The town is melting very, very quickly. Walking across town, it sounds more or less like rain . The snow on the top of buildings was thick enough to make the eaves form a downpour with the temperatures today being around 40 F. There are mushy, brown, slush-filled lakes in the middle of every road and sidewalk, and everybody is walking around without gloves and hats. It's pleasant, but will be a lot more pleasant when the slush clears.
On Friday, the male population of the school and some special guest stars celebrated Trifon Zarazen, which is pretty much a fertility ritual with a focus on wine and vineyards. Everybody brought their best homemade wine and rakia, and the rookies in the school's TZ celebration (Including myself. I can't really remember why I didn't take part last year) had to make the lunch. So the new French teacher, art teacher, and a few new security guards spent the morning making a chicken and potatoes lunch for 40 people. It was all fun and right on schedule, and somehow, miraculously, not only did not a single person die of salmonella, but most agreed that it was some of the best chicken they'd ever tasted. Credit goes to everybody, but a lot of it goes to just plain luck since none of us had any real idea about what we were doing.
During the lunch itself, the fertility ritual took on all of its proper forms. There were a few too many dick jokes, a bunch of speeches and explanations of tradition, everybody wearing a grapevine branch, and the initiation, which involved walking between two paddle lines and getting "baptized" with wine. All good times, lots of laughs. And apparently this warmer weather can be chalked up to these ceremonies, so all's good. Glad I could help.
Now it's just a matter of walking through a slushy and soaked city. But that's a tiny hassle when Spring's just around the corner and getting closer.
Posted by Rob at February 13, 2005 06:13 PM