Well, the big, giant weight that has been Teaching in this last, boiling month is gone. School, finally, is over. The last few weeks haven't been what a sane person would call "fun." I've had little structured material to teach as I wanted June to be flexible under the demands of Peace Corp's having me run around the country and the wavering hours at school. Most of the classes have been centered around discussions I came up with the night before.
And now the grades are all in, the students have cleaned up the school, and I feel at peace for the first time since, probably, late April. Sigh. Good, good times.
Except I have no water in my apartment, and for the last few days have been a little short on dough. The Peace Corps took care of the latter problem by giving us all the big quarterly payment yesterday, but the water issue still goes on. Hopefully it will be resolved tonight after two days without a good, solid shower.
Yesterday I was dreaming about something or other when the sound of my doorbell snuck in, coming out of the mouth of whatever person happened to be in my dream at that point. I woke up, and on the third ring managed to figure out what was happening. I stumbled to the front door, grabbing my keys on the way. After unlocking my door, I hid behind it in my underwear as my landlady and a maintenance-looking type guy stood there and started talking to me. As far as I understood from their hand signals and clipped sentences, they would be installing pipes somewhere near my bathroom and needed to shut down the water in a half hour.
They left and I charged into the shower. I hurried through the usual shower process and was throwing some underwear on to my wettish self when the doorbell rang again long before the half hour was over. I asked the maintenance guy (who was with a larger group of maintenance guys at this point) for a moment and ran into the bedroom to throw on a shirt and some pants. This done, I opened the door for the guys who came in and tramped muddy shoes into my wet bathroom. One was smoking a cigarette in my apartment.
Digression: Somewhere in one of the myriad Peace Corps manuals it says to make your apartment your little haven of America. I understood the intention behind this statement and have, more or less, privately insisted on my apartment being American soil. Under most circumstances, a Bulgarian would almost need a passport to get in. Other than people I need to fix things that go wrong, I've had only one group of people over and they were a bunch of students who had a movie they wanted to watch on my laptop. Maintenance guys come in with lit ciggies and I glare. Nobody lights a cigarette in my apartment. Nobody.
After filthying up a good square meter or so of apartment space, the lead guy explained that they wouldn't need to do a thing in my apartment but they were going to replace pipes downstairs and needed me not use water for the next two days. I took this to mean that they would shut off the water, do their work for the day, clean up, and leave me with water at night and in the early morning, then shut it all off again. I was, apparently, wrong.
Later in the morning, I used the toilet, left it unflushed on the assumption that there was no water to flush with and went to the sink to wash my hands with whatever water was left in the pipes. The water came on full force and I quickly washed and shut it off. A moment later the doorbell rang again and the lead guy was standing there with his hair wet. He told me I couldn't use the water and beckoned me downstairs. There were massive drainage pipes in the stairwell. He took me into the bathroom directly below mine and explained that they were replacing the entire drainage system below my apartment, which is on the top floor. I guess they hadn't shut off the water to the building to save the neighbors from a little trouble. Anyway, I didn't tell the guy that he should feel lucky I didn't flush the toilet, too.
The biggest problem with all this is that they tore out the entire drainage system yesterday instead of working floor by floor like reasonable people. So I haven't had any water and have been relying on restaurant and school bathrooms to do my, erm, business. The guy tells me I should be able to use the water tonight, but we'll see about that. A slightly smaller problem is that I can't have the windows in my apartment open because the entire building is filled with flies attracted to the scent of a torn out drainage system lying all over the stairwell. I tried it for a few hours yesterday and had to kill well over a dozen house flies while picking up 5 or 6 mosquito bites and haven't gone near the windows today.
At any rate, this is a minor problem when the great load of School has been lifted off my shoulders. It's finally summer! Things are good.
Allow me one day of cynicism. If you like, you can once again blame my tutor's coffee.
Last week, the B-13s (We brave volunteers who came last year and have decided to stay for a year or more) were all in Pazarjik talking about the year behind us and advising the new teachers, the B-15s, Polonius-style. Basically, there was a lot of chat about being true to oneself and not lending or borrowing money from students. Both very useful tips.
The prediction had been that the B-13s would charge into MST ("Mid-Service Training." Another successful collection of letters brought to you by Peace Corps. Honestly, you should have seen the evaluation forms we had to fill out. "Have the PC PMs provided enough aid to PCVs regarding ETs, ISTs, and TEFLs? Have the PCMO and PCSO provided clear explanations of the EAP and Medevac procedures?") full of adrenaline and estrogen, sweep the B-15s off their feet, and cure all of our dating ills.
You see, most of us have what you would call a natural fear of dating in our towns. I've given quite a few examples of gossip's speed in Bulgaria (Among Bulgarians, mostly. But read on and you'll find out Americans move it even faster). When an American gets together with a Bulgarian, it had better mean something because it's all everyone in that town will be talking about for the course of the relationship. The whole process is made easier in towns with universities, where people from around Bulgaria come and go, but those are far and few between. So the B-13s, well, most of us, have gotten a little, um, stir crazy in the past year and the prospect of 40 new Americans being injected into Bulgaria gave everybody a little hope.
However, the B-15s actually wanted to learn something over the course of the week and we spent most of it discussing our jobs, teaching, and the European Football Championship. They were also more than willing to tell stories about their first two months in Bulgaria. The B-13s, a group of people that has developed an unhealthy attention to the smallest bits of gossip, adapted quickly and left off cannibalizing our own group's skeletons in the closet when we learned that, while they may not be interested in love (yet), the B-15s had done quite a few things that were worth talking about. None of which, of course, can be mentioned here.
If all this means nothing to you, I understand completely. It wouldn't have meant anything to me a year ago. But a year in PC-Bulgaria changes a person. He becomes institutionalized. Learns the rules of the game he's in. And if he's not a complete gossip-hound when he comes in, he'll learn what little bits need to be talked about in a hurry. Allies need to be made. You need to learn which confidantes will drop news like an 8 AM class and which couldn't care less about what you have to say and will soak up your torrid little stories like a sponge that'll never get squeezed (That's two--two!--lame similes for the price of one sentence, ladies and gentleman!). Gossip and "love," then, might as well be the same among volunteers and Bulgarians living in Bulgaria.
An honest pursuit of the one in quotes will always need to go through the gauntlet of the other. If it survives and the quotes come off, well, that's something to be proud of, and it's happened a couple of times in the past year, happily enough. Not to me, unfortunately, but I hear it's certainly possible. For myself, I guess I'll see what happens in the next few months, keep my eyes and ears open, keep my mouth shut when it should be, and be the unfathomably nice guy the gossip reports tell me everybody sees me as.
Basically, I'm waiting for emotion to come into play at some point. I'm not one to go around spraying deodorant on false pretenses, partly because I'm a bad liar in general, but mostly because when it comes to the important things in life, I just find it impossible to fake something I don't have. But if it comes, it'll come, if it doesn't, it's just another year before I go back to America and life will go on.
If all this seems like the bitter ramblings of a guy who hasn't had a date in over a year, it's because it is! And if all this seems like angst on the level of a FOX high school soap opera, it's because it really is! Peace Corps has given us the chance, when we're not doing good, to live out all of our Dawson's Creek, 90210, and Saved by the Bell fantasies. And in our twenties, too, when the actors that made those shows come alive were at their best and playing freshmen in high school. Nobody's taken to pep pills like Jessie Spano, or seen their fiancee get gunned down in a car the day before the wedding, but that doesn't mean those things couldn't happen. Summer's arrived, everybody will have free time, and in a world where a radio DJ plays a dance re-mix of Eamon's "F___ It, I Don't Want You Back" and follows it up with Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" anything's possible.
--Reading over all this stuff a second time leads me to believe that some people could read all this as being pretty negative stuff and get the idea that the Peace Corps is some kind of cesspool of depravity and that PC-Bulgaria is Sodom revisited. It really isn't, as a year of other posts has attested to. Sometimes, a guy has to vent about the little things. Hence, posts like today's. Thanks for your patience.
For the curious, there were no entries this past week while I spent my time at a mid-service conference in Pazarjik, down around Southern Bulgaria. I only went to an interent club once and didn't really have time to do anything exciting there.
I can't say there's all that much to report from the conference. We got to meet all of the new volunteers, who will be "real" volunteers this Friday after their swearing-in and they got to receive the benifits of our year of experience. Most of the benefit came out of us venting at them at the front of lecture halls. Everybody had something to say about their little devil baby students and the things that could be done to make them slightly less devil baby-ish. I think some of the newbies were put off by it all, but most got something out of it, I hope.
So that leaves me here, briefly in Sofia on the way back home. We have a new headquarters here in Peace Corps Bulgaria and it's a fantastic pain in the ass to get to, but it still has pretty speedy internet, for free, so that's something. Much, much more tomorrow, if you're interested.
I have no particular theme today (see "title, lack of theme in"), and I'm hopped up on whatever incredible amount of caffeine my tutor puts into that stuff she calls coffee, so this should be a good time. First, allow me to make a John Brown style observation. I'm now quite certain that this country's fear of winds, breezes, or otherwise moving airs will never be purged away but with a summer heatstroke epidemic of immense proportions.
It hit 100 degrees today (The municipality thermometer was showing 35 C around 3:00), the marshes around the Danube River made it feel swampy, and I was sagging as I was walking around town. When I arrived at my tutor's apartment for my lesson, I found one window open in the kitchen and no fan running. My chin was about two inches off the table throughout the lesson and little beads of sweat kept forming on my forearms. I'm not normally very good in extreme heat, even when I have a fan and cold water to cool me off. I like to spend the hottest part of days lying on the couch, air blowing over me, with a bottle of water at my side. Intense summers make me lazy. Bulgarian summers make me a zombie.
Over the weekend, as I was travelling up and down the coast, I noticed a fascinating pattern. Whenever an American was sitting in the front seat of a minibus and opened his window, the driver would shut his, eliminating any possiblity of draft. Any American passenger would sink further into their seat and/or misery, the driver would light a cigarette, and the Bulgarian passengers would continue to stare out the front window.
I was hopping up and down the coast for two reasons. One was to finally arrange a site for next month's camp for Bulgarian boys, the other was to pay a visit to Adam (Happy Birthday Adam!) who was having a party in Balchik in honor of his getting the heck out of here after two years and birthday. The first goal was accomplished in two easy hours in a town called Obzor, midway between Varna and Burgas. We talked to the guy there, who was very friendly and spoke in slow, clear Bulgarian, and then we took a tour of the town.
While waiting for the bus after the tour, we sat across the parking lot from a very, um, interesting hotel. At times, there were as many as ten Mercedes in the parking lot in front of the hotel's restaurant. Each Mercedes contained one muscle-bound, huge thickneck and his invariably gorgeous girlfriend. One guy, after getting out of his car, slid a 9mm into the back of his pants like it was a newspaper he was planning on reading. In America, you'd get as far away from this kind of gathering as possible, maybe even tell the police about it if you're a good, honest citizen. In Bulgaria, sadly, it's par for the course, and chances are most of the guys knew most of the cops in town anyway. Chances are a couple of the guys were cops.
We finally chased down a bus to Varna and got out of town, finally arriving in Balchik. Usual Peace Coprs-Bulgaria weekend party there. We saw the town's sites, took a swim, had a good time. The buzzword for the weekend was "metrosexual," which has become a heavy conversation topic recently. Everybody at the party had come last year or the year before and had not seen an episode of "Queer Eye" or heard of Howard Dean's "I am a metrosexual" soundbite.
The standard definition we decided on was a guy that dresses well, but is not gay. The rest of the conversation revolved around whether or not it was an insult for a straight guy to be called metrosexual. I mostly played referee and moderator the whole time since I'm nothing approaching gay or metrosexual (My fashion decisions mostly come from whatever I can get my hands on or is given to me. It's not that I don't necessarily know how to dress, but that I really don't and can't care seeing as I'm Sasquatch's much less hairy cousin [Hi Jimbob!]). And since I've been reading blogs and paying more attention to broad American social trends than your average volunteer, I was able to offer such intriguing trivia as the news of the Howard Dean soundbite.
By Sunday, I think a general consensus on the whole thing had been reached, although I still have no clue about what that consensus might be or what relevance it has. I think the fact that it gets brought up at all is a sign that PC-Bulgaria is a different experience when compared with, say, PC-Africa. But I guess that's obvious.
Today, in one of my last day's of classes, we were all sharing brief stories. Vladimir told me about his weekend's shoe-buying. He had been in the store when the shopkeeper brought out a pair that was too big for him. Thinking of me, of course, he mentioned that the pair would still be much too small for his English teacher. The shopkeeper said "Oh, I know your English teacher. The American. We all know him because nobody in Silistra could ever sell him any shoes." I have never tried to buy shoes in Silistra, nor do I do much shopping outside of grocery stores, but, well, that's what it's like being a volunteer in small-town Bulgaria. Everybody knows your name and that you wear size 52 (In Europe) shoes. And nobody ever opens a window. That too.
Courtesy of The Corner, this map of Springfield is, without a doubt, the greatest work of love ever created by man. There is NO argument about this.
I'm sure any number of fans can tear at little bits and pieces of this masterpiece, but the fact that I think Moe's Tavern is perfectly located either a short drive or a long, depressing walk from the Simpsons' house is justification enough for the map's authenticity.
Bulgaria, Bulgarians are fond of saying, is a very old nation. America, conversely, is very young. While the decisions Bulgaria makes come from a history of 1,100 years or so, America--which came into being at the clap of a hand in 1776, I'm told--tends to make rash choices typical of, say, an adolescent. Standard post-Iraq Euro-philosophy, I know, but in Bulgaria's case it usually comes up when I, or another volunteer, talk about things we miss about America. For example, if I were to say that I really miss screen doors as I slap at mosquitos while sitting on my couch, a friend of mine in Silistra would argue that Bulgarians have developed a heartier stock, one that doesn't need screen doors in the summer or properly insulated windows in the winter.
Only two kinds of cheeses in Bulgaria? Bulgaria has developed the best cheeses, and only two are really needed. Kufte and Kebapche? Bulgaria needs no other form of meat outside of the unidentifiable mystery kind. Steak is for the weak, sir. Usually, when I make a suggestion to my students, Bulgarian friends, or colleagues about things a long-term foreign tourist might miss when visiting Bulgaria, it's met with the kind of argument parents give their teenage kids. We're old, you're young and that's just the way it is. Accept Bulgaria for what it is, and get on with life. But sometimes it doesn't go that way.
Last night only three guys showed up to play basketball, and on any court anywhere three guys means a game of 21. 21, though popular with pick-up game players, is a bit mysterious to the uninitiated. This is mostly because rules change widely depending on where you play, and, to my knowledge, it's never been popularized in movies, books, or anywhere else people may get their ideas from.
Most of the time, in America, 21 starts at the free throw line where one of the three guys shoots free throws until he/she misses. Each free throw gets 1 point. If he misses, the other two guys lounging around can grab the rebound and effectively start the game. When somebody makes a basket, he gets 2 points and goes back to the free throw line to shoot until he misses. It's pretty much a rotating game of 2 on 1 and the first guy to 21 wins, although the rules governing the end of the game are always horribly confused and should usually be checked on first.
So when we started playing last night and the other two guys asked me if I knew 21, I said "yes," looking back on my years of experience in poorly organized pick-up games. We shot for the ball and I was the only one to hit a free throw, so I "broke" from the free throw line. I made two free throws, but missed the third. When I dove in for the rebound, the guy who had grabbed it stopped the game for a second and told me that I wasn't supposed to play. In Bulgaria, I guess, 21 is an organized way of getting three people to play 1-on-1. After a guy misses a free throw, he sits out until another guy misses and then gets to play again. And every basket is worth one point here.
This version of the game really, really favors a guy who can hit free throws and I dominated the two games of Bulgarian 21 we played. I didn't even really get tired. I'd get a rebound, back up to about 18 feet, and take a shot. I made about half of them, and when I hit them I'd make 6 or 7 free throws, sit out for a while, and repeat. When the second game was at 19-5-6 or something like that, I began explaining the American version.
At first, they were doubtful, citing the fact that 2 on 1 was unfair. After I told them that the 2 are always different and that it's just a matter of rotation, and that everyone always gets to play, they both developed an "it's just crazy enough to work" face and we tried it in the next game.
I've never been particularly good at American 21, working against double teams is never my strong suit, and I have a tendency to use it as hook shot practice. I also get lazy on rebounding. Personal flaws, really. So I lost the two games of it we played, the Bulgarians were awfully happy with the strange new rule-set, and we all went home satisfied. A cross-cultural success if there ever was one. And while Bulgarian 21 is certainly not to be ignored since I'm very good at it, the American version is at least a worthy option. Everybody's happy, and we all have something new to do when the lazy, slacker, family-oriented types can't make it on Tuesday nights.
Jimbob's stats:
address: Central Square 1, Plovdiv 4000, Bulgaria
e-mail: nss@ITDNet.net
nic-hdl: NS806-RIPE
changed: nss@ITDNet.net 19990908
source: RIPE
At first I thought he was from Amsterdam, but that proved a little hokey, so I looked a little deeper on the RIPE server and it turns out that our dear Jimbob, who's been knocking around the comments section imitating my beloved readers, is probably a Bulgarian. Working from an internet club in Plovdiv, most likely.
It all makes more sense, but makes him seem a little less important in my book. I wanted the person who came up with the ingenious idea of linking me to Sasquatch (I have big feet and I'm tall. Yegads! It seems so obvious to me now!) to be someone who would, in some way, be worth my time. I was hoping to be known internationally as a boring, self-important blogger who forces people to read his arcane, dull, and mindless observations about life in Bulgaria. Now I'll have to settle for being boring to a couple of people in New Jersey, Massachussettes, and Bulgaria...hardly record-setting. Sigh. Life must, somehow, go on.
The Lakers are looking pretty bad...also not good.
Oh, oh, but I went to the orphanage this weekend. Jeff was in town (bored. It's a recurring theme, apparently) and was pretty much suckered into coming and helping out. He didn't quite believe me when I told him that the kids would instantly run to him and that he'd really have to not think about anything while he was there. He didn't believe me when I said they'd want nothing but attention and basketball and piggyback rides and spinning around. But he learned that it was all true and as soon as he walked through the gate, as soon as we got out of the cab with fifteen watermelons to split among the 60 some orphans, they mobbed us and treated us like the best friends they would ever have.
Debbie, the B-12 sitemate who will be leaving for America next month, came for her last visit to the orphanage and we had two days of celebration and excitement in the heat of the first days of Silistra's summer. It was fun, but, as always, the basketball and the piggyback rides and the spinning left me exhausted. I'm still a little tired and sore. It hurts, but its a good kinda' hurt. And with two weeks left of school, I can afford to drag a little in the classroom. I'm taking it easy in my classes, and letting the students take it easy, too. We're still speaking in English, but it's all conversational, and I'm not pounding them with too much grammar.
So that's where I stand at the beginning of another hot summer week. Jimbob, this one was for you.
I get my hair cut here in town by a guy working in a busy shop near Silistra's market. He must be in his sixties or seventies, and he speaks in mumbles and grins, when he speaks at all. Despite being on the back end of his career, I picked him out the first time I went into the shop and have been loyal since. It doesn't take much for me to be loyal to a barber, as long as they don't massively screw things up up there, I'll keep going back.
However, I have a long-standing tendency against barbers in general. Mom charts this back to certain barbershop horrors of my childhood, and that may be true, but something about barbershops always makes me a little pensive when I walk through the door.
The first time I went to this place near the market I was suspicious. It wasn't sparkling clean, but neither are most Alaska barbers' so that wasn't a problem. I walked up the nearest barber and, not having any prejudices against age as far as hair-cutting goes, sat down in the old fella's chair for the first time.
I've been there three times since and he's been available each time. He seems to forget where I'm from. I've had to answer the same question each time I've gone. And he also asks me about my height and shoe size every time I go, but that's to be expected. He always gives me a good cut and when he uses scissors they never stop snipping, they're always moving. He also enjoys whipping off the apron and telling me "Chestito" or congratulations after he's finished. Getting a haircut in Bulgaria is always cause for a congratulation, a detail I've actually grown fond of.
Anyway, I got my hair cut today. That's the long and short of it.
Before we get to basketball, let me talk about Dennis. Dennis isn't a student of mine, he's in one of the 11th classes that I don't teach. But Dennis owns the internet club that I come to. He doesn't have money invested in it, but he's probably put in enough time on the computers here to have given the club thousands of leva. At school, Dennis is just a student, a good student and one fluent in English, but just a kid that listens to his teachers.
Here at the internet club, Dennis is a Corleone. He pushes aside kids in their chairs a little when they're in his territory, he wanders about at will while his account is running to give tips to other users, and he plays his music as loud as he wants when he's forgotten his headphones. He was just playing The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," one of my favorites, and has turned it down a bit to play Annie Lennox's "No More I Love Yous." He's a Counterstrike and Warcraft expert, which I'm sure would make him a good friend of some people I know.
Dennis is invincible here at the internet club. He tells me he lives here because, at home, his parents give him a hard time about not studying. Dennis, I think, more than any other kid here, represents where Bulgaria is going. Even as five and six year-olds here play games that are way over their heads like Counterstrike or Grand Theft Auto 3, they're becoming computer-literate like no kids I've ever seen. Four year-olds are usually pretty good with a mouse in Bulgaria, even when they can't read what's on the screen. And by the time they're ten or eleven, they know enough English to understand such useful phrases as "start game," "cover me!" "choose your weapon," etc. It's not going to get them jobs right out of school, but it at least gives them a great starting point for understanding Word, or other more useful programs. And even if they know "head shot" before they know how to use "the," being at least a little good with computers is something. Now, on to pick-up games and basketball.
Tuesday night has become basketball night for me here in Silistra. I play with an ever-changing assortment of twenty-something guys from around town. Most of them played ball in high school, which makes them all solid pick-up game players in Bulgaria. Last night, we played the most symmetrically perfect pair of games I've ever been involved in. Sure there were errors on both sides, and I, in particular, had my share of turnovers. I let my only dunk attempt literally slip through my fingers as I was focusing on the players around me, the basket, anything but the ball. But the games flowed, they never stopped, or got silly, and no team ever began to look like they'd run away with a game.
Most importantly, there were exactly ten players ready to play in the gym until the last minute when a little of the symmetry left to go to a 9:00 meeting. Nobody was left sitting on the sides, guzzling water and trying to look relaxed, and everybody was putting in their all. Both games had a middle section where it got rough, and every other play ended in a solid foul, but towards the end execution came out on top (In pick-up games! Execution! It was mind-blowing). At the end of two heavy full court games, the gym getting dark, we called it a night with everyone left, exhausted.
Part of the perfection and symmetry of the night came from the fact that we lost the first game 21-19. I had six or seven points, a few blocks and a lot of rebounds, but the other side just played a little bit better at the end of the game. It didn't feel like a tough loss, it felt like the start of something good. We all felt good after the first game. Winded, but good.
The second game started with our side making the first few baskets. I mostly let the offensive game flow around me, getting offensive rebounds and kicking them out, making sure guys had open shots, etc. I didn't actually have a basket until somewhere in the middle of the game and only finished with four or five points. But the entire team was clicking on defense. The play of the game started with a block that sent the ball out to the three point line, where our little guy snagged it and ran it up the floor before passing it off to our small forward for an easy lay up. It felt like a Swiss watch fastbreak and it all came out of the team funneling the ball to the other side's weakest player who felt like he could show me the ball for three or four seconds before taking a shot. I loved the way it felt.
At about 8:30, our little guy had to leave with the score tied 19-19. We wanted to finish the thing so we played 4 on 5. On the first possession I made a lucky 15 foot fadeaway that had to bounce in. We shut them down on defense (We'd been playing zone the whole night, and playing it well, another miracle of the perfect game. Zones almost never work in pick-up games in my experience, but these zones flowed for both teams) and the ball went straight up the court where our small forward made a tough lay-up for the win. 19-21, 21-19. Night over.
We left with "good nights" and my "good games"--Bulgarians, by and large, aren't big on congatulating each other after games, especially informal ones, but they're always more than happy to return a handshake, even if they think it's a bit odd--and I wandered my way home, reflecting on the fantastic symmetry of it all, and the fact that I'd found it here in Silistra.
Now they've done it. Now they've really done it. My eighth classes took their finals today and my other classes have been pushed back to the afternoon, which explains why I'm at the internet club a bit early. This means that the eighth graders will only be noisier and less compliant over these last two weeks. Since I'm finished teaching them from the textbook this will mostly mean that these last days will be full of games in English and discussion about life and all that. This will all be made possible by my having some of the greatest students I've heard of in Bulgaria. They may be noisy, they may be non-compliant at times, but at least they're always willing to speak in English, and if I jab at them enough they'll even do the work I ask them to.
So that's that, and it comes on a day where summer is, for the first time really, making itself felt. The thermometer on Silistra's town hall read 32 C today around noon which means it just brushed 90 F. It'll get hotter, but coming after last week where the days were dominated by cool rain, I think this heat caught the people here off-guard. There were sagging shoulders and people mopping their faces all over the city center.
Somehow, it's cool in the internet club, and I've been waiting out the heat here. Other than all that, there isn't that much to report, fortunately. I paid off the bills today (Something that, in Bulgarian, always gives me this little shiver of success), and will play basketball tonight. My "no to TVs" plan is working well. I've gotten through three books and half of Shakespeare's history plays since my TV broke down. I've also been working out more, listening to classical music, and seen a rebirth in my desire to master Bulgarian. Seriously. I've asked my tutor to start testing me on vocab. Seriously. And the TV sits there, staring, and I pay my cable bill, just like everything's normal. Only I'm not watching TV much, or at all. The plan is working and the TV addiction is ending without withdrawals. I never thought it could work so well.
Well, my camera is now officially iffy. I've been wondering about it for some time, but I have no choice now but to declare it, without a doubt, weak. It's one of those Kodak Easyshares, which was nice to begin with because it was simply an amazing point-and-shoot. I could take it anywhere, pull it out of my pocket, and get a great shot. But now, about half the time, the photos come out blurry or fuzzy. Not so much that you can't tell what's going on, but enough so to make you think the camera had a few to many from the bar before taking the photo. Anyway, I'm still messing around with some of the photos I took last week, so that's why none of them are here today.
I'm back in Silistra after a week on the road. Last week I visited and observed nine classes taught by nine different new volunteers. The kids in those classes were sullen, noisy, and mostly indifferent to the strange Americans trying to teach them a lesson or two at the very end of a long school year. Walking back into my own classroom today was a little different than what I saw last week.
First, in 8th class and before the bell rang, Guler ran up to me and said "Hello, Mr. Young. Welcome back!" Then she paused for a moment. Then, in a very loud voice so Nadezhda in the back could hear, she said "Mr. Young, tell Nadya that Dido's 'Thank You' and 'Stan' by Eminem are two different songs that just sound the same. She thinks they're the same song."
And over a (mostly) quiet classroom I explained to the class, and Nadezhda, that "Stan" "samples" Dido's "Thank You," taking the chorus and manipulating it into a new song. In fact, I added, Dido probably wouldn't be as popular as she is today if Eminem hadn't liked the song and made it a hit. Nadezhda, in her own Nadezhda way, didn't buy it and still spent the first few minutes of class arguing with Guler about the subject until I got tired of it and told them both to just be quiet. It's good to be home with the kids I've gotten to know.
Last time it was the TV that didn't work, this time the water failed to work properly on my return from vacation. I went to class still smelling of yesterday's long and hot bus ride over the Stara Planina mountain range back home to Silistra. I also had about four day's growth of beard and bits of breakfast in my teeth that hadn't been brushed out. The students didn't seem to notice, and I hopped in the shower as soon as I realized that the water was back on in my apartment after classes.
Basically, it's good to be home, where I know what things work and what things don't. Where I know which kids will be noisy, which will want to learn, and which will want to learn and be noisy. God, it's just good to be home.
Well, I was in a nice little mountain town called Bratsigovo Monday and Tuesday, I spent Wednesday travelling, and now I'm at an internet club in a valley town on the main rail line between Sofia and Burgas called Stamboliski. I'm hopping around the south end of Bulgaria preaching the benifits of cheese, and lots of it. Good wholesome, American cheese. With the occasional gouda...I'm sorry, I thought that joke would work out somehow, but it wasn't going anywhere. I'm teaching the new volunteers (the B-15s) a thing or two about teaching. The new sitemate, the person who will teach in Silistra in September and henceforth to be dubbed "The New Sitemate," is one of them. But The New Sitemate is in Batak, and a primary school teacher, and so out of my experience. I'm sure he'll live somehow.
I was impressed by Bratsigovo. It's a town that knows where it's going and what it wants. That may well be because it has a population of less than two thousand and a collective idea is easier to hold on to with a population that size, but it's also because the place has a philosophy. It's a mountain town with many nice trails to small monasteries in the hills and a small bottling plant that pushes out good, clean "Bratsigovo" brand mineral water.
On the upper end of the town, near a church with a belfry that houses a thousand swallows and a bell that tolls not on the hour but at twenty till or a quarter of (or whenever really, and always very early in the morning), is one of the finer hotels I've visited in Bulgaria. You could call it a bed and breakfast, but that would really be doing it a disservice. The hotel is built like a late-nineteenth century Rodopi villa. It has a restaurant in the front garden where the serving staff is always willing to chat about how tall you are or how big your shoes might be, and they dress in period costume. It's like eating at a Disneyland restaurant! The food was great, the bed comfortable, and no TV, but one in the bullpen on demand if I thought I needed it (I never did). If you're ever in Bratsigovo, ask around for the Damova Kushta. I don't think anyone in the town wouldn't know about it.
And thus far, I've decided that Stamboliski reminds me a lot of Hill Valley. There doesn't seem to be a clock tower that hasn't worked since the Great Lightning Storm of November 12th, 1955, but honestly, who needs one if you aren't travelling around in a time machine that requires x amount of [g]igawatts to function properly? See? It would just be wasted space. Strangely, a lot of towns in Bulgaria remind me of Hill Valley. Either I'm living in a country modelled on the ideas inherent in a backlot or the aging process in Bulgaria is eerily similar to the one they used to age the buildings thirty years in that honored town.
So yeah, um, Stamboliski is your standard Bulgarian town, a more detailed description of which sounds like a great idea for one of those times when I find myself with nothing to write. The volunteers here are great, green, and solid teachers. Good, hearty stock like all PC people. And they come from all over the place. Seattle, Kansas, Virgina, Boston, Ohio, you name it, we have a volunteer here...Except Hawaii, I can't think of anyone I've met from Hawaii. I'll bet there are reasons for that, but they probably don't need to be dug into.
In fact, I'm on the road, and I could visit an internet club anywhere really, so I'd best take advantage of the joys of a rainy Stamboliski night and sign off. Photos to come some time next week. Maybe. If I remember.