher, I didn't have any of my own classes that needed to be scheduled.  Or so I thought. I found out on Wednesday that I was still listed as the teacher of the 12th-grade English-as-a-second-foreign-language classes.  I guess word never got to the schedule makers that I wasn't to teach these classes.  By this time, I had talked to the 11th-grade English teacher about how I'd teach her groups 2 hours per week out of their 5, but I was starting to realize how hard it was going to be to coordinate all my classes with her, and that I'd have a bigger problem with the 12th-grade literature classes in this regard, so I went to the director to see what, exactly, I should be teaching.  I told her to go ahead and leave me on the schedule for the English-as-a-second-foreign-language classes so at least I'd have a couple of classes all my own.  So now I have those two groups and the 11th-grade literature classes and am supposed to help out with the 5th- and 6th-graders once per week each.

 

So, I came to school at 7:30 on Thursday morning, went to meet my class of 12th-grade German students, and the classroom was empty.  One boy came in about 10 minutes later, and asked in very good English where his classmates were.  I told him I was hoping he could tell me.  He made a phone call, and 15 minutes later two of them showed up and said that everyone was at the cafe.  Since I hadn't shown up on Tuesday to teach them (because I didn't know), they figured they didn't have a teacher, so why go to class.  Sounds logical.  I guess.  Anyway, I went over to the cafe and met the class and told them to be there the following Wednesday for class.  And to bring their textbooks.  They promised they would.

 

Friday at 7:30, I met the other group of 12th-grade German students.  All but two of them were there, and they seemed to be a sweet enough bunch of kids and class seemed to go pretty well.  We played "2 truths and a lie".  Their lies weren't very good.

 

Okay, so Friday afternoon, the teachers voted to continue the strike.  (Remember the strike?)  If you're keeping track, what this means is that I only taught one English class the first week of school.  The teachers decided that they'd be on strike on Monday and I don't have any unshared classes on Monday, so woohoo, a three-day weekend.  Tuesday I showed up to teach at 7:30 the same group I had met on Friday and I had 0 students.  I worked a crossword puzzle for 30 minutes and then went home.  The striking teachers, meanwhile, have to be there from 7:30 until 4:00 every day they are striking, and as far as I know they aren't getting paid on the days they are striking.  Because they voted to continue the strike for the next two days, I didn't go to school Wednesday or Thursday and stayed at home working on some writing exercises I have assigned to myself and reading through some of the literature textbooks.  Thursday night one of my program managers was in town to observe a class of mine on Friday and I told him the students hadn't been coming to school because of the strike and he informed me that it didn't matter, I still needed to be there, so on Friday I went at 7:30 for my class and was blown away that 5 of the students actually showed up.  I taught the class as best I could - 2 of the 5 spoke some English but the other 3 didn't speak much at all; none of them had the textbook; only one of them even had a pencil and paper - then got my feedback and met with the director and manager and headed home for the weekend.

 

I was really surprised that the 5 students showed up.  This is a 7:30 in the morning class and these are German students.  It's the only class they have during the strike because there are only like 3 teachers in the whole school who aren't striking.  I instantly liked them for being there.  Oh, I offered to teach my literature classes twice a week to the 11th-graders, but the director rejected the idea since the class was really the other English teacher's class.  On Tuesday, I went to school and had 3 students from the same class, although none of them were from the 5 who had shown up on Friday.  No textbooks.  Only 1 of the 3 understood the most basic English.  But, again, they were there!  On Wednesday (today), I had 2 students.  I had asked the director if maybe she could move the class to 10 o'clock as long as the strike was going on and she said she'd do what she could, but I don't think the daily schedule-maker ever heard about this idea, because I continue to have my class scheduled at 7:30.  I figure maybe attendance would be a little higher if the students didn't have to wake up so early to get there.  Anyway, the strike continues, my one class per day continues to be at 7:30 and attendance continues to be low.  Weird.

 

Josh and I are still jointly teaching the twice-weekly class for the Roma.  We have many students who show up every time, but we are baffled as to why new students are still showing up 8 or so weeks into the class.  I mean, really, who shows up on week 8 for a beginner's English course and thinks that maybe they can just pick up the previous 8 weeks of material?  The only late-joiners who have managed to do well at all are the ones who obviously have studied English a little bit before.  The rest come for a session or two and we never see them again.  Tonight we were back up to our original total of about 20 students.  I had never seen 5 of them before, and another 2 or 3 were there only for the 2nd or 3rd time.  Oh, well... at least we have students!  Tomorrow I will go to the special needs school where I taught the teachers last year and talk to them about when they'd like to have a class.  I miss that group.

 

Other than the teaching, or lack thereof, I've been working on some exercises in hopes of discovering the answer to the $64,000 question "What are you going to do after the Peace Corps?"  And I've got a new Bulgarian teacher - this time one who doesn't speak English! - and have spent a lot of time studying the language.  I really want to at least be semi-competent at this language by the time I am finished here.  It has been really inspiring to have this new teacher, so maybe I'll make some progress.  I think I already am a bit better, although I still speak really, really slowly.

 

Again, I've written way more than I meant to, but will go ahead and hit the Save button and get back to my self-study.  Oh, and speaking of self-study, I encourage all of you who are interested to go to www.pente.net and sign up to play Pente for free.  Then challenge me (llamapez) to a game.  It's not real-time, so you just make a move when you feel like it and check back hours or days later to make another move.

 

Check out all the new photos and leave comments here and/or with the photos if the urge strikes you.

Keep up the hard work!  (One of us has to!)
-Jamey

So... it looks like I "forgot" to make an update in September.  I think I've generally been able to do one update a month for a long time now, and somehow I just didn't "get around to it" last month.  But why? you ask.  Read on and perhaps you'll see.

 

I took another one of my trips at the end of August: 8 days in Austria and Slovenia.  I flew from Sofia to Vienna very early in the morning. I had a 6 AM flight and, with the 1-hour time change, landed at 6:40 AM, tired as could be.  I found my hotel and dropped my stuff off and then went to see Schonbrunn Palace.  Let me just make a note here, by the way, that there are so few places anymore where you can actually take pictures. I usually end up buying a few postcards as I leave a place because I wasn't allowed to take my own photos. Now, this is probably why they forbid the photography, and the postcards are better than any picture I could take anyway, so I guess it's not so bad, but at times it would be nice to have my own.  Anyway, I walked around the amazing gardens while I waited the 15 minutes for my ticket to be valid, then I headed into the interior with my trusty rented audio guide.

 

After Schonbrunn (I'm feeling too lazy to type umlauts today) (as if I regularly type umlauts), I took the Rick Steves Guidebook tram tour of the loop around the inner city.  So very beautiful.  Then I headed back to the hotel to meet my traveling companion from America - a friend of mine named Pam.  We headed downtown to see the city.  There are many very interesting churches throughout the city.  The zig-zaggy roof of St. Peter's is certainly different and hard to miss.  The damned souls falling from heaven in St. Michael's are also "different" I must say.  But just Vienna itself is a joy to behold.  The city is so clean and beautiful.

 

On the second day, we toured the opera, the Hofburg Treasury, the royal apartments in the Hofburg and, um, a globe museum.  Interestingly, photography wasn't forbidden in the Treasury, which had crown jewels, pieces of the Cross (you know the one) - one of the Nails! even! - and astoundingly beautful gowns and robes and jewelry from the last thousand years or so.  Holy Roman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, that kind of stuff (short-hand for "I don't really know the history").  The globe museum, while not worth going to Vienna just to see, was certainly worth the 30 minutes or so we wandered around in it.

 

Day 3 was mostly a day-trip to Durnstein on the Danube.  Durnstein is a nicely preserved old town on the river and in the shadow of some fortress ruins up the hill.  Just a nice place to spend a few hours soaking it in.  Also had some fairly tasty food throughout our stay.  After Durnstein, we ate dinner, grabbed our bags and headed to the train station for the 10PM overnight train to Koper, Slovenia.  Koper is just a couple miles from the Adriatic Sea, so somewhere throughout the night we passed through a good chunk of Austria and all the way through Slovenia.

 

We arrived in Koper in time to catch the 7 AM bus to Piran, a charming (or was it quaint?) little town on a small peninsula on the Adriatic Sea.  We had to wait until 1 PM to check in, so we left our bags and walked around the city, but we hadn't gotten enough sleep on the train and all we really wanted to do was sleep.  I finally put on my swimsuit for a few minutes of swimming in the Sea.  (I think this makes it two down, five to go, by the way.)  The Adriatic is especially salty, or at least it is near Piran, and floating was much easier than any other time I've been swimming.  There are actually tours of the salt production areas not too far south near the Croatian border, so I wouldn't be surprised if the salt content was for some reason rather high.  We finally got into our room and took a much-needed nap, then got cleaned up and checked out more of Piran.

 

On our second day in Slovenia, we took the train up to a city I can't think of the name of right now where a bus was waiting to take interested passengers to Skotsyan Cavern.  The bus was even free, and very nice.  I guess I wasn't sure what to expect about Slovenia.  According to my guidebook, it was always the nicest part of Yugoslavia, and it certainly seemed like a nice place.  The countryside was beautiful and there wasn't garbage everywhere like you see in Bulgaria.  All the houses seemed like they were in nice shape.  They're the only country out of the 10 admitted to the EU in 2004 that is already on the Euro.  I think they're doing just fine, and managed to avoid that Balkan mess with only a couple of lives lost.  Anyway, back to the Cavern, which was quite huge, I must say.  I've seen nicer formations in other caves, but the canyon running through this one, with the Reka Reka ("River River") running through it, is really cool, as is the sheer size of the room through which it runs.  We had to kill a lot of time waiting for the train back to Piran, so we walked around the small town with the forgotten name and found a restaurant that you can tell doesn't get a lot of tourists, and so that was a nice fun game of miming before they dragged someone from the back who spoke a little English.  I think this is the only place we went in Austria and Slovenia where the person we were dealing with didn't speak English.  And to think I was always so scared to travel when I was younger because I didn't know "the language".  What, am I supposed to learn them all?  I can't even learn Bulgarian, and I *live* here. (I've gotten better, though.)

 

The next day, we headed up to Bled in the "Julian" Alps.  Bled is a small tourist town on Lake Bled, home to Slovenia's only island.  There's a church on the island and pretty much no room for anything else.  It's an extremely beautiful part of the world, this.  We took a "pletna" boat out to the island, we toured the castle overlooking the lake and took a day-trip to Vintgar Gorge, which really reminds you where the word "gorgeous" comes from.  We only had one full day in Bled, which was actually okay.  There were some full-day excursions into the Alps, but the only one we really wanted to take wasn't offered on the day we were there, and we did just fine without it.  I could write more, but need to get a move-on.

 

The next day we took the bus to Ljubljana, where we had to catch the 4 PM train back to Vienna.  We got there sometime before lunch and did another Rick Steves guidebook tour.  Ljubljana is so much nicer than Sofia.  There is a lot of interesting architecture there, and the last thing we did before leaving was tour the most famous architect's house.  The guidebook said it takes 30 minutes to do the Jozhay Plechnik home tour and that there are tours on the hour.  Well, that sounded do-able and would still give us 30 minutes to catch a cab and make our train.  The city isn't that big, afterall, and we had walked to the museum.

 

So, a huge thunderstorm moved through the area a few minutes to 3.  The museum people had called a taxi for us before our tour, so we went ahead with our tour and got through just at 3:30 (although the woman said she had to shorten the tour a little bit for us), and by this time the rain had already stopped.  We went out to get in the cab, but there wasn't one yet.  We waited 5 minutes before asking the museum to be sure one was coming, and they said they were sure - they use this one guy.  Another 5 minutes and okay, well, now we're starting to worry.  Finally the guy gets there at 3:45 and we immediately get stuck in traffic.  The driver said because of the rain, and it had rained really, really hard for a good 25 minutes, all of the traffic was messed up.  You kind of got  the impression that people only got in their cars and drove into the middle of town *because* it had rained.  There really hadn't been much traffic before that.  Anyway, stop and go all the way to the station, and the guy actually did a u-turn at the end and backed up the last quarter mile for us.  He jumped out of the car to help us - his job was to figure out the track while we retrieved our bags.  We got our bags, he grabbed one of Pam's and we ran, ran ran.  Let me tell you - marble floors can be quite slick when they're wet.  Got off the concrete and onto some more grippy concrete, went down under the tracks - why, oh why, did we have to go to the furthest track from the station? - and the driver helped us up onto the first train car going all the way to Vienna.  I only had a 2-Euro coin or a 20-Euro note to tip the guy with.  At this point, we were still mad that he had been 15 minutes late to pick us up, so he got the 2-Euro coin, but immediately aftewards I realized he had deserved the 20, as the train started moving within a minute.

 

The rest of the trip was uneventful.  Got to Vienna around 10 PM, found our hotel by the airport and flew out the next day - me to Sofia, Pam back to America.

 

I actually thought I was going to get around to writing about being in the Peace Corps and Bulgaria, but it is now late, so I'll try to get to that as soon as possible.

 

Keep up the good work!

-Jamey

 

Ah, summer...  In a way, I can't wait for it to be over.  I mean, I feel like I haven't really had a summer vacation this year, but today it's so hot I just want it to end. Did I ever tell you that I love autumn?

 

So what have I been doing since Camp Blue Rocks my first week of summer?  Well, half a week later I headed off to Sofia for 2 and a half weeks to teach at the American College of Sofia.  My program manager, Dora, had asked me a month earlier if I could help out and I thought it sounded like a nice opportunity to get out of Sliven for awhile and experience life in the capital.  Turns out, though, that the ACS campus is way on the edge of Sofia, near Vitosha Mountain.  It took a half hour or so by bus to get to the city center.  The good thing, though, is that the campus was close to the mountain, so was much cooler than downtown Sofia.  The campus is pretty nice, with lots of open space and trees.

 

I learned a new Bulgarian word there after the first night.  Sometime close to midnight I started hearing what I figured was probably a bird making a most godawful shreiking sound, so the next day I asked what kind of animal it might have been. The "housemother" for the dormitory, Rumyana, told me it was a kukumyavka.  I asked if that was some kind of owl and she assured me it was not.  I looked it up a few minutes later in an online dictionary and found that this word means "barn, or screech, owl". (And then I went off on a tangent about how J.K. Rowling insists that these two species are distinct, but that we muggles apparently can't tell the difference. I then found many pieces of conflicting information about whether or not a barn own and a screech owl are the same creature.) I heard this little guy just about every night before I went to bed. I kind of got the impression that he was even more of a night owl than I am.  (Ha! I so funny!)

 

Also, the Bulgarians use the term "kukumyavka" to describe that neighbor lady who is always screaming at her husband about everything.  It's a fun word.

 

My experience at ACS was okay.  It was a lot more work than I realized, with 3.5 hours of teaching in the morning and another 3 in the afternoon, followed by an hour of waiting around in the evenings for the children to get picked up from school.  The morning classes were pretty nice because for one week I was working with older teens who were quite good at English (and who made the sweetest thank-you card for me at the end), and one week I was working with three adults - an Italian, a Belgian and a Bulgarian.  It's quite different trying to teach English to people who don't share a mother tongue than teaching a group of Bulgarians. I think it's much better for the students because if they want to communicate, the *have* to use English.  If only I could import a bunch of non-Bulgarian speakers into my regular English classes here.

 

The two groups I taught in the afternoon were about 11-13 years old and 12-14 years old, give or take.  Many of the kids were sweet and bright, but most of them just wanted to be outside playing, so were actually worse than my worse discipline problems in Sliven.  I couldn't wait for the summer program to end so I wouldn't have to deal with these kids anymore. (I got a text message from Valerie, whom I had replaced at ACS. She said she had just seen Lubomir at the bus station in Sofia and it was all she could do to not sneak up behind him and slap him. I can't believe she missed the opportunity.)  Anyhoo, I survived the ordeal and was at least happy to have had a few sweet students who liked to talk to me while we waited for the parents to come fetch 'em.

 

I received some sad news, however, during my stint at ACS. I got a message from Bruce and Donna informing me that they had made one of their toughest decisions ever and were going to "ET". (ET is short for "Early Termination" and it's what we call it when we leave the Peace Corps before our tour of duty is over.)  Everyone who has ever met Bruce and Donna has fallen in love with them.  They are the nicest, most cheerful, and most generous couple you could ever hope to meet.  Due to family issues back in America, however, they decided it was more important that they return home, and though we all miss them terribly already, there is no question that they made the right decision. I was happy to have gotten to meet them for one last dinner in Sofia before they left the country. I also inherited their toaster oven, which Bruce claims is the best thing they bought with their moving-in allowance way back last July. I still haven't figured out how to easily get the thing home from the PC office, but hope to soon.

 

While at ACS, I managed to get in one hike on Vitosha mountain, and also visited a site called Cambanite, or "The Bells".  This is an interesting monument promoting world peace where each country was encouraged to donate a bell.  Some of the bells were quite impressive.  The one from the US was quite a disappointment, looking like a slightly bigger version of the bell Mom used to ring back home when it was time for dinner.  You could ring all the bells at the monument, too, which was pretty cool.  While walking around the monument, you would periodically hear a bell being rung from some other part of the memorial. I went there with fellow PCV Jason, who actually spent the entire month of July at ACS. Jason holds a strange fascination for North Korea, and I had to admit that the bell from that country was probably the most impressive bell there.  Check out the photos to get a better idea of this place.

 

The day after I finished at ACS, I headed to Simeonovgrad to attend a wedding between PCV Anthony and his Bulgarian fiancée. Anthony is the first from our group to tie the knot here in Bulgaria, although a few days ago another, Alan, also became engaged. (Congratulations, Alan!).  The wedding itself wasn't too terribly different than any wedding I've attended in America. They got married at the city hall building, but there was a nice enough room for such events there.  The bride wore a beautiful white wedding dress, and Anthony wore a light suit. It was about a million degrees that day, so the light color was a good choice, although he was still sweating buckets. I think that I probably missed the most interesting parts of the wedding day because between the time friends came to get Anthony and when I next saw him at city hall, he had to go through many traditions, including somehow having to convince the bride's family to give her up by offering various "bribes".  I also heard lots of rakiya was consumed during this hour or so.  Oh, well...  (I actually try to avoid rakiya at almost all times.) After the ceremony, as well as when the friends had come to take Anthony away, there was a dancing of the horo in the street. Then we got in cars to drive to nearby Harmanli for the reception.  Now, whenever someone gets married in Bulgaria, they wedding party and guests drive around town honking their horns for longer than most people would think necessary.  It was fun to finally be on the honking end of that tradition.  The reception was very nice, with good food, lots of rakiya and lots of horo dancing.

 

I finally made it home the next day after a somewhat miserable bus ride.  It was good to be home.  The next day, though, I started my thrice-weekly English course for the teachers at my school.  It is a continuation of my course from *last* summer, although now there are only 3 students.  It's a nice group, though, and keeps me from being overly lazy.  The next week, new sitemate Josh and I started [By the way, I hear a half-dozen cars or so honking the heck out of their horns right now, so just thought I'd share.] an English course for a group of Roma students.  Some are about 16 years old, I'd say, but they go up to about 40ish.  They are all so friendly and welcoming that Josh and I can't stand it.  But what we can't stand even more are the comments that we both have heard from other Bulgarians when we tell them that we have begun this course, and they're not good comments, but I really can't go into much detail here due to limitations of being a representative of the US government.  We meet with this group of 20 or so two evenings a week.

 

Two more weeks of summer, then teachers report to school.  Two weeks after that, the students arrive.  Hmm...

 

Don't forget to check out the latest photos, and for Pete's sake keep up the good work!

 

-Jamey

 

Summer is here.  I guess I just noticed this.  Today I took my first day trip of the season to the Black Sea.  I went in early May with a friend of Christin's but it was still too early back then to think about swimming there, so that trip doesn't count.  This time I went with my new sitemate, Josh.  Josh will be working at the language high school which shares a building with my own high school (which is a math and natural sciences high school).  His students will be motivated learners of English.  Mine are motivated learners of science.  I'm betting he'll have a better go of things here and I wish him well.  Anyway, we went to Sozopol today and now my back is slightly sunburned, despite liberal applicatoin of SPF30.  Looks like the rest of me was spared.  The sea was really nice today with barely any seaweed and very clear water.  It's the nicest I've seen the Black Sea.  Did I mention before that beaches in Bulgaria (as in most, if not all, of Europe) are tops-optional for women?  (and of course for men, too!)  Sometimes this seems like a grand plan, and sometimes it's a fairly bad policy, depending on the participants.  I don't think I'll ever quite get used to the idea.  Um, 'nuff said about that.

 

So, what has Jamey been up to recently you ask?  Well let me tell you.  Back in June I went for a hike in the Rila Mountains to the famous Seven Rila Lakes area.  I was there with about 20 of the newest PC trainees from the B21 group (I am a "B19") and another 8 or 10 other PCVs.  My friend Tony was one of the organizers of the hike and had invited me to join them, and my sitemate Christin joined us as well.  Bruce and Donna Criswell, whom everyone holds in the highest regard imaginable (and I mean that), were also able to accompany us, as was Donald, the only other B19 on the trip.

 

Hmm... Let me back up a bit here.  Back in early June I decided I needed to start jogging because I don't get any exercise other than walking around all over Sliven.  I started out with a slow 20-minute jog and was trying to add a minute or so each time, going every other day.  Well, after about 2 weeks of this I noticed that both of my knees were hurting in a way unfamiliar to me, so I did the sensible thing and went running again two days later.  Figured a "real" athlete would just "power through" whatever it is.  And after a few minutes it didn't seem so bad.  To cut to the chase, the next day I could barely walk.  I limped through the next 5 days, trying my best to stay off my legs but it's hard to do this when you are a teacher and live in a town that requires a lot of walking.  But I was determined to go on the Rila Lakes hike.  On Friday late morning Christin and I took a bus to Sofia, met up with Tony and we headed down to our old stomping grounds in Dupnitsa where we ran into others gathered there for the hike on Saturday.  I managed just fine hiking up to the "hizha" (a semi-rustic mountain lodge) - it took about 2 hours at a leisurely pace - and in the afternoon there was another hike to see some of the lakes and I only limped the tinyest little bit.  (Meanwhile, the newest Peace Corps doctor was on the hike with us, which was reassuring, although at the time I was trying to hide the limp from him.  Am I a genius or what?)  Because of bad weather moving in, we only saw 4 of the 7 lakes (or maybe it was 5?) before heading back.  Be sure to check out my photos.  A very beautiful place.

 

The next day we hiked down through some beautiful woods to a very impressive waterfall called "Skakavitsa" (or something like that).  Really no major problems with the knees.  The area around the waterfall is one of the prettiest places I've seen and the weather was perfect that morning.  Some people climbed up to the base of the falls, but I just relaxed in the sun.  After an hour or so hanging out at another hizha to kill time, we hiked down to meet our buses, which took us back to Dupnitsa.

 

The next two days were another of those training/meeting thingies that our entire PC group gets together for from time to time.  This one was called the Mid-Service Training, or MST.  You know what that means, right?  That I am officially past my mid-service point.  In fact, as I write this I'm down to about 51 weeks left in Bulgaria.  How 'bout them apples?  It was nice as always to be able to see all the people from my group.  Some of them live so far away that these conferences are the only time I ever see them.  Unfortunately, this is the last one until our Close of Service (COS) conference in 9 months.

 

I came back from MST and only had one more week of school.  I finished up with my classes and my grading and recording and was so very thankful that school is done for the year.  I made a lot of mistakes this year with classroom management, or my lack thereof, and hope to do better next year.  I heard from another English teacher at school that the director is awaiting my ideas about what I'd like to teach next year.  But by this she doesn't mean which English classes or which age-group, but what kind of optional classes will I have.  As you may or may not recall, my optional classes all started out with 6 or 8 interested students and most of them ended the year with zero students and were a major source of my frustration here.  I just want to teach some real English classes to some real students who are required to attend.  Is this so much to ask?  Anyway, I'll have to come up with some sort of reply for Mrs. Vasileva.

 

Last week, after taking care of some things at school on Monday, I met up with Josh and the two of us headed up the chairlift to Karandila.  Karandila is the area at the top of the mountains right next to Sliven and has a number of hizhas and more proper hotels.  Josh and I had agreed to help Christin with her summer camp for teenage girls from the area.  B19 Tara from nearby Yambol also joined us as a "counselor".  The idea of this camp is to teach (in English) things about values, leadership, gender roles, healthy living, etc., etc.  I was there mostly to provide support as needed.  I also had to carry up about a hundred pounds of equipment to show some videos on human trafficking, to show a movie on "movie night" and to serve as a karaoke machine for, you guessed it, karaoke night.  There were only 9 girls at the camp, but they all got along well and it turned out very well.   It was the first time one of the girls had had an overnight stay away from her family.  You could tell at the end that she really, really liked the camp.  They all seemed to be quite pleased with it and this made me happy.  I feel like I did so much more in those 5 days than in most of the rest of the year.  And Christin did almost all of the work!

 

Which brings me back to the present and my slightly sunburned back.  Oh, and my knee.  During MST I finally visited the PC doctor and he diagnosed my ailment as bursitis and gave me a knee brace.  After a couple of days of knee brace and mostly keeping off my feet, I started feeling much better.  But the time I got up to Karandila, I barely even noticed anything in my knees (and it was always only really the right one that hurt - the left one just a tiny bit) and now it is all better thanks for asking.  Which again just leaves the sunburn, and even *that* is slight, but you know how I'm not happy if I don't have something to complain about.

 

Sometime around Thursday I head to Sofia for a two-week program at the American College of Sofia.  I'm still awaiting details on what, exactly, I'll be doing, but rest assured that it involves speaking a lot of English to strangers.  Which probably isn't a whole lot different than what many of you do every day anyway.  I'm looking forward to living in Sofia for a couple of weeks for the change of pace, although I'm sure I'll miss some of the things I have here in Sliven by the end.  Things like refrigerators and water distillors and internet in my room.  I'll survive!

 

Keep up the good work!

 

-Jamey

Oh, my...

 

Perhaps I should just dive right in here.  I believe that the last time I was here, I was talking all about my wonderful trip to Greece.  I decided after that posting that perhaps it looks just a bit too much like all I ever do in the Peace Corps is to travel.  I vowed then and there that I'd start to post more of my regular day-to-day life here.  I think that's really want you want to read anyway, even though at times it seems fairly mundane to me these days.

 

Vows... Well, I'm sure some of you know how that goes.  Here it is like 14 years later and I haven't made such a posting.  I sure have *thought* about it a lot, though, and you know how much I value thinking and thinkers.  So without further ado, here's a posting about my trip to Italy.  Yup.

 

My mother, brother John and sister Libby came to visit me back in mid-May.  They were here in Bulgaria for 3 days before the 4 of us headed off to Italy.  I met them at the airport in Sofia with the car and driver (Kostadine) I had hired.  It was a beautiful day and the 3 of them weren't asleep, so we went to visit a couple of the nicer churches in Sofia.  There were some very special icons on display at the best of the churches.  While these icons - a couple of very old and faded paintings and a picture box full of various bone fragments - mean a lot to devoit Bulgarian Orthodox, they weren't a priority of ours.  But unfortunately we had to wait in a long line just to get into the church, and were horrified that once we got inside the church we were in a line just as long as the one we had stood in outdoors.  We were only halfway there!  And we couldn't just walk around the church (Alexander Nevski Cathedral) to admire it because of the way the line was forced around the perimeter of the church interior.  It took us about an hour and a half to see something I thought would take 10 minutes.  Thankfully there was a bottled water company handing out free water to the people standing in line.  After Nevski, we went to see the nearby Russian Church, which is quite a pretty little church.  Then we piled in the car and Kostadine drove us to Sliven.

 

We got into Sliven a bit later than expected and got Mom and Libby checked into their hotel, and found a place for Kostadine, and then we headed to the famous Tuesday "pizza night".  I wanted my family to meet the folks I regularly hang out with here.  When we got there, however, it turns out that there was a somewhat overwhelming number of people there and they were only briefly able to meet with Greg and Jan (pronounced "Yen" - the Danish man living here).  Everyone else was occupied in other conversations, and Christin happened to be out of town.  Oh, well...  After pizza, Kostadine drove Mom and Libby to their hotel and then John and I to my deluxe apartment.

 

The next morning, I had a 7:30 class, so I got up and managed to get there and teach that, then came home with some fresh bread from the store so John would have something to eat for breakfast.  We feasted on bread, honey and fig preserves.  I had just been given the preserves by a teacher in my adult class.  She gave me that and some strawberry preserves, and it's the first time I've been given food since the end of last summer.  I was so very thankful and they were both delicious.  I had been told by some PCVs that they get so much food from the locals that they couldn't possibly eat it, but here in the big city the relationships don't quite work the same way.  I'm fairly annonymous here.  I mean, everyone around knows that I ain't from around here, but they don't make a big deal of it. In the smaller towns, there is more or less a complete lack of privacy, but the volunteers certainly receive a lot more attention.  There's good and bad in both situations, of course.

 

After class, John and I took the trolleybus down to Mom and Libby's hotel, the Edona, and I showed them the main walking street downtown.  Then I dragged them to my school to meet my school's director and whatever teachers might be around.  I thought maybe that would take about 5 minutes, somehow having forgotten that "na gosti" never takes 5 minutes. I had tried to tell myself that we'd just "pop in" more than have it be "na gosti", but a minute after my family was (or were as the Brits say) in Mrs. Vasileva's office, some women appeared with cups and saucers and cookies and coffee and juice, and we had commandeered a translator (Thanks, Daria!).  I kept explaining that I appreciated the effort, but I had a class to teach in 10 minutes!  And so, naturally, we *all* went to my class, and I made my family *be* the class.  Questions and answers for 40 minutes, and then back up to finish up the na gosti.  I then dragged them down to my favorite sandwich (I'm using the term loosely) shop for a quick lunch, then it was off to Nesebar.

 

Nesebar is a town on the Black Sea with a beautiful old town with thousands of years of history, full of old churches and cobblestone streets and old wooden houses, surrounded on all sides by water (other than the narrow strip connecting it to the mainland).  We had an interesting adventure there trying to find a "famous" "black Madonna" icon, only to be denied in the end by the church cleaning crüe.  We ate dinner at a restaurant with an astounding view of the sea and headed back to Sliven around dusk.

 

The next day, we went to Veliko Turnavo, another Bulgarian town with a lot of history, including having off-and-on been the capital of whatever has been called "Bulgaria" over the last 1500 years or so.  We toured Tzarovets castle there and even paid for a guided tour since it was a free day for admissions.  We had lunch there in VT in a restaurant with an amazing view of the winding river valley and surrounding cliffs.  Libby and John bought some trinkets or t-shirts or something from a very cute girl in a shop there.  (I really wasn't paying attention to what they were buying.)  When we were done in VT, we headed to Sofia and after a tiny bit of trouble, managed to find lodging for the night.

 

The next morning, after a brief stop for some traditional Bulgarian pastries to go, we drove down south to visit Rila Monastery, which I think I wrote about once about a year ago.  It was the first day with bad weather, but it wasn't actively raining while we touring the monastery, so it wasn't too bad.  The pictures aren't as bright and sunny as we'd have liked, but everyone enjoyed seeing the place.  John and even went up the road a bit to see the famous "dupe-ka" ("the hole") that climbing through somehow proves that you are without sin or something like that.  I think something has been lost in the translation since John and I both made it through.  We had tentatively planned to visit Baba Vassi in Bobov Dol, but because of the weather and traffic, we decided there simply wasn't enough time and instead went directly to the airport to fly off to Rome.

 

We did some stuff in Italy for 8 days or so and then I headed back to Bulgaria and the others back to America.  It was a great time!  I'm so happy they came to see me!  Woohoo!

 

So... Keep up the good work!

 

-Jamey