Alaskan Bulgarian

Finishing With a Whimper and a "Yippee-Kye-Yay"

My first semester here has petered out to a close. The students have tomorrow off, the grades are all entered, and no one wants to pay any attention. As a result, five or six teachers decided to play hooky today and most of the ones remaining took their kids to a nearby cafe. In two of my classes, all the previous classes of the day had been cancelled, leaving me little choice but to sign the students off, give them a little something to do at home, and wish them a good weekend. I certainly didn't have any tests planned for them or anything.

The hard thing about a system where classes are taken this lightly is identifying whether or not the students respect your classes. I get some comfort when I see a delegation from some class or other outside the teachers' room door before every class. It means they do it to all of their teachers. It's part of the culture here as the students batter away at the teachers until they get an hour off. It's probably the hardest part of my job, not succumbing to the constant requests to skip classes. I've adopted the flattest "no" I've ever had in life, and this is probably a good thing for me to have picked up. The students come to my classes, look bored, but eventually start to learn something, by force if necessary. And I've always thought that was the whole point of this school thing: to get a certain number of students to listen to something and hopefully absorb and retain it. I like to think I'm doing pretty well in the numbers category. The other signs of respect are more qualitative.

For example, a few of the students from my eighth class invited me to Once Upon a Time in Mexico, which has been showing at the movie theater here all week. I appreciated it. It shows they wanted to be able to study English outside of class (and we spoke only in English), that they think I deserve a good time outside of school, and that they can watch really gory movies at a young age here in Bulgaria. I figured it was still probably better than suggesting that we see Boat Trip instead. At least OUTM had some art to it.

It was a halfway decent flick. A strangely relaxing action movie. Despite some eye-gougings, lots of shootings, etc, it all felt very calm and cool. All under control. It meant there was a little boredom in the middle, but there always seems to be in these kinds of movies. After the movie, we covered the gore aspect quickly, and the conversation moved on to the invincibilty myth the movie more than embraces.

It used to be that heroes, if they survived, would come through without a scratch and with perfect hair. It's been that way since Homer. You either got a javelin through the eye, or you slaughtered hundreds of Trojans and returned to a happy wife after killing all of her false suiters. But something changed in the late eighties.

Lethal Weapon and Die Hard both came out in 87-88, and I think both are responsible for pushing the new invincibility trend into the mainstream. Lethal Weapon Americanized Mel Gibson's penchant for nearly crucifying himself at the end of movies and Die Hard started the same thing for Bruce Willis. At the end of both movies Riggs and Mclane are beaten nearly beyond recognition, but left alive and triumphant.

The trend expanded from there and has infected nearly every action movie. James Bond no longer walks away with a girl and an ironed tux. These days he's tortured in the introduction, just to get the martyrdom out of the way. The Terminator, a machine, winds up the most beaten down character in all three of its movies.

[spoilers in the next paragraph]

Once Upon a Time in Mexico leaves Johnny Depp with his eyes gouged out, his legs shot twice and a bullet in his arm. Yet he still manages to kill his two assailants and the chick that turned on him, and stumble out of the city with the aid of a boy helping him out. Nothing in the movie's previous hour and a half led us to believe that Depp was an ironman. It's just expected these days that the hero bleed for the audience. We want our heroes gory and our villains even worse.

Now we also have 50 Cent, a real-life "hero," taking 9 bullets in a single sitting and earning all kinds of street cred for it. I have no doubt it's getting into kids heads. Until you get shot, you never know how many bullets it would take to get you down, and I think it's every guy's fantasy to have a bit of invincibility. I have no idea where this will lead, but it seems to be going somewhere. Heroes are going to wind up looking like Holy Grail's black knight at the end of movies, and villains are going to have to go down with a fatal headbutt from the man they just made a quadrapelegic. I can't wait.

"And Homer fails Another of Life's Little Tests"

A busy weekend has flowed into a week that’s busy in a general kind of way. Lot’s of things to do, all routine, all right in line with the faithful tradition of a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Bulgarian town. Excitement came when I went to the big city, Sofia, for all of five hours Sunday before turning right around and coming back. I was escorting 3 students who wanted to take a national English test and wanted an English-speaking chaperone they could bounce questions off of if needed. I’d been told about it a few days before and just kind of went with the flow.

We wound up traveling by train, leaving at 5:20 PM Saturday and getting in at 6:00 AM Sunday, because last year’s group had been snowed in and failed to get to Sofia by bus. This year, the school’s group was taking no chances, although other students went by bus with their parents. It was an epic trip. We split two cabins: 2 girls and another teacher to one, a boy and I in another, and along the way had a nice conversation with the students translating everything back and forth even when I knew perfectly well what was being said in Bulgarian. Although the other Bulgarian teacher, the boy’s mother, wanted to let the studying go on until bedtime, I remember from my standardized testing days (And they aren’t over) that relaxing was always better than hard study, so when the boy wanted to go read in our cabin, I went with him, broke up the party, and set to finishing 1984, the book I had brought along for the trip.

1984 is one of those books that people have always given me strange looks over when my failure to have read it comes up in conversation. As if it’s some crime against my upbringing and English major heritage that it never hit my reading list. Well, I’ll say it was a superb book, revolutionary for it’s time I’m sure, but I knew each and every thing that would happen pages before they actually came up. The book was revealing itself chapters ahead o where I was. Orwell’s fault? Not at all. Instead it felt like reading a book after seeing the movie, although I haven’t seen any of the movie versions of 1984 either (Heresy!). Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which has always impressed me, should have a “based on” label in the opening credits. It’s a great movie, filmed well, but as far as terrifying visions of a horrifying future go, 1984 and Brazil are brothers, if not twins. I’ll watch Brazil many times over in my life, but I’ll never watch it the same way again, and that’s in all ways a good thing.

Another side effect of 1984 is the new inside joke answer I have to the standard Bulgarian apology for communism. Especially among the elderly here, the common response to any question about politics is that the old times were better because everybody had jobs, and jobs meant security. After this usually follows a long conversation about how individual freedoms can be better than job security, but now I have the short, simple, glib answer: “Winston Smith had a job, and a good one, and look how far that got him.” Seeing as few, if any, Bulgarians I talk with will have any idea what that means, I’m probably going to keep it to myself, but it’ll make me feel better when a baba feels a need to complain about the horrible state democracy has wrought in her country.

Anyway…I didn’t quite finish the book on the train. I was left with about 50 pages, which proved to be a bit of a curse later on in the eight hour bus ride home, but that’d be another digression. We got the kids to the test, they took it, said it was hard but thought they did well, and we got them home. We had some good times, I got to meet a teacher and some students I didn’t know, and I got to pick up some books and candy that had been sent to me and left in Sofia.

One of the books is on the GRE and the other is on the TOEFL. One’s for me and the other is for the school. It’s baffling to understand that I already have to start thinking ahead again. That applications will have to be sent in January and I’ll have to take the GRE sometime in the fall, but that’s the way life goes when you’re still figuring things out. I suppose I was lucky to have these last 9 months of stasis, where I was just trying to figure out Bulgaria and not the rest of my years. Of course, Bulgaria’s still first and the rest of my life is on the backburner, but it hurts to watch that water start to simmer again.

I ended the school day this afternoon by test driving the new TOEFL CD with my students. For the first time, we got to work on the listening part of the test, and never, ever, ever before has a standardized test been so damn funny. The portion consists of tiny snippets of dialogue, all taken from potential scenes at Anywhere University, USA. The dialogue is hacky student angst, but the larger part of the problem is the overuse of the two questions "What does the man/woman mean?" and especially "what does the man/woman imply?"

Actual Example:

Man: I can't believe I still haven't bought a textbook. I guess I've just been so worried about my social life that I haven't had a chance.

Woman: My friend Becky has a spare textbook for your class. I'll give you her phone number and you can give her a call.

Dull, American Narrator: What does the woman imply?

My students and I were chuckling over that one. It kind of ruins the focus. This one was worse.

Woman: All I do when I come home is math. I don't have any time for fun.

Man: Why don't you come upstairs. Haven't you been studying enough?

Narrator: What does the man imply?

Come on! The correct answer was that the woman studies too much. But honestly, is that the first thing that pops into your head when you read that dialogue? It's almost corrupting. My eleventh grade Bulgarians were breaking up on that one. How are you supposed to take a test when you're laughing so hard from the last question? And these are actual questions from past actual tests. So that's what we have to work on in class now. Not detecting double-meanings in standardized test questions. Difficult times ahead.

One of Those Quiz Thingies

I am Pacman. I am an aggressive sort of personality, out to get what I can, when I can. I prefer to avoid confrontation, but sometimes when it's called for, I can be a powerful character. I tend to be afflicted with munchies constantly. What Video Game Character Are You?

This one courtesy of The Ghost. I've never thought of myself as Pac-Man before, but somehow the description hits home, especially the food part. I need food. Lot's of food, and at all hours of the day. And that's just to get by, I'd hate to think about the needs of a Rob who wanted to be chubby for some reason.

Also, The Ghost has been on fire lately. His recent posts and links about the Lord of Rings in particular.

The Vacuum

I just finished re-reading Peter Hessler’s River Town, his book about serving two years as a PCV in China. After a semester of teaching, it was pretty enlightening. A lot of what he had to deal with was breaking through taboos and teaching English with propaganda-laced textbooks. His students would often bow their heads and say nothing if they, or the Party, had been offended. College students, they had a childish glee when the read Shakespeare. Any new information was good information. Reading it, I noticed that many of the things I notice with my students are in the same areas, only the problems are the opposites of what he had to deal with.

In a conversation with a group of teachers a while ago, I heard for the first time the concept of a “values vacuum.” For forty years the values of communism had been so pressed on the teachers, students, and people in Bulgaria that the sudden release of those values 14 years ago left a gaping hole. Now, the teachers all agreed, that gap was being filled by MTV, Cartoon Network, and tiny amounts of discipline from the Ministry of Education.

When the students want to make a good show of it, they’ll all stand up at the beginning of class, their leader giving a sharp “class stand up!” Most of the time, though, the classroom is a bustle of activity when the teacher walks in. Like the sex-ed class John Cleese teaches in Meaning of Life the kids almost seem to get into highly organized disorder so the teacher can have something to do as soon as he or she walks into the room. Without constant attention, a classroom devolves into small groups talking about what they want to do in the afternoon. Sometimes I have to talk to one kid three times in a day, lower his grade, tell him all will be good if he just keeps his mouth shut, and as soon as I turn around he’ll start talking again. I don’t think a lot of these kids can help it, being kids and all, but it’s amazing how the classroom gets when everybody’s quiet. It’s either a loud din or pin-drop silence, with little in-between, and the silences seem more terrifying than the noise because the kids must be up to something.

The results are incredible when the middle-ground is reached or the din overcome, something that happens at least once a day and often for good stretches, When that creative, disruptive energy is actually applied to useful class work, these kids are capable of doing any work they put their mind to. Eighth class is already working on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, an idea I came up with cautiously. And when the first day with it was over, when all the whining about it being hard and impossible was through, they’d gotten it all. Maybe they don’t quite appreciate the immortality aspect of a poem beginning with “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” but they know all the words and understand what Shakespeare was getting at, and by the end of the second day, the prospect of a test on it seemed easy to them. I had to overcome some complaints, but it all came out okay. And it ended a hard, great week really well.

I’d started it all off by finishing a unit on superheroes, trying to get an idea of what the kids admired. Turns out they admire the ideals of the Powerpuff Girls, Batman, and any other superhero they’ve seen in the movies or on TV, but that’s certainly okay. Most of them had their heroes fighting “the crime” or “the evil,” and apart from being a little standard, it provided me with a great chance to go back into what they were covering in the textbook, namely the proper use of articles.

“Do we know what crime the Powerpuff Girls are fighting?”

“No, Mister Young!”

“Then we don’t use ‘the’ right? But what if they’re fighting Mojo Jojo, Polina?”

“Then they’re fighting the crimes of Mojo Jojo?”

“Right. ‘the crimes.’ Very good.”

They’re little sponges, all of them. The problem with that is, I have little control of the things that go out of control in the class. Hessler’s students threw “yahoo” around after they’d read Gulliver’s Travels. In my eighth class students yell “you’re stupid” across the room at another kid, all because of “Dexter’s Laboratory.” I do what I can to reign it in and tell them that calling other people stupid is wrong, no matter how funny it is when Dexter does it to Didi, but it’s stemming a pretty strong tide.

Quiet students under communism, noisy students after. Well, I’ll take the latter, since it doesn’t in any way apologize for Stalin, praise Zhivkov, or substantiate Castro. Whatever MTV and Cartoon Network give the kids, it’s better than propaganda for genocidal and oppressive regimes. And the examples that I can use in class are a lot more fun.

End of the Week Fog Removal

Well, it's Thursday, and with no classes tomorrow and no lesson plans in my head, I suddenly have a hundred tiny (mostly insignificant) things I want to write about. No time to write anything last night, so this will be one of those internet club posts I promised myself I wouldn't write anymore.

First off, the SOTU, which has been bugging me since it was spoken. Bulgaria got a mention in the list of allied nations, its sacrifice appreciated. After that, though, the speech showcased everything I haven't liked in Bush's domestic and foreign policy over the last year. He again fudged on WMD, saying that Iraq had "program activities," whatever those might be. I thought the evidence for war was sound, but the implication that there were bombs under the sand that we would find if we dug them up always bugged me. There might still be nuclear weapons in bunkers somewhere in Iraq, but we might never find them. Bush asked the world to trust him when he thought there were active weapons and programs in Iraq. I think it's time he admitted that that threat wasn't severe in the ways we thought, but the other threats from Saddam (genocide, weakening the UN's authority, etc.) were. Everything else on down the list also jabbed at me: bragging about an improving economy when most aren't feeling it, steroids!? (Which, for some reason, seems to be the highlight of the speech for CNN Int and EuroNews), and the threat to all judges who go against his will on marriage rights when they're trying to figure out laws for their own states, all that got to me. I'm liking uncharismatic Kerry more and more, but would really like Dean if he let some of the air out of himself every once in a while. I've never been a Bush-hater, never will be, but I'm leaning pretty far away from him now.

tri...dve...edno...Reklama! The Lakers! Recommended by 4 out of 5 SoCal Orthopedic students as a way to study for the boards. "Ooh!" as they're crushed by the Suns! "Aww!" As they're pounded by the Grizzlies! Marvel at Gary Payton's humility in playing for the bare minimum with future hall-of-famers Jamal Samson, Kareem Rush, and Slava Medvedenko! Wonder at Phil Jackson's ability to come to games without cyanide tablets in his coat!

I'm going to miss not seeing them win the championship live this season, but some parts of the season are best avoided. And that's all I have to say about that.

And a hearty thanks to Sofia Sideshow for the link and compliment I don't at all deserve. I check out his great writing every day for the Bulgarian west side scoop, and I recommend you all do likewise.

I think that about sums the better stuff up. Oh, Owen's boogers are freezing. There was a Calvin and Hobbes about that once.

Bulgarian Hospitality

There isn’t that much to talk about in a busy week. Several new units are beginning and ending as the end of the semester approaches. Some classes are making it easy, some hard. Life, in short, has gone by as expected so far this week, but Dora, my tutor, has given me a short, decent story for today.

My lessons are on Monday and Wednesday and run from four to six. I arrived yesterday at four and Dora looking tired, yet glad to see me, opened the door and invited me in. Normally, she sets the table, has a kettle of coffee ready, and a plate of cookies on the table, the standard set-up for a Bulgarian na gosti, or gathering of guests. I’ve never asked for any of it, but I certainly don’t mind it at the end of long fays, and she seems more than ready to please. But yesterday, the table wasn’t set, the day’s lesson wasn’t laid out, and it didn’t look like she was expecting anybody. I briefly wondered if I had gotten the time wrong.

I held off asking about it as, within moments, she had already laid out the table and settled in for the lesson. We went through everything she had planned, and I asked if she might start gearing the lessons toward the history of Silistra, something I’ve gotten interested in recently. I noticed, a few times, that she looked a bit ill, as if she had a cold, but I always hate when people ask me if I’m sick so I again held off.

We ended the lesson shortly after six, she had eagerly shown me some old Roman coins she had found in town and seemed more the excited about the possibilities of teaching me the history of Silistra in Bulgarian.

I left satisfied, went to the internet club, and then home. Getting there and emptying my pockets, I realized that I hadn’t turned my cell phone on after finishing the morning’s classes. One of the calls I had missed was from Dora, at noon, to tell me that she wouldn’t be able to do lessons because she had the flu. She had apologized and told me she would see me Wednesday. I’m sure I didn’t miss a thing she said yesterday, and she never mentioned a thing during the lesson about being sick.

I don’t know if it all qualifies as heroism, but I’m duly impressed and will sure let her know about it tomorrow. I’ve never quite seen anything like that in America. Although the customer service in Bulgaria may not always be friendly and courteous, if you’re a friend, you’re taken care of here beyond all reasonable expectations. And something in that appeals to me.

Happy Birthday, Grandma

Today (or what remains of it here in Bulgaria) marks the birthday of one of the Grandmas making up the terrific dynamic duo of grandma-ness back in America. And it turns out that the sentence that should go here is one of those "difficult to put into words" things. So let's go with this: Despite self-deprecating references to being the "bad grandma" or at least not the "good grandma," she has continued to be an incredible and beloved grandma, going beyond good and covering all the necessary grandma bases.

When I was in Alaska, where she understandably couldn't go but for a few well-appreciated trips, she was "distant Grandma," and sent her love through cards and letters that I probably never thanked her for enough.

When I was going to school in LA, she was "friend Grandma." We went to movies together, had dinner on some weekends, and had many great moments whenever we found mutually free time.

And now that I'm in Bulgaria, she has become "inspirational Grandma," recovering from her own troubles and still finding time to lend me infinite support and reading material that my students and I loved.

So, this is my meager present to her from Bulgaria. A few simple words that I can only hope express my love and admiration for the Grandma who, despite apologizing for never being there enough, has always been there and been well-loved for it.

Happy Birthday Grandma

Rob

The Road to the Base

Yesterday was the kind of day I don’t plan on seeing again in a Bulgarian winter. From sunrise on the sky was crystal clear and a few clouds only added to the image. Normally on a January day like that I would expect to lose a finger to frostbite if I went around without gloves. The clearer the sky, the colder the weather and Bulgarians usually prefer a cloudy, snowy day to sunny weather in winter. However, yesterday I woke up in a room that was almost, but not quite, hot. I had left the heater on during the night as I’ve done every night in winter, and it was now working above and beyond the call of duty. I opened my windows to get air and the apartment didn’t get an immediate chill. The day was warm!

Although “warm” may be a stretch, I was able to walk around comfortably in a sweatshirt and coat without the usual scarf, hat, and gloves. Having slept-in, and realizing the day was already wasting away as a result, I quickly ate a breakfast of yogurt and apricot compote and hustled out the door. I’d already made plans to--at some point--walk a road leading out of town which I’d never had the opportunity to travel, and I made the twenty minute walk to the road's main intersection at the south end of town.

At first the road ran along Silistra’s industrial neighborhood. I passed a couple of small textile mills and car parts shops. After the factories, on the left, there was a good-sized field for roses. The field was grassed over for winter and I made a mental note to stop by again in spring or summer. On the right, an immense complex with one building of eight or nine floors and several with three or four rose out of a slowly developing forest. When I arrived within a hundred yards or so, I realized that the complex had never been finished.

The exterior walls were masses of exposed brick that would have been plastered over someday. The hundreds of windows were empty, without panes, and dark. The fence posts around the building had nothing running between them, and there were no signs anywhere. If I had to make a guess, I would say that the complex had been intended as a hospital, it had the general shape, especially at a distance, that I’ve come to associate with them. It was started either in 1989 or the mid-nineties and was stopped by either the fall of communism or Bulgaria’s devastating depression in 1997. I’m going to ask about it the first chance I get.

After the hospital, a forest of conifers began to build on either side of the road. At times, the trees on the left would become straight rows of birches, replanted after clear-cutting long ago. Straight rows of trees are common all over Bulgaria, most of the forests having been chopped down and re-grown. I doubt a single tree in the country is old growth, with the occasional forest fire finishing off the hilltop trees that survived the axes over the centuries. Apparently scared of this very thing, the local government has posted various signs prohibiting campfires. One or two could get the point across, but they're posted about every fifty feet. Some are small with "Fires Prohibited" written in block letters. However, some had dramatic drawings of forests in flames below the words "Don't Start Fires in the Forest." None looked old enough or forgotten enough to be communist, but they probably came from the early nineties.

Along the way, there were small pastures and at an intersection a man tending his cattle asked me for the time. He asked it in a strange way that caught me off guard, instantly giving me away as a foreigner. Interestingly, he looked surprised but understanding when I fumbled at the answer, as if the fact that I wasn't Bulgarian was right on the surface but he hadn't seen it. This probably means that my "hello" passes me off as a local these days. Earlier in the day, I had gotten into a conversation with a factory's security guard where it took him about five questions to get to "Where are you from?" I also took this as some kind of good sign on a day that I wouldn't call one of my better Bulgarian days. It gave me a bit of a hop in my step for the rest of the afternoon.

I noticed the sun beginning to set after I had walked four or five miles out of town. I had reached a good turning point: a lake that streched about a quarter of a mile down the left side of the road. At the south end of the lake, two people were herding sheep along the bottom of a grassy hill and around a small white house at the north end. I had never seen Silistra look so pastoral, and I paused to take a few photos of the tableau, though--because of the setting sun--I decided to move on before the shepherds got to the street.

On the way back home, I passed a road on the right that looked like it might connect to another road leading into town. I followed it until I realized it ended at a farm. Skirting the edge of the farm and walking over grassy fields and through a small orchard I reached the bottom of a 500 foot ridge that made it's way toward town. The ridge rose gently and the surface was the same firm and grassy incline the sheep had walked along earlier. I climbed to the top, got a great view of Silistra, and made my way along the ridge back toward the city center.

When I reached civilization after a mile of pasture, it was in the form of tiny houses connected by muddy roads. The houses all had vegetable gardens in the backyard (the Bulgarian standard) and many looked like the homes of beekeepers. From what I could see, there were no roads down the hill until I reached the city proper and a paved road connected a large cemetary with the industrial zone below. When I finally reached the center of town, it was getting late, so I went straight to the internet club, checked my e-mail and shuttled off the short missive you read yesterday. Although the walk hadn't been strenuous, it had been long (about 10 miles) and I wasn't really in the mood to type this entry on an empty stomach. The walk had been satisfying enough, and I gave myself the excuse of needing to think about it.

I had left home with the vague but impossible goal of reaching the airfield outside of town that has become quite the conversation point recently. There was a post over at Sofia Sideshow about the proposed U.S. base coming to Bulgaria in the near future. My students are absolutely psyched about it because, from what they've heard, it's coming here to Silistra. On Friday, I had dinner with Debbie, the volunteer working at the municipality here, and she told me that about a month ago she, with various important Bulgarians, had escorted a military delegation to the airfield and other relevant sites in Silistra. They, in the end, had decided to recommend Silistra as the site for the upcoming base.

This, of course, has made Silistrans very happy, but that happiness should probably be tempered a little. The recommendation still has to go through God knows how many committees in congress and nothing will be decided for certain until this November at the earliest. Nevertheless, if a base does come here, it will be far enough from town to satisfy Bulgarian NIMBYs, but close enough to make a big difference in the economy. It's one of the few things I could imagine making a huge difference in Silistra, and I'm glad things are looking positive for the moment.

At some point in spring, I'll get up early to take a really long walk down to the proposed base, and see more of what's along the way. I could get a ride with a friend, but the walk is really too nice to pass up. Winter has cut me a lot of slack so far here in Silistra, and I'm trying to take advantage of as many breaks in the cold as I can when spring comes around and things start blooming.

Administrative Guck

I've made a command decision: No more writing long posts here at the internet club. I wind up spending three hours typing a paragraph, looking at a webpage, typing another, and so on. It's a waste of time and money, so from now on everything gets done at home and brought here.

This means there will be more thought-out and longer posts nearly every day, but no post today for reasons that will be explained tomorrow.

Football With the Kids

Call me adaptable, but when somebody mentions the word "football" to me, two sports spring to mind at the same time, and in Bulgaria I naturally assume people are talking about the kind that invloves the feet more than the arms. It has made conversation easier here and when my two eighth grade classes said they were playing a football game against each other, the thought of American football didn't even enter my mind.

The kids had asked me to come watch them after school and I obliged. Of course, as is so often the case with sports in Bulgaria, a few of the kids didn't come so they asked me to play. I'll admit to never really being an expert at the game. I played in a youth league eons ago and have only had the rare casual school or pick-up game since. What's interesting about all this is that I seem to have more natural ability at football than I do in basketball. My height has been my main inspiration in basketball, and I've practiced a lot to best make use of it since I love the sport, but as far as having a natural basketball sense, I don't think I ever did.

But here, after having only played twice--maybe--in the last six years, I was able to play, compete, and actually score a few goals playing against eighth graders. Well there we go right there, huh? They are just kids after all. Well, no. I'll admit I used my size once or twice to get to a header, and over a certain distance I am probably faster than most of them, but these guys have been playing for most of their lives, they all had a few tricks up their sleeves, and none of them looked like a rookie out there. They were all impressed with me as a beginner, and seemed to be putting their all into the games (They weren't giving them away. The class I played with in the beginning got whumped just as badly as they say they normally do.)

So I seem to know what I'm doing when I play football. What does it all mean? Well, it gives me something to play other than basketball, and it gives me some incentive to start up a project Jeff has been working on in Isperih. He's starting a summer youth league in his town and says that everybody's getting excited about it.

I've already mentioned the possibility a few times around Silistra, a much larger town, and have gotten the usual "If that's what you want to do" shoulder shrug I've gotten when I suggest a project here. And I'd be okay with that shrug if there were a flood of ideas behind it, but no one, and I repeat--no one--has come to me with an idea an Silistra. No one has said, "Say Mr. Young. I hear you're the type of fellow that could bring a bit of money into this town if you wanted to, how about..." All project ideas have come out of me, and they get met with the shrug.

Part of this is probably because I work with the wrong people for project ideas. Jeff, a teacher in a smaller town, lives his life with everybody, working out with the police chief, for example. In Silistra I've met everybody I've needed to meet, right on up to the governor of the region, but I rarely so much as run into them walking down the street. I spend a lot of time with the teachers in my school, their spouses, and our director. They love the school (sort of), but as far as community projects go, most of them just don't seem to have the time. And I understand that, so i've decided to go younger.

If a youth football is going to work here, I think the kids are the ones who have to get the ball rolling on it, starting the rumors. I mentioned it to the eighth graders, they liked the idea, and I hope they'll bring it home to their parents. I think the kids here need something to do in the summer, and this still sounds like a pretty good idea.

Not Much, But Here I Am Anyway

Well, there was a lot to do at the internet club today, so I'm taking it kind of slow here. There are a few new photos down in the Greek stories if you want to take a look at those. Might be fun, and there are captions to, if you're just dying to read something. Otherwise, I'll be back tomorrow. Tootles.

The Life of a Student

I should probably save this for a time when I have a couple of hours to sit at home and think about it, but it's an immediate subject with immediate images. Also, this site has never been about dissertations, but jotted-down musings--however serious they may be--from Bulgarian internet clubs. So here we go.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a student of mine, let's call him Roderick. Rod, a twelfth grader, came up to me after school while I was watching the language school students engage in an epic snowball fight with the students from the school down the street. Rod enjoys Newsweeks and I give him the new ones I get every week and he returns them the next. He's always a bit nervous when he speaks in English and tends to shift from one foot to another when he speaks. Outside of that, it's hard to see a lot of emotion in him. He's very level-headed and has his English down very well. After we talked about the magazine I'd given him last week, I asked him how he was doing, in general.

"Pretty good. But I'm feeling bad because one of my...schoolmates...was beaten up and is in the hospital."

"Oh?" He had said all that as if it happened every day. "What happened?"

"Well. Three guys came up to him with weapons, like bars and baseball bats and they hit him. After they hit him, he fell and they didn't let him get back up."

He paused.

"He was lucky...A police car drove by and stopped them. They were all arrested for 72 hours. It was very bad. His head was sewed six or seven times, he had broken ribs and other broken bones."

"That's terrible," I said when he paused again. "Is he anyone I know?"

"Oh yes!" Roderick suddenly got a little excited when he mentioned the boy's name. Let's call him Devin. Roderick probably should have called Devin a "classmate" since they are in the same class, one I teach for two hours every week, but I didn't correct him. Devin is a great student, shy, but he was one of the two guys who took me around town in the failed attempt to get internet cable installed in my apartment last week. He lives near me, although I've never visited his family's apartment. I know him as well as I know any of my students and he's not the kind of guy who gets involved in brawls. So I was shocked to hear his name come up.

"Devin?" A thousand questions popped into my head all of a sudden. "Why?" Rod didn't know, of course. "Is he going to be okay?" The class had visited him in the hospital and he would probably be discharged today. He'd probably be at home for two weeks. Maybe more. "Are they charging the guys who did it? Are they going to be punished?"

"Well," Roderick shifted his weight a couple of times before he went on. "The justice in Bulgaria is different. The courts take a long time, and, probably, the guys who did it will just walk away."

Sigh.

We stood there watching the snowballs fly back and forth across the school's fence, and then I realized I was late for my TOEFL class. I told Roderick I'd see him on Thursday and hustled off.

I should note that this is the first time something like this has happened to one of my students, that I have no idea who the assailants were, and that I still really know nothing about what happened. It all went down long after the school day ended and I don't think it mattered, in particular, that Devin was a student. But it reminded me that these students live lives outside of school and that those lives come complete with tragedies and problems unrelated to next week's exam. I'd almost forgotten about that here in Bulgaria.

Some of this came out in a conversation with my tutor today. I had gotten through the prepared lesson pretty quickly, so the last half of class was conversation. The first question she asked was about the differences between American and Bulgarian students, a question I've had to answer several times. The answer changes a little every time.

The part that stays the same is my assertion that Bulgarian students study more outside of class and less in class than American students. The lessons of this week have helped me understand why. I'm beginning to understand more of what the students talk about when they jabber away to each other in Bulgarian when they should be speaking in English. It usually has nothing to do with school.

Now, I'll grant that one of the things I remember teachers saying most in high school was "Please, kids, don't talk about what you're going to do this weekend," but I remember that happening most often on Friday afternoons, when students the world over care nothing for class. And I also think that if some big event occured, like a student being hospitalized, there would be a buzz during classes.

Maybe I'm thinking too much from the perspective of a good student, but I remember "life," as it is, happening more during lunch than in the classrooms. At the very least, lunch gave students a chance to have a life in school that could be separated from their schoolwork. There were the cool tables and the empty tables in the cafeteria; There were the kids who drove to McDonalds and the kids, like me, who did the brown bag lunch in the hallway or library; There was, in the lunch hour, the social rites that everybody remembers, for better or for worse.

Here in Bulgaria, with only a "big break" that lasts twenty minutes, life happens mostly in the classrooms. Students tell me as much. It's not as if the dynamics never change in the classroom in American schools, but they seem far more fluid in Bulgarian classrooms. Instead of using free time in class to do the next day's homework, as I would imagine most of the students in my school would do in America, they SMS across the school with their cell phones, talk about what happened at the disco last night, and generally make me feel guilty about giving them freedom to do whatever work they needed to do. All of the homework gets done at home, and the students come in telling me about how overworked they are and how they have no time to hang out with their friends after class.

I'm not sure if that makes American schools better, worse, or just different. The jury's still out and probably will be for a long time. I note the differences and talk about them with other teachers and the students, but I try hard to reserve judgement on the basis that I'll be a newcomer here until the day I leave. Two years is enough time to get to know a place, to see where it might need help, and to bring in the help needed, but it's not enough time to decide whether a culture's practices are inferior and ought to be changed at the root. It's enough, I think, to show the people here that other ways of doing things exist and to maybe pick up a few things that might be useful for Americans.

Any of this change the fact that Devin was beat senseless? Of course not, and there's nothing I can do about the possibility of his assailants escaping justice. But tomorrow, I'll go into the class a little more wary of the lives behind the students and lay off if they seem a little more distant and unfocused than usual. Life can be hard for these kids, and they're going to have to talk about it, no matter how much I try to teach them grammar at the same time.

Deal Breakers and Keepers

This may mean a change. My usual internet club, the one where I have an account and have come nearly every day over the past six months, has suddenly picked up a highly aggressive pop-up stopper. Although this should be a benefit, they have given us no way of shutting it off. I can still open new browsers on my own, so at the moment, the only thing I can't work around is uploading files, where I can't get an address to type into a new window. I try asking the computer nicely by right-clicking and manually opening a link in a new window, but that doesn't help. The guy working this shift says that the pop-up stopper is only on four computers, but it has been on the last two I've used.

So, does anybody have a way around this? Is there some "Open in same window" option I've never paid attention to? Little help.

Fortunately, I came to the internet club a little more relaxed today. The students, after a little pre-class prodding and threatening, seemed to understand that I really was pissed yesterday and that there is something they can do about it: stay quiet when I'm speaking. Not to say it was one of those eerie, silent days. Frankly, those just creep me out now. If no one in the room is talking, and they're all just staring at me, they're up to something. If one or two of the 26 are whispering, working on math, whatever, then that makes me feel a bit more comfortable, and that's the way it was today.

I set a deal with both eighth classes that if they don't shape up by the end of the month (conveniently the end of the term) that I'd start grading them every day on whether they could keep their mouths shut. I told them that this would be a pain for me and a pain for them, but I'd have to do it. They quieted down a little for the day and we finished everything I wanted to finish.

I wrapped up the day by helping three or four of the brighter eleventh graders prep for the TOAFL, the Test Of American As a Foreign Language. At least that's how I see the TOEFL these days. These kids who, for their entire educational careers have had to learn British English have a hard time getting over some of the idioms, words, and sentence structure changes. It's been a hard shift for me going in the other direction. Example: Dustman. What do they do? They collect garbage in England and put into their dustcarts, or garbage trucks. Absolutely fascinating. Also, the British--in their textbooks, anyway--seem to think that Americans call our chemists "druggists." As the son of a pharmacist, I can say that in 22 years of life, I have never heard him called a druggist. I swear, you go into this thing thinking it's all just elevator/lift and fries/chips, then you wind up learning that "you've got" to learn a whole new language and cultural structure "at the weekends." It's nice teaching the TOEFL and seeing the good ol' phrases once again.

Plus, the kids are smart as whips, they are. The three or four that come really do want to take the TOEFL and really do know their stuff. We always seem to have a problem of the day, but those are fun because they're so easy to pinpoint and overcome. Today it was causative verbs. Twice they all tripped over questions with them. It's hard explaining that "General Grant had General Lee meet him" is correct when they think that "General Grant had General Lee to meet him" sounds better. I had to look up the rule, point out that infinitives can't be used with certain causatives, and tell them that it sounds better to boot. It's challenging because the extent of my troubleshooting in normal classes is to say "it sounds better" and look up the rule with the student after class. In TOEFL prep, these guys expect on-the-spot justification, and "it sounds better" doesn't cover it for them. Makes it fun for me, because I get to remember this nitpicky stuff for the next time it comes up.

They're getting better, and I'm sure everyone in the class will kick the thing's rear when the take it. They get increasingly confident every week. It's great fun to watch, and it always beats off the day's earlier demons nicely.

A Book Analysis Interspersed With Random Complaints

A 500 page book is the perfect thing to read over a vacation, but it's a pain when a person is trying to work around it. Why? Because of that 200 page stretch. The last climactic story arc inevitably begins around page 300, and those last 200 pages can never be gotten through in one sitting while there's a job to be done.

Richard Russo's Empire Falls fits this life-altering formula perfectly well. A year and a half ago, I had put the book down, citing the fact that it felt like a 500 page short story that was going nowhere. For some reason, I had made this decision on about page 50. Giving it another go here, I found I was very, very wrong. The book is incredible. Although it has a delightful pre-9/11 cynicism that almost feels comforting when it should feel terrifying, Russo gets his characters down better than I thought an author could. Even the characters he seems to hate he writes lovingly.

At any rate, the story begins to build its head of steam around page 300, where I arrived mid-afternoon yesterday with a stack of papers to grade. This morning, before I left for school, the last chapter I had time for ended with the vision of one of the main characters fading to black around page 450.

I went to school, babysat (err. . .taught) a bunch of kids who still seem to think they're on vacation, and walked home with a group of the better, more quiet eighth graders. They always seem apologetic, for some reason, as if the constant talking and occasional trans-room paper airplane flights coming out of the other students are their fault.

Talking to one of them after the others had cut off down another street for home, I asked what he thought the problem might be. He was pretty blunt, as far as these students go.

"You teach different than the other teachers."

"How do I teach differently?" I asked.

"I don't know. You're better."

Ahh, student-speak. "I don't punish you as much, or..."

"The other teachers are more...." He was looking in every corner of his head, but couldn't find the word

"Strict?"

"Yes! Strict. If a student is noisy, they give them a two for the day."

And there's my problem, I suppose. In a language class it seems counter-intuitive to me to punish students in the gradebook for speaking. I do it a little, under the participation grade, but I don't think many of the students have felt that punch. Maybe I need to swing a little harder.

The way I see it, any English teacher in Bulgaria could sit and have his or her students write an essay every day, and writing is mostly what the eighth graders do in their other 18 hours of weekly English outside of my four. I'm here, I've always figured, to give these kids conversation for a simple four hours a week. They have increasingly come to misunderstand that this relaxed, conversational atmosphere can include bouts of Bulgarian. I'm happy that I only have to force maybe two students to speak in anything but Bulgarian, but the others are just as inclined to use it when they aren't talking to me.

I'll admit that language classes were never the time I paid copious amounts of attention, and that's probably the reason I remember little of my French and nearly nothing of my Spanish. Like many of my students, I found language classes a great time to do Math, Biology, or whatever subject I had a test in that day. The problem is, until I went in for the Peace Corps, foreign languages had always seemed a bit useless to me. Call it nationalistic if you want, but Americans have a pretty narrow worldview until they go exploring, I've found.

I've always believed that Bulgarians, in contrast, should have a natural and overwhelming urge to learn a language that could serve them in just about any country they wanted to visit. This isn't always the case.

When I offer examples of how English could be useful to them, I sometimes get the looks of oppressed colonials, as if "The Matrix" could have been produced by a Bulgarian production company, it's just that those theiving Wachowski brothers stole the idea out from under them. This may be a bit extreme, but the point is that they often don't see understanding the English present in every movie they watch, in every TV show they relax to, and on every food package they chow on as a reward for work in class. Subtitles seem to suit them just fine and knowing how to say "May I go to the toilet?," "What does this mean, mister?," and any number of objectionable phrases they've picked up will get them by in international business.

I'm probably going too far here. Deep down, they all want to learn English. That's why they've passed difficult tests to get into a language school. But it just ticks me off every time I ask one of them to speak in English and I get "Zashto?" as a response. I want to yell at them that being ignorant is not something to aspire to, that being the incompetent class clown in high school will get you exactly nowhere when you graduate. But before all that comes out I realize that I would sound like any incompetent principal in any 80s John Hughes movie. After closing my eyes and breathing deeply, I give them a sensible answer, they go on to speak in English, and the class moves on.

Successful? Yes. But it happens every day, and it gets a bit tiring.

I'll give them until the end of the semester, less than a month, to shape up or I'm going to have to make some disciplinary changes. There will be no avoiding it.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the book. After I got home, I managed to get through thirty pages between a late lunch and my Bulgarian lessons. This was enough to get me over the climactic hump and into the resolution phase, which explains why I could comfortably vent here without rushing back home to finish the book off.

After I had finished my Bulgarian lesson, my tutor offered me another bottle of wine, the third in the last month. Her father does well on a small farm outside the city and she seems more than happy to give me leftovers. It started with apples and apricots, and then, somehow, a bottle of homemade wine got thrown into the mix. I took it with me on the trip to Greece and spread the wealth accordingly. Since my return, she's given me two more bottles of homemade wine from the farm. I'm not sure when, exactly, she thinks I'm drinking all this wine on my own, but maybe its because I usually spend about 5 minutes of every lesson talking about my classes that she thinks I need a little help getting through the evenings. Honestly, I only talk about my students with her so I can shift the vocabulary she teaches away from war, peasants, and forests to something a little more topical.

I've always been pretty good at turning things down, but I get the idea that she would be insulted if I rejected another bottle of wine in the next, say, month. Also, when she throws food in with the deal, it's awfully hard to line-item veto a gift. All I can do is thank her politely, tell her I'll see her next time, and head out the door with whatever's in the bag she presses into my hand.

...

You know, looking back on what I've just wrote, if the problems in the rest of my life are no worse than the ones I've written about here, I'll have no problems. Sometimes, I guess, when a person is tired and has a bit of a headache, he just has to complain about amazingly intelligent but noisy students and tutors that offer too much wine.

I'll easily finish off "Empire Falls" tonight, move on to "The Corrections" tomorrow and the whole crazy book cycle will start over. I probably won't write about it anymore, and the likes of this random, bitchy, whiny post will never cross your computer screen again. Forgive me a day's venting.

The End of It

Well, today marked the end of a long week for the students, who were making up for a day the country decided to add to Christmas break. It mean that most of the students weren't willing to listen to a word I had to say, no matter how many times I asked. But my brilliant TOEFL students still came, bright and willing to learn more about the test they've decided their lives depend on.

So I hacked my way through all that and arrived here with the last part of the Greece report, I managed to get the pictures for it uploaded too, but the server here doesn't seem to want me to do it for the other two parts. We'll see how it feels Monday.

It's been a long week, and I think I'll take a break by re-watching the third Matrix movie that's showing tonight. We'll see how it plays with bad sound. I'm sure it'll still be partially entertaining, but a little dull. Just like last time. Oh well, it's only a lev fifty. Can't have a problem with that now, can we?

I'm taking an internet club free day tomorrow. Come back Monday and I'll have something nice for ya. Mmmkay?

'Twas the Season in Athens

We spent five days or so in Athens and came to one conclusion: during the off season the entire city either goes to the Acropolis or Ermou Boulevard. The Acropolis, of course, is the old city at the top of the hill that includes the Parthenon. It’s understandable that people would go there seeing as it’s the one reason most people go to Greece. Ermou is where people go once they realize that the Acropolis doesn’t quite fill the time of an entire vacation and as long as the Archaeological Museum is closed, why not go shopping instead?

It’s a long, mostly pedestrian, boulevard that stretches from Syntagma Square to Monasteraki. From the giant Christmas tree that marks the entrance to the richest part of the city to the flea market at the foot of the hill with all the old stuff. Other than the days that were, without a doubt, holidays, each and every afternoon saw the whole of this street packed wall to wall. People were trying to make there way around chestnut stands and Greeks dressed as Native Americans in order to get to the Body Shop, the Marks and Spencer, or whatever store they needed to get to so that they could substantiate their trip to a foreign country.

It was like being on 3rd Street in Santa Monica. Everyone spoke in a foreign accent, people were yelling at you to look at their paintings, and you always needed to get somewhere when it was most crowded. Mimes did their mimey thing, women painted themselves in gold and dressed in period costume from Victorian England, then writhed strangely on top of buckets. Oh, and the human statues. One can’t forget the human statues and the hordes of people that gathered around to take pictures of the people who, mysteriously, don’t move.

There’s nothing like Ermou in Bulgaria. I had forgotten places like it existed and it was a bit strange coming upon it in Greece in the middle of winter. When we first walked along it on Christmas Day, it was deserted but for a few tourists like ourselves. We had eaten at a small diner, the only place open for breakfast, and were thinking about how deserted the city was at that time of year. Little did we know that the next day the mob would come to the street and not leave until New Year’s Day, when everything closed again.

A lot was closed, it turned out, in preparation for the Olympics. And I can say, that as of this moment, if Athens wanted to hold the Olympics next month, it couldn’t. Couldn’t come close, even. The stadium still more closely resembles a hole in the ground than a place for hundreds of thousands of fans. The metro, though completed in sections, drives right by the still uncompleted stations necessary for certain events, like the Opening Ceremony, for instance. And although I’m going to bet public transportation will improve dramatically a month before the games, if the streets were as packed as they were during the off season, I wouldn’t want to step foot anywhere near the city center when it’s over 100 degrees, packed with a few million odd extra people, and everyone is trying to see the Parthenon, the museum, and the Equestrian Competition in the same day.

In my first months here in Bulgaria, I thought it would almost be a waste to not see the Olympics when I was this close. Now I’m happy to have gotten my “Athens 2004” sweatshirt and gotten out of there. Athenians are going to have the craziest summer since Socrates started dating the fun chick. And no, I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

Museums. They were fun. Well, the two we saw were pretty cool, anyway. I hadn’t expected more out of the Acropolis Museum than a gift shop, but the statues there were impressive. The paint that still remained on some of the statues after thousands of years of abuse baffled and surprised me. I’d always read in my literary analysis and German aesthetics courses (Quit laughing! All of you!) that the idea of paint or detail on the pure white marble statues was a bit shocking to classicists. Ruskin, it has been said, was so surprised at the idea of pubic hair on a real woman that he fled his wedding room. I didn’t quite flip when I saw traces of what looked like mascara on Hercules and other heroes, but it sets you back a bit when you realize that the Greeks weren’t all that gloriously simple.

More surprising still was the National Art Gallery. Greeks, it seems, can paint, and they did it pretty damn well in the 19th century. The most impressive imagery came out of the paintings of the war with the Turks. The Greeks have established something approaching a new mythology about that war, and battles were drawn in nothing but the most heroic way. One ship against a full harbor of Turkish ships, a man and a woman crouching behind a rock and ready to take action, the requisite freedom conference with men swearing freedom or death.

Contrasting all this with Bulgaria’s own war for freedom would take more time and space than I want to devote to this. But, put simply, it was fascinating to look at the Greeks’ interpretation of their triumph through action and counter it with the Bulgarians’ triumph through a tragedy few nations have ever faced. The Greeks’ images of victorious men looking off into the middle distance, the classic hero pose, opposite the Bulgarians’ image of Levski, Botev, and the population of Batak. Proud men and women martyred for a great cause. Both nations have had to struggle with their own demons since their occupations, and the more vicious hold the Turks had on Bulgaria has altered this country’s present more than even most Bulgarians realize. They’ll point to the 500 years of the “Turkish yoke” as reason to keep the Turks in their own villages and quarters, but I think it’s rarely understood how that very discrimination is evidence that the Turks still get at them, still hold those 500 years over them.

But I told myself I wouldn’t get into all that. Anyway, if you want my opinion, and if you’re reading this I imagine you do, I would visit the Art Gallery in Athens. Make it a priority. As much as the Archaeological Museum will help you understand ancient Greece, the Art Gallery will give you an understanding of modern Greece. It really completed the trip when we visited it on our day-long layover on the way back.

The rest of the time in Athens was spent walking, mostly, and it’s a fine city for it. The only hills are in Kolonaki, really, and those are relatively easy hikes, with nice views. It’s also, incidentally, a great place to catch a movie. While Kate and Ryan shopped, Jeff and I watched “Return of the King” and “The Human Stain,” and never have two movies contrasted so wildly.

“Return of the King” was shown in one of the nicer theaters ever, and is just as exciting as the gushing critics promise. Many people and orcs die in many fun ways, and Legolas, the elf, does something absolutely incredible to a giant elephant and its crew. It’s tremendous entertainment, and probably wins best picture in my Bulgaria-limited book, but the usual length and book-related criticisms apply. Why in all hell does Aragorn go for the dull, wishy-washy Arwen when he has the bellicose yet kind, and gorgeous Eowyn willing to die for him? The book doesn’t explain it and the movie didn’t really help. Before I saw it, I thought “Finding Nemo” had kept me the most entertained and satisfied, but the poor genii at Pixar, who may never win a major award for their ridiculously consistent greatness, are now only second for the year.

“The Human Stain” was best summarized by our immediate reaction to it. We both walked out of the theater and moved silently for maybe a block. Then I said “Not a whole lot of point to that movie, was there?” and Jeff replied quickly “That movie sucked!”

I wouldn’t go that far. Neither of us have read the book, and I think the movie was hampered by too many people who had. It was like a collection of the best scenes from a book, all tied together, and mostly rendered meaningless by a failure to string together character development along with the rest. Characters seem to drop dead at random in the movie and for the sole purpose of having a death for the remaining characters to emotionally toy with. I believe, and I could be wrong, that seven individual deaths are dealt with in the movie at some point or another, and by the second heart attack you begin to wonder when the carnage will end. Gary Sinise, who gets far less screen time than he needs to develop his character, seems to have the right expression at the end of the movie. Maybe I was just projecting, but it seemed to desperately ask if it was all finally over.

We also get a voiceover from Sinise that’s out of place until the very end of the movie when it’s revealed why his character has some kind of right to do a narration in the first place. And his poor character never gets a chance to come out of his shell, as the movie clearly intends him to. Anthony Hopkins’ role has been pissed on enough without me doing it here. And if I ever meet a suicidal janitoress/milkmaid that looks like Nicole Kidman does in this movie, I’ll have seen all I need to in life. She looks like a superstar playing a milkmaid, and was almost (almost) as unconvincing as Denise Richards playing a nuclear scientist. Or Nicole Kidman playing a brain surgeon, for that matter. The only character that really got the job done was the young version of Hopkins’ character. He had enough scenes on his own to let the character grow, and the part was also acted incredibly well.

We saw “The Human Stain” the night before we left for Crete, and I can’t say it changed the trip for better or worse. It was just one of those movies that happened. You go in, watch it, pass two hours or so, and think about how it might have been okay if you’d passed those two hours three years down the line when HBO would show the movie 5 times a day. That kind of movie.

We had spent about three hours or so walking around, trying to find the theater for the movie, and the next day we left Athens exhausted from almost a week spent walking. Really the only way to spend a vacation though. If you walk, you rarely miss a thing.

Stuck Again

Well, once again I've managed to find a computer in the internet club that won't let me upload photos. All of the other computers are in use at the moment so I guess we'll all just have to wait for tomorrow.

There's a new Greece entry, though. Tomorrow I'll cover Athens at Christmas time and that'll be it. It's been fun going over it all in my head, and I've left out some good stuff, but that's what the imagination is for.

One last thing: thanks to a discovery by good ol' Dad, I've discovered that if you mistype "blogspot" as "blogpsot" in any given blogger address, you'll find a site selling bibles and "spiritual warfare." Example: alaskanbulgarian.blogpsot.com. What prompted the people at Aaron's Bible to exploit people mistyping "blogpsot?" The world may never know.

Why Cretans Aren't All That Bad

The biggest surprise from Crete was the presence of snow capped mountains in the middle of the island during winter. We could see the mountains from both Iraklion and Hania and, especially in Hania, seeing snowy mountains from the coast reminded me a little of home.

The other surprise was that most tourists, when they arrive on Crete, go through Iraklion. Maybe the town springs to life in the summer, when all of the hostels and hotels open for the droves wanting to see Knossos, but during the off season the only life we saw was a thousands-strong flock of birds passing between two or three trees one early morning in the center of town. We stayed at a nice hotel that, like all hotels on Crete, had triples available. The fact that three people could easily get around the island in the off season made the trip easier and impressed us quite a bit.

Knossos, however, did not. The whole thing smacked of a Disneyland attraction. Most that is left is fake, rebuilt by Arthur Evans, the man who discovered it. The frescoes are all in the Iraklion museum and the only thing the palace offers these days seems to be a really nice view of the surrounding farmland. This all hit me pretty hard, or at least as hard as old, irrelevant things can hit a person. I’ve spent my life enjoying Greek mythology. I could probably place the point where Icarus fell into the Sea of Crete trying to escape Knossos. I can see the entire labyrinth where Theseus stalked the Minotaur and finished it off. I’ve grown up with an image of Knossos. It may not be anything like the real thing was, and it probably isn’t close. But I didn’t need Evans’ half-assed interpretation of the whole thing to guide me along the way. I hope it helps some tourists enjoy the place a little more, because it certainly didn’t do me any good.

Kate had come dying to see the bull-leaping fresco which wasn’t there, I had come wanting to see the place where a great palace in my imagination had once stood, and Jeff had just come not wanting to be bored. We left after two or three hours (after eating lunch) saying goodbye to Knossos and laughing about all of our “fond memories.” Like the time we went down those stairs, remember? Or the time I had to duck under a doorway? Wow, that was fun.

That night, instead of going to what appeared to be Iraklion’s one club, we hung out at the hotel and made fun of poems in the “New Yorker”s Jeff had brought. Then we made fun of how pretentious we were. The next morning we got out of Iraklion as soon as we were ready to leave.

We had wanted to go from Crete to Santorini, in order to see as much of the good stuff as possible. What we learned on Crete, however, was that nothing in the off season went from Crete to the surrounding islands. Not having time to go all the way back to Athens and down to Santorini, we decided to go west to Xania instead, with the vague hope that it would be a better port city than Iraklion.

Coming into the bus station, I was less than optimistic. The town on the drive in had looked just like the city we had left, and the surrounding buildings didn’t look very quaint or beautiful. But we bucked up, grabbed our gear, and made our way to the harbor, where the trusty guide book told us we might find some open hotels. When we got to the shore, we were ecstatic.

More than a harbor, it seemed to be a reflecting pool. Ships came in between the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater and a Venetian fort on the edge of the city, but they quickly turned to the left and docked behind a row of beautifully crumbly Venetian buildings and an old mosque that we all thought looked like something out of the first Star Wars movie. The rest of the harbor, the water near the mostly empty cafes and hotels, was less than four feet deep and never saw more than a single boat in our two nights in the city. Every building along this calm pool had a café in front and a hotel behind.

Where every other door in Iraklion had been a car rental agency or travel office, ways to get out of town, every other door in Hania was a hotel and, in the off season, they seemed to be looking for customers. The first place we stopped in at had triples for 60 Euro, which we suspected was a bit high. Nevertheless, I went in to ask about the rooms.

“Sure, we have rooms,” The manager said, tense. “Where are you from? What are you doing here?”

“We’re Americans,” I replied. Kate and Jeff had stayed outside with the bags. “We’re here in Greece for the holidays.”

“You aren’t a sailor then? None of you are sailors?”

“No.” I paused. “No, none of us are sailors.”

“Fine. There’s a room for you if you aren’t sailors.”

I told this story to Kate and Jeff and we walked on to the next hotel, confused. Jeff came out of the next place with an offer for a triple the first night for fifty Euro and two rooms the next for seventy. He had already accepted based on his happiness with the first night’s room, but we all decided we’d look around more the next morning.

The room Jeff had found rivaled any hotel room I’d ever seen in pure originality. It had a small whirlpool installed between the door to the room and the bathroom, and a large queen-size, curtained bed dominated one end of the room with two twin beds on the other side. The room had a great view of the harbor from a small balcony, and many small photos from times in Hania long passed.

The bathtub in the middle of the room had been the selling-point for Jeff, and he used it—in swimming trunks and reading a New Yorker—while Kate and I were both in the room. It reminded me of the captain on a certain ship in one of the Hitchhiker’s books, but that only added to the room’s, um, character.

The next day, Jeff and I walked two doors down looking for a better room for New Year’s Eve. We walked up to a hotel on a small street with a strange sign on the door:

Rooms available:
1 – 35 Euro
3 – 35 Euro
7 – 30 Euro
Keys in the doors

Intrigued by the prices, we went in. A small table sat in the lobby with a basket of cards, a basket of fruit, and a taped-down note that read: “No receptionist? No problem. Fill out a card, leave it on the desk and take an envelope.” The envelopes sat in a neat pile next to the basket of cards and had simple information for payment. If we couldn’t find a receptionist, we would only have to slide the full envelope under the door marked “private” on the second floor.

We went up to the rooms and found a housekeeper who, although she spoke little English, showed us the three available rooms. They were neat, almost sterile. They all had great views of the harbor, and room 1 had a curtained double bed below a small loft that had two twins. Already sold, we went upstairs to see if there was something up there that might possibly fulfill our expectations that this hotel was too good to be true.

On the floor above, there was a terrace with three tables and a small in-door kitchen. Inside the kitchen were drinks, cookies, and place settings with the simple, taped-down rule that all that was there was ours to use, with the requirement that we keep it neat and tidy.

While we rushed back to pay off the last hotel and drag Kate and our bags to the new one as soon as possible, it struck me that this new hotel had almost taken on fairy tale proportions, as if the owners were trying to make us content and chubby in order to do something to us. That never happened.

Instead, we had the most relaxing, peaceful, value-filled stay I’ve ever had in a hotel. Kate made it known every ten minutes or so that she wanted to live there. In the afternoon we sat on the terrace and Jeff and I played chess while Kate contented herself with making tea and delivering cookies while enjoying the view of the city and surrounding mountains from the terrace. From the same terrace later that night we watched some early fireworks with a French family and the owner of the hotel, who seemed kind, but just as skittish as his usual absences and proliferation of notes would indicate.

After a couple of drinks and olives given to us by the French family, we went down to the city to grab some dinner. After walking all the way into town and back out, we decided that the only place open for dinner on New Year’s Eve at nine o’clock was the Chinese restaurant we had avoided the night before. We could get mediocre Chinese in Bulgaria, we had figured. The restaurant gave us a great dinner, though. It was full of Americans, Frenchmen, and Germans, also surprised that Greeks don’t go out for dinner on New Year’s Eve. We shared everything, in that great Chinese restaurant tradition, and split the bill in three down the middle.

Just before midnight, we hurried to the center of town where, in front of a building that looked just like the courthouse from Back to the Future, most of the city had gathered to set off fireworks, apparently believing that the island’s most beautiful harbor was not the place to do that kind of thing. In the middle of the crowd was a large, smoke-filled center where kids set off sparklers and adults launched the rockets. Never has a celebration seemed so close to my image of war. We stood at a good distance and watched several sparks and flames singe the people in the inner circle.

After the show of Crete’s military capabilities, we went back to the harbor and visited some clubs where we ran into, literally, boatloads of American sailors. There’s a base near Hania, and they come in to celebrate the holidays whenever they get the chance. They seemed pretty well-behaved, or—to put it another way—I didn’t see any reason for that hotel owner to give us a grilling about our motives for being in town. But sailors, I imagine, will be sailors.

New Years Day, we slept in, left our envelope with a receptionist, and put our bags in a small loft on the first floor since our boat would not leave for Athens until that night. We hadn’t sat in a café for five minutes, however, when the rain began to fall. We spent the day hustling from one cup of coffee to another, grabbing lunch along the way. Towards the evening, the weather settled and we walked around town before catching our ferry.

Although the ferry stunk of the problems of rough seas, the entire trip to Crete was certainly something to remember. We never would have visited Hania without a certain sense of adventure and the closing of the route to Santorini. We all left glad we’d taken the chance.

The Elderly and Other Strange Things

Owen, over at LL, had quite an adventure. Not that he's elderly or anything, but what happened to him was certainly disturbing, and I'm certainly glad he made it out of his scrape with just a welt. Eastern Europe can be hazardous at times. Knock on wood, nothing has happened to me in Bulgaria. But that certainly doesn't mean it couldn't.

Things have happened to a couple of volunteers; It's mostly pickpocketings, but a couple of assaults have been thrown in, too, unfotunately. However, if you think about it statistically, we're just as--or as near as--safe here as we are in the U.S. Granted, we spend most of our time in our sites with the community we know. A person is usually pretty safe among friends. It's when volunteers go to the big cities that bad things usually happen, so I suppose Owen in St. Pete's can expect the occasional hard time.

And it's not just the "It Takes a Village" mentality that protects us. The Peace Corps does every conceivable thing to keep us safe. We have a giant vault door and guards at headquarters, we've had hundreds of checklists to make sure our cities are American-proof, and we've had about 20 hours or so in lectures on safety. Most of the lectures have dully boiled down to common sense, but none of us are freely handing over cell phones to drunkards (sorry Owen, I had to), so I figure it did some good.

One of the things they told us in the lectures was to get to know our neighbors. I haven't been going to nightly parties, but my neighbors knew my name and I knew theirs. There was a thud in my stomach, then, when I learned that Rada, my downstairs neighbor, had passed away at 83 two days ago. I admit I didn't know her too well. We did the usual greeting with my usual answers (name, hometown, height, shoe size) and gave cordial "hello"s when we passed each other on the stairs. She seemed like a nice woman, and it's a pity I didn't get to know her better.

In fact, I learned about her passing only when the lid of a coffin appeared in the middle of the stairwell. At first, I read this as some kind of omen and took the rest of the day pretty easy, watching for cars, drunk people with 2x4s, etc. Only when the standard Bulgarian memorial leaflet and black ribbon appeared on the door did I finally figure out what was going on. I'm assuming there was some kind of wake in her apartment, allowing guests to pass in and bid her last respects. I didn't go in myself. Although I knew her a little, I didn't know her family at all. I didn't think an appearance by the American upstairs was called for or necessary.

After what I assume was the reception last night, the lid disppeared today. I was a little grateful for its being gone. Every time I went down the stairs I only saw the shape of an upright coffin straring at me. It's an unsettling sight, even when it's expected. Even with the coffin gone, the paper memorial will still be on the door, and I'll still remember what little I knew of Rada.

Truth is, my building is full of pensioners like Rada, and I think that's part of the reason why I haven't made too many good friends there. It's quiet, sure, and everyone keeps to themselves, but I think the pensioners are a little frightened of me, despite every attempt to be as kind and gentle as I can be. It's hard becoming a gentle giant when the first impression given is of the big guy clomping up the stairs.

Apart from a certain lack of great friends, the building's other disadvantage is that it isn't what you would call hi-tech. There's a cable hook-up sure, but from the mission I went on today, I should apparently be glad to have that. Intrigued by a conversation with a couple of 12 grade students today, I asked them to come around to the cable companies and see if I could ge a cable modem connection. They were both pretty certain that I could. Well, we went to the two companies and had no luck at all. Both suggested that they'd build connections after the "bad weather clears." But the sun could come out tomorrow and shine clear through to May and I wouldn't hold my breath. They gave me the idea that nothing would be happening for some time, and I'd be willing to believe that from the way I've seen bureaucracy work here. So, it's the internet club for me, which gets me out in the air, anyway.

Oh, also, I've decided to keep the Greece series going bit by bit. Today: Strays. Enjoy.

We'll Always Have Yossarian

I borrowed an old copy of the Greece Lonely Planet guide from Debbie, one of the other two volunteers in town. At first I thought the cover was just a cute design, it featured a white cat in the upper left corner, sitting on a shelf. The rest of the shot was of a deep blue wall. Nice picture, I thought, but is that really Greece? I mean, it's a cat.

Turns out that, as in Bulgaria, strays are a part of Greece. Tourists seem to expect them and the locals actively take care of them. There are far more stray cats in Athens than there are dogs, and the pattern seemed to reverse itself on Crete, with packs of dogs running around. But before I get to the stories, let me just say this to any Eastern Europeans who might be reading this, hoping for advice of some sort. Strays do nothing to aestheticize a country or a community. It's not romantic to have packs of stray dogs running around and, at times, it's scary. I say this because some students have mentioned that the strays are part of Bulgaria's "nature," and that getting rid of them would detract from the scenery. If Eastern Europe is holding back on proper animal control programs because it thinks that 3 legged bags of ribs hopping around biting shins are cute, then it needs to take another look at its policies.

That said, the Greek strays are, for the most part, at least healthy-looking. This led Jeff to trust a dog enough to pet it and name it Yossarian. As it happened, this caused Yossarian to take a liking to Jeff. His home (the dog's) seems to be the area around the Acropolis, and as we were exploring the hill, the dog kept following us. We couldn't shake him. He would walk a hundred feet ahead, a hundred feet back, then check on us to make sure we were okay. It was funny, almost cute. But then Yossarian got an over-developed sense of protection. At the top of the hill, in front of the gates of the Acropolis, Yossarian decided that another group of tourists had unfriendly intentions toward his Americans. He growled, barked, and nearly attacked them before he ran back to us and pissed on a nearby tree. The people he had nearly attacked glared at us as if Yossarian were ours.

The fun ended there. We did what we wanted to do at the top of the hill (the Acropolis was closed that day) and at one point left Jeff behind to babysit his hellhound while we went to an area dense with tourists. When we got to the bottom of the hill with Yossarian still tagging along, we decided to take action. We first tried to trap him behind a fence, but that failed when he cleverly found another open gate. Then we tried to ditch him in an alley by running around several corners in a row while he was busy with someone far behind us. He found that game all kinds of fun and charged after us.

Finally another stray, this time a cat, did him in. The cat was sitting behind a fence, inside one of the many archeological sites, and Yossarian wouldn't leave him alone. He barked, ran back and forth along the fence, and decided the cat was the enemy of his four new friends. We walked carefully away and escaped in a restaurant to eat lunch.

Two days later, when we had come back to actually see the Acropolis, we saw Yossarian in the courtyard where he had almost attacked the group of tourists. We very carefully walked around him, and he never suspected a thing. No doubt he had already found another group of Americans to stalk. There were thousands of them up on the hill that day.

Later on in our sightseeing, we discovered that the park near Hadrian's Arch might as well be a zoo for strays. At least ten puppies played in the park (which was closed the day we visited) along with their parents, and a small kitten bounced around trying to act at home.

Shortly after we arrived, a woman came by with a giant bag of food and the dogs ran over to the fence expectantly. The puppies all ate their fill and the bigger dogs ate last, which seemed like a noble feeding order for strays. The cat got what it could and did well.

The point, if i have one, is this: The strays were a part of our trip, they accented certain things, but we could have had just as fun a time without them. You know, I think we would have had even more fun without the guilt and pity. They've given us anecdotes, sure, and some of the memories make me chuckle. But I'd rather see the animals in homes or a shelter. Their scabs, broken legs, and unkempt hair reminded me at every turn that cats and dogs aren't meant to be left to the wilds of urban society, no matter how much food tourists leave them under the table.

Lazy Day

Maybe it was because I was tired, maybe it was because I couldn't focus, or maybe it was because it's still icy-cold outside and writing about the cuddly warmth of the trip to Greece physically hurt. Whatever the reason, I couldn't get past a third paragraph before my regularly scheduled time to come to the internet club, and in all honesty, those three paragraphs weren't that exciting to begin with. Expect some more stuff about the trip tomorrow, as I'll write one really long entry to cap this whole thing off quickly tonight. Until then, enjoy the photo of the view from our hotel in Athens. That's the Acropolis in the rear. It was a really nice place to stay for the view alone.

If I may, allow me to complain about the weather, because I have to defend it all day. The students, sensing the discomfort of every teacher in this weather, complain about it at every opportunity. Lack of adequate central heating will do that, I imagine. The rooms are cold enough that most of the students in most of my classes wear coats, gloves, and hats throughout the hour. To counter this and the students' wretched complaints about the difficulty in writing with gloves on, I usually run the class in jeans and sweatshirt with my coat and other warm things on the desk. A show of strength is necessary, it seems, and usually the students quiet down after a few "but you're from Alaska, this isn't cold for you"s.

Saying hundreds of times a day that this weather isn't cold, and that a cup of coffee at a heated cafe wouldn't be a good idea gets tiring. The students regularly ask if they can skip the next class and go somewhere warmer. I don't think they realize that I take this as something close to an insult. For them, it's just a part of school life in winter.

At least the city looks different in winter, the new snow has given me an excuse to take the camera around wherever I go and snap photos of all the things that look different. Statues and monuments take on a new life in the snow. One in particular looks like it was made for snowy weather.

So tonight, I'll go home, write a little, read next to the heater, and prepare for the barrage of freezing students tomorrow. I don't remember anybody spending nights coming up with new ways to challenge my high school teachers those many (6 or 7) years ago. Maybe I hung out in the wrong groups, or the right ones, if you want to look at it that way.

The Scoop and Intro

So here's what will be happening over the course of this week: I'll be posting one entry after another about the trip to Greece I took over Christmas and New Years until the story is pretty well told. If I have topical things to say, they'll go above the entry. As far as narrative goes, chronological order on this thing seems a bit silly, since the trip--in its success--was a collection of great moments that, though they often came from one another, were largely independent. The best way to write about this, it seems, is by subject. If you need them, the facts of the case, gentlemen, are these:

The Travellers: Myself, Kate, Jeff, and Ryan (Ryan went back to Bulgaria instead of going to Crete, having things in Bulgaria he needed to take care of). I'm me. Kate's a TEFL out of Kentucky living in Pleven. Jeff's a TEFL out of just about every state in America living in Isperih. When Jeff mentions to a Bulgarian that he lives in Isperih, they sigh audibly and look like he's been sentenced for life. That's always funny. Ryan's a TEFL out of Minnesota living in Kanezha, a small-ish burg outside of Pleven.

The Itinerary: We left for Athens on the night of the 23rd and got in on the afternoon of the 24th of December. We left for Crete on the night of the 28th and stayed in Iraklion the night of the 29th. It was Hania for New Years from the 30th to the night of the 1st, when we travelled back to Athens and then back to Bulgaria on the night of the 2nd. We got into Sofia at about 6 AM Saturday the 3rd, and I arrived home in Silistra on the fourth.

The Money: We all had ~600 Euro or so we were willing to spend on this trip. As it happens, 600 Euro was everything we needed to enjoy Greece for a week and a half. It meant not taking flights, but, as you'll see in the entry below, that was half the fun.

And without further ado, the first entry...

The Alpha, the Omega, and the Deltas In Between

I learned a lot on the trip. Learned about people, Greece, monuments, stray cats and dogs. But the most important lesson was the first taught and the last absorbed. The key to a great trip, the gravy on the biscuits, is to have a terrible, horrible, reprehensible time getting from place to place. It first hit me when we got back to Athens from Crete and began talking about our trip to that point with the 10,000 odd volunteers we ran into in that city.

You see, nobody expects you to come back with a recommendation about a way to travel. Unless you paid two dollars for a flight and had caviar and champagne served by glowing belly dancers, most people, most of the time, really aren’t interested in the way you got to where you went. But if you have a funny story about the ferry to Crete-with its stained floors and chairs and heavy smell of vomit-that just adds to the fun. Also, when you go back and look on the trip with the people you went with, the memories of the bus staff that wouldn’t let you sleep will always be there to go along with the more pleasant things that happened.

I don’t think there was one trip from city to city that we can’t look back on and laugh about. The fun began in Sofia on the snowy days before Christmas Eve. They were the kind of days where the things in your nose that can turn black from smog and freeze from cold do both. Sofia, as it turns out, is pretty ugly in winter. Reminded me of Dickens’ descriptions of Victorian London. It made it kind of Romantic in a way, but it also made us want to get the heck out of Dodge as soon as possible.

The day before the trip, we were forced to buy our bus tickets in pairs. Jeff and I needed to collect our money from the screw-up travel agency, and Kate and Ryan needed to get their tickets as soon as possible. Since the screw-up travel agency continued to screw up in getting our money back (they finally succeeded) Kate and Ryan left to go get their tickets before Jeff and I did.

Before Jeff and I could get in a cab, Kate called from the bus ticket agency and told us we needed to get down there, like, five minutes ago. We told our cab driver to get us there, wondered what Kate was getting herself into a fuss about this early in the trip, and arrived at the bus depot with Ryan having already left for his Bulgarian home.

Kate told us that the ticket lady had said something in Bulgarian about the possibility of there not being more than one or two tickets left on our bus to Athens. She had had a long conversation trying to get the lady to hold the remaining couple of seats for us, but the negotiations had not gone well, apparently.

We went into the office and the sight of Kate set off the worst in the woman we had to deal with. I’ve heard rude “Kazhete”s (formally “speak!”); I’ve heard polite “Kazhi”s (informally “speak!”); but I’ve never heard “Kazhi” with the wrath and seething anger this woman displayed toward the two American men standing before her plexiglass window, asking her to do the job she was ostensibly paid to do and give us some tickets in exchange for legitimate Bulgarian currency.

We wanted two tickets to Athens, could we have a couple? No, there were no places left, and we couldn’t sit next to our friends.

So, there weren’t any places left, or there weren’t seats next to our friends? No, there were no seats left, and they certainly weren’t next to our friends if they did exist.

On the entire bus…stay calm…there were no more places? There were no more places next to the two other Americans.

Out of curiosity and hunch, was there somebody that spoke English we could talk to? She was busy, and there were no more seats left next to your friends.

We didn’t need to sit next to our friends. We could sit anywhere on the bus she liked. If she wanted us to sit at the opposite end of the bus, we’d do that.

Fortunately, the woman who spoke English came around at this point and got a good yelling-at too before she opened the reservation book and wrote our names into two of about 10 empty slots on the bus. The rude woman sat in her chair seething. Maybe she just liked to prevent people from going on trips, maybe she was having a bad day, but she symbolized all the rude customer service we were leaving behind in Bulgaria. The rest of our travel difficulties came on the various modes of transportation.

The ferries to and from Crete weren’t so much difficult as they were odd. We slept on the floor of the third class room with the other backpackers, using our coats as blankets and bags as pillows. At some point in both ferry trips the coat eventually turned into the pillow. The food on the ferries was understandably bad and expensive and the night trips arrived in port at ungodly hours of the morning. On the second trip we were prepared for it all, but the smell of vomit kept some of us awake and the horrid, ghastly snoring and coughing of two elderly gypsies sleeping next to us did the rest of us in too. We got about three or four hours of sleep on both trips and lost about two years of life in our backs, but we traveled cheaply dagnabbit. And at least the ferries weren’t the buses. That was something in their favor.

The first bus trip has left at least two indelible memories. The now world-famous conversation occurred when we were stuck for five hours in Sofia waiting for a truck to be cleared from the road. Jeff and I were sitting in the back of the bus and had just finished a little of our liquid sleep-aid. In what we thought were quiet, inside voices, we went through the topics of competition, war, the prospects for peace and utopia, robots, etc. The whole thing went on for more than forty-five minutes and the opening twenty were listened to and recorded by Kate and Ryan, sitting several rows in front of us and apparently able to hear everything clearly. They say they were informed and entertained, but stopped when we got to the robots, as I must say any reasonable people would. Jeff and I nearly had a universal solution for all of the world’s problems worked out, but nature called, we realized that many of the bus’ passengers were using the cover of night and a park next to a restaurant that was once a church, and we hopped out of the bus to join them.

Towards the middle of that same night, while trying to sleep, I myself created the second lasting image. I'm sitting in the back of the bus with my feet crammed into the neighboring seat and my knees up near my chest. My head is leaning back against the window, my mouth is gaping open, and my scarf is tied around my head to cover my eyes against the fluorescent glare of the lights left on during our three hour stay at the border check. Apparently, I was also snoring to set a new record and the Bulgarian woman sitting in the seats next to me was debating whether to wake me or take her own life. I have no memory of this image, seeing as I was dead to the world and all, but I’ve already heard it described so many times and in such detail that I feel like I was there, watching me make an ass of myself too.

Trips always remind me about what a terrible sleeper I am. I snore when uncomfortable, drool a little once in a while, and now-apparently-mumble incoherently occasionally. Of course, there’s nothing I can do about any of this, especially not here in Bulgaria. I haven’t once seen or heard of a sleep clinic here, nor do I expect to in the immediate future. Sleeping better seems to be one of those luxury things Americans are accused of taking for granted. Nobody blames me for any of it, but it sure makes for good comedy, and the snoring tends to make sleeping on buses a bit harder, apparently.

Sleeping is also harder when, as on the trip to Sofia from Athens, the staff on the bus tries to do everything they can to keep their passengers from doing it. “Wake up!” was the only phrase in English one of the heathens seemed to know, and he delivered it in a way that suggested that it was his own private revenge for the all the torture English-speaking tourists had subjected him to in life. These boys took it personally that we were trying to sleep at two in the morning at their precious border check, and if we weren’t awake to hand over our passports then that was a viscous insult against them.

They kept us from taking off our shoes, they left the heat on until we were sweating with our sleeves rolled to up to our shoulders, and they sang along loudly to the terrible music they were playing. This after the horrors of the ferry trip the night before left us in a horrible state when we arrived in Sofia at about 6 in the morning, and I think it says a lot that the best and least remarkable trip was the train trip that morning back to Kate’s place in Pleven. Somehow, Bulgarians know how to do things just right. Sometimes.

Be It Ever So Humble

You know how divers have to go into decompression chambers if they come out of the water too quickly? Well, over the last couple of days, I've been awfully worried about bubbles getting into my system, so I've been taking it easy. Really easy. Greece was so nice, so warm, such a great place to spend the holidays with a couple of good friends, that coming back to Bulgaria seems to require a specific system for overcoming the stress of being here again.

For me, this system has been laying on a couch, watching a movie, reading a good book, and watching the dirty clothes pile slowly shrink as I do all the laundry from the trip. Unfortunately, it hasn't meant sitting in front of the computer and writing about the trip I've been talking about. I'll get working on that tonight and have the first installment tomorrow. All I have to do is slog my way home through the six or so inches of snow that fell in today's lovely pseudo-blizzard.

In addition, today was also very cold, and heat in the school was very poor. Consequently, there was some skippage in the upper classes today, including my 11th class. Some students even admitted to me before the class that they would be skipping. I told them that it would be unacceptable and that they would be punished. Some of them will be. If I have to shiver my way through a cold and poorly heated class, then they had better be there to sit through it, shivering along with me. I expect better attendance tomorrow.

As always, the 8th classes were all there, but were back to being their abundantly noisy selves. There will have to be a readjustment period there too, apparently.

All of the teachers I talked to in the teacher's room were sorry vacation had to end and didn't want to get back to teaching, but were all there, ready to put on their game faces and get the kids back to studying. It doesn't matter that the classrooms were near freezing, we were all there to work, even if we had to do it with gloves, scarves and coats on.

Tomorrow I'll go back, and things will improve bit by bit. I'll return to my apartment tonight, which will finally have hot water and heat after the hours it took to get it all back after I returned. Things are getting back to normal in Bulgaria. And the memories of Greece are heading to the backburner.

But man, is it cold out there.