I have no particular theme today (see "title, lack of theme in"), and I'm hopped up on whatever incredible amount of caffeine my tutor puts into that stuff she calls coffee, so this should be a good time. First, allow me to make a John Brown style observation. I'm now quite certain that this country's fear of winds, breezes, or otherwise moving airs will never be purged away but with a summer heatstroke epidemic of immense proportions.
It hit 100 degrees today (The municipality thermometer was showing 35 C around 3:00), the marshes around the Danube River made it feel swampy, and I was sagging as I was walking around town. When I arrived at my tutor's apartment for my lesson, I found one window open in the kitchen and no fan running. My chin was about two inches off the table throughout the lesson and little beads of sweat kept forming on my forearms. I'm not normally very good in extreme heat, even when I have a fan and cold water to cool me off. I like to spend the hottest part of days lying on the couch, air blowing over me, with a bottle of water at my side. Intense summers make me lazy. Bulgarian summers make me a zombie.
Over the weekend, as I was travelling up and down the coast, I noticed a fascinating pattern. Whenever an American was sitting in the front seat of a minibus and opened his window, the driver would shut his, eliminating any possiblity of draft. Any American passenger would sink further into their seat and/or misery, the driver would light a cigarette, and the Bulgarian passengers would continue to stare out the front window.
I was hopping up and down the coast for two reasons. One was to finally arrange a site for next month's camp for Bulgarian boys, the other was to pay a visit to Adam (Happy Birthday Adam!) who was having a party in Balchik in honor of his getting the heck out of here after two years and birthday. The first goal was accomplished in two easy hours in a town called Obzor, midway between Varna and Burgas. We talked to the guy there, who was very friendly and spoke in slow, clear Bulgarian, and then we took a tour of the town.
While waiting for the bus after the tour, we sat across the parking lot from a very, um, interesting hotel. At times, there were as many as ten Mercedes in the parking lot in front of the hotel's restaurant. Each Mercedes contained one muscle-bound, huge thickneck and his invariably gorgeous girlfriend. One guy, after getting out of his car, slid a 9mm into the back of his pants like it was a newspaper he was planning on reading. In America, you'd get as far away from this kind of gathering as possible, maybe even tell the police about it if you're a good, honest citizen. In Bulgaria, sadly, it's par for the course, and chances are most of the guys knew most of the cops in town anyway. Chances are a couple of the guys were cops.
We finally chased down a bus to Varna and got out of town, finally arriving in Balchik. Usual Peace Coprs-Bulgaria weekend party there. We saw the town's sites, took a swim, had a good time. The buzzword for the weekend was "metrosexual," which has become a heavy conversation topic recently. Everybody at the party had come last year or the year before and had not seen an episode of "Queer Eye" or heard of Howard Dean's "I am a metrosexual" soundbite.
The standard definition we decided on was a guy that dresses well, but is not gay. The rest of the conversation revolved around whether or not it was an insult for a straight guy to be called metrosexual. I mostly played referee and moderator the whole time since I'm nothing approaching gay or metrosexual (My fashion decisions mostly come from whatever I can get my hands on or is given to me. It's not that I don't necessarily know how to dress, but that I really don't and can't care seeing as I'm Sasquatch's much less hairy cousin [Hi Jimbob!]). And since I've been reading blogs and paying more attention to broad American social trends than your average volunteer, I was able to offer such intriguing trivia as the news of the Howard Dean soundbite.
By Sunday, I think a general consensus on the whole thing had been reached, although I still have no clue about what that consensus might be or what relevance it has. I think the fact that it gets brought up at all is a sign that PC-Bulgaria is a different experience when compared with, say, PC-Africa. But I guess that's obvious.
Today, in one of my last day's of classes, we were all sharing brief stories. Vladimir told me about his weekend's shoe-buying. He had been in the store when the shopkeeper brought out a pair that was too big for him. Thinking of me, of course, he mentioned that the pair would still be much too small for his English teacher. The shopkeeper said "Oh, I know your English teacher. The American. We all know him because nobody in Silistra could ever sell him any shoes." I have never tried to buy shoes in Silistra, nor do I do much shopping outside of grocery stores, but, well, that's what it's like being a volunteer in small-town Bulgaria. Everybody knows your name and that you wear size 52 (In Europe) shoes. And nobody ever opens a window. That too.
Posted by Rob at June 21, 2004 06:36 PMInteresting discussion:
Actually http://www.onelook.com 's wikipedia link gives an extensive definition ....crediting 'metrosexual' back to 1994..perhaps Howard Dean, who indicated on your link that he had not idea what it meant, will want to research it a bit. :-)
"was first used in 1994 by British journalist Mark Simpson, who coined metrosexual (and its noun, metrosexuality) to refer an urban heterosexual male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle. He is the fashion-conscious target audience of men's magazines.
Thanks, Rob, new word for me!
I did a small test, and it seems that men generally don't like being called metrosexual. Whether they really are or not, they don't want to admit they're that into their looks. But some guys do take it as a compliment, because it means they're well dressed. Anyway, it's a fun word to throw around.
Posted by: Christine at June 23, 2004 01:52 AMThere's been a long-standing prejudice in Bulgaria against draughts; in fact, we are raised up with a almost religious fear of draughts. While it does have some practical foundations, it is true that in the minds of most Bulgarians the danger is quite exaggerated - to the point of coworkers actually having a real, honest to God fight once when one felt that the room was too hot and wanted to open a window and the other would not allow it for fear of catching a cold.
To say the truth, I do believe that there is a lot of merit in the way Bulgarian mothers and grandmothers instill a fear of draughts early on - here, the climate is quite unpredictable (to say the least) and sometimes keeping windows closed is indeed a Good Thing(tm), especially in a moving vehicle like a bus or a train. I myself have caught two bad colds falling asleep in a moving train... but sometimes, just sometimes, we do go too far in trying to prevent a cold in a 38C weather :)
Posted by: Peter Pentchev at June 22, 2004 04:12 PMThanks for the birthday greetings. I have a question to the Bulgarians. When i am on the minbus and there is only 1 window open, i can see that the bulgarians are extremely uncomfortable and hot. Why do they not open the windows? Is there some medical data that shows a breeze can kill a man and if so than how come half of the world is not dead and just Eastern Europe remains.
Posted by: Adam at June 22, 2004 02:05 PMI can sympathize with the heat. I just arrived in Atlanta, Georgia and it was 97 F when I got here. Fortunately, I work in an air conditioned office, and my apartment also has AC, so I only have to bear the heat while waiting for the train back and forth to work.
Posted by: curt at June 22, 2004 01:23 AMJust in case you get the wrong idea, not *all* Bulgarians are fascinated by heat, or at least not all Bulgarians are heat-resistant enough to employ the usual method of killing off foreign invaders ;) A lot of us do indeed suffer heat much harder than cold, and the summer heats are not the best time of the year indeed. Actually, I don't think I could spend two weeks at the seaside now, like I would every year as a kid - the last couple of years it's more like two or three weekends at sea (most recently camping out), and then a week or so hiking somewhere in the mountains, where the grass is greener and the air is cooler and the water in the streams is cold as God intended it to be ;)
Posted by: Peter Pentchev at June 22, 2004 12:12 AM