This weekend I'll finally be going to Bulgaria's wine country, Melnik. I've been meaning to go for a while, but it's in the opposite corner of the country. Because of a couple of mountain ranges, that doesn't make it the hardest place to get to in the country, but the psychological factor is still there, and an 11 hour trip is nothing to sneeze at. Even here in the land of buses and trains.
The week behind me was an emotional rollercoaster. The computer came back to life, although I'm still thinking there are some evil forces at work deep in the depths of the hard drive. So, with a working computer and no unlimited internet account, I went off to buy myself a gigabyte of transfer space from the ever-friendly internet people so I could use the internet at home again. I payed my bill, said "have a nice day," received something similar from the person in charge of the office and left. This is important because not once while I was in the office did anyone mention that their server is infected by a monster virus that attacks computers as soon as they're hooked up to the network.
It's awfully nice to have friends in town who have internet, the same problems, and the capability to solve them. The virus is off my computer, but I'm off the network until I get a few necessary Microsoft hotfixes from a buddy tonight. So I'm back at the internet club. Life goes on.
Fascinating event at school today. It's standard for a school to have a representative guy or girl from the graduating class. But the way things are done here is different than anything I've heard of in America.
I've already explained the concept of paralelki, but in case you missed it, a paralelka is a group of about 25 students who stay with each other through pretty much every hour of every day for the five years they go to the language school. They're brought together only in their common deisre to study a given language and six of them make up this year's graduating class. Two study English, two study German, and the other two study French and Spanish.
So today, after having sometime in the last month nominated someone in their paralelka, two students from each group stood and tried to sell their nominee to the entire faculty arranged in the teachers' room. Six five-minute sales pitches and here at the language school, where the city's best come to study, the competition was fierce. Two of the groups used PowerPoint presentations, one had made a shrine to overachievement that filled half a wall, and every group spent most of their five minutes reading off the awards, test scores, and extra-curricular activities their horses had piled up in five years.
One of the candidates had an SAT score of 780 Math/560 Vebal (I nearly threw up in mouth on that one. Just taking the SAT is rare enough in Bulgaria, but to have a score that comes close to the total I had, that's amazing). Another was 10 points off perfect on the TOEFL, and her first foreign language is German. A few had published things in various local and regional newspapers. It was very impressive.
But the strangest thing about it all, and the thing I love most about the whole process, is that it's invariably the second banana that does most of the presenting. While the nominees all wait out in the hall and wring their hands over who will win, the other person from the paralelka who had straight sixes ("A"s) does the work to push them over the top. They read the list of achievements and then give a prepared statement about the great person/friend their nominee is and has been.
Now, I know these paralelki are big families, but there has to be some teeth-grinding going on. The presenter I talked to earlier this week in class was diplomatic but dogmatic, too. In fact, she was looking at the whole thing as her competition, her contest. She was looking to me to give her an edge in the whole thing (I'd seen and voted in last year's competition). Of course, it was all for her nominee, but she knew that her nominee had done the work, it was her job, her game to make that that work look perfect.
Now, maybe I'm just not a good second banana, but I don't think I could ever shove away the idea that it would be better if the candidate was up there promoting my record. Sure, I'd look at the speech bit as my time to shine, and I'd use those five minutes for all they'd be worth, but after they were over, I'm not sure I could go without sulking whenever I was around the nominee for about the next week or so.
Oh well, I'm selfish. Sue me. Expect an upadate on Monday when I'll have little to do in Sofia except visit headquarters and see Episode III before I go into anticipatory spasms over seeing the last part of my favorite collection of movies/mythos/crazy Lucas dream. I'm actually more glad than most die-hard fans that these latest movies took so long in coming and then turned out to be pedestrian. For me, it adds a bit of Hollywood reality to three movies I had always grouped together with Greek mythology and the best of Shakespeare.
If Phantom Menace and Jar Jar had never come, I might well have someday gone to Star Wars conventions and joined a jedi cult while I was living in LA. Well, I was probably never that nutty, but you get the drift. It's sometimes nice to have a bit of the shine taken off of something. It can give you an entirely new perspective on things. While I'm still in a constant drool, knowing that Episode III is playing out there in the rest of the world and I won't have a chance to see it until Monday, I know that going to Melnik and hanging out with great friends would be much better than staking out a place in line somewhere in Sofia, most likely alone. It's all about perspective.
Posted by Rob at May 20, 2005 09:16 PM