Alaskan Bulgarian

Happy New Year!

Well, the always strange week between Christmas and the New Year is ending. Here, it's going out with a bang. All day long little firecrackers have been going off in the streets. One just went off about five feet from the internet club and really boomed. It's all well and good I suppose, although I feel like strangling the people I see throwing them. The holiday season has to be respected and that can best be done by blowing up small bits of your town. Perfectly understandable.

New Year's Eve is always a bit awkward until things start happening at 9 or 10. Here we have bombichki to level things out, but much of the day is still spent watching Sidney and Hong Kong and everyone celebrate first. I have no real idea what New Year's Eve was like before global news showed us how the rest of the world celebrates. I assume that everyone used to see midnight as the time and the rest of the day as a build-up. I guess a lot of people still see it that way. I've grown into seeing New Year's Eve as this rolling celebration where every city in every timezone has to play its part in moving the calendar along in style. Sidney has always had this big image in my mind as the source of it all, and they usually seem to throw a pretty big celebration over there.

And it always reminds me that I need to get to Australia at some point, if only to confirm that it isn't this mythological place that gets everything rightm as it is in my imagination. Throw them the Olympics, they nail it. The first New Year, every year? They nail it. An opera house, for pete's sake? They nail it. And there are picutres of Sidney all over a couple of the cafes here in Silistra, although that's probably an entirely unrelated coincidence.

Anyway, Happy New Year! I hope everyone has a great time and a prosperous 2005 filled with good health and promotions and fantastic life choices. I'm sure there's lots more I could put into a good toast, but you get the idea.