Jamey's Space

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