Short week--Over. Tomorrow is Georigiev Day, the day where all the Georgis of Bulgaria celebrate their fine name. So everybody gets a four day weekend. This marks the beginning of a series of short weeks before the end of school. When I graduated high school back in Sitka, I remember long, beautiful days of playing frisbee out on the school lawn, it was pretty relaxed in those final months. Here, the seniors are already finished and the rest of the school is backing slowly into the summer.
This morning was a graduation party of sorts for one of the senior classes. I suppose I was honored by it happening during my weekly two hours with them. It was all taped by a professional photographer who will follow the class around during all of their various celebrations in this final month. There was cake, and Capri Sun like "California" bag drinks. Always fun trying to get the straw into those things. I've learned to jam it into the bottom and chug. There's the least amount of trouble that way, if you try to go through the top you risk all kinds of things like splashing yourself, or stabbing clear through the bag. I noticed that the Bulgarian students were pretty set on getting the straw in through the top. There were a couple of stains as a result. Tragic.
After all the drinks were in hand, their class teacher (Basically their home room teacher for five years) gave a little speech through a few tears. She's the school's chemistry teacher, a pretty funny lady, and really sympathetic to my general cause. One of my favorites. After the speech, she gave everyone what seemed to be a yearbook, with the standard Bulgarian mug shots for yearbook photos. For anything the size of a yearbook or passport photo, most photographers in Bulgaria ask their subjects to stare directly into the camera and glower. Maybe two students got away with showing teeth in their photos. The rest looked like something you flip through at a police station.
The same thing happened to us volunteers when we had our ID photos taken. PC had us all line up and the photographer snapped us one by one. Two factors resulted in the worst set of photos ever taken, all of which were posted on a wall in Pazardjik for about two months. One, we got the usual anti-smile photographer. Two, the photos were taken at the end of our first week in Strelcha when we were just getting used to the country and were more than happy to comply with the guy's demands for frowns. As a result, on my PC ID I have one of the worst photos in a long line of bad ID photos for Rob.
So the mugshots were flipped through, quotes from various teachers were read aloud, and the class was merry. We all went outside for a class photo, which they insisted I be a part of, and then everybody just kind of went off and did their own thing, the class pretty much over. That's the way things are going for the seniors now. They've already taken their finals and the school will be lucky if we see one or two of them drop by next week. Graduation is at the end of May, a month before the rest of the school finishes. Needless to say, it doesn't really inspire the other classes to work like champions when the see an entire class leave. I'm prepared for a severe drop in focus. Summer is getting closer, the heat and humidity are setting in, and you can feel that everybody just wants the schoolyear to end.
Posted by Rob at May 5, 2004 08:15 PM