Wednesday night saw my first Bulgarian earthquake. Technically it happened in Romania, but it shook things up pretty well here, too. I live on the fourth floor of my building and could feel things swaying pretty well. I felt like it would be responsible of me to stand under the doorway. According to the news, there were no casualties, which meant it took a long time to find it in the news. If a magnitude 5.8 earthquake hits and kills a few hundred people, it's all you hear about for a day, but if it's happy news and no one gets hurt, a person has to dig it up out of Reuters. That's the media I guess.
Having lived most of my life in California and the slightly less earthquake-prone Alaska, a 5.8 centered 200 or so miles away rattled me a bit, but left me a bit short of panic. I can understand why some of my students' families left their apartment blocks during the quake though. These buildings aren't exactly retro-fitted, as far as I know. Anything much stronger than that quake might see a block fall, so I imagine it's a good thing these don't happen too often. Some of my students say they remember or remember hearing about a quake about 13 years ago or so, but there hadn't been anything since. This was something new for just about everyone, and when I said I'd been in 8 quakes (a guess, but I'm pretty sure it's close. I can't remember every one of the darn things) they were a bit awed. Always nice feeling like a superhero for no good reason.
The next morning, the morning I was debriefing everybody on the quake, they wouldn't let the students in the school at the beginning of the day. The rumor I heard among the students was that the earthquake had damaged something or other and that school wouldn't start until 9:00. I made my way through the crowd and up to the teachers' room. The rumors, of course, were wrong. Someone had glued the locks on the doors and they'd had to break a window to get in. School started at 8:00 (although half the students didn't come because they still thought 9:00) and each student has to pay something like 10 stotinki to get the broken window fixed. The assistant director came through during the first hour and told the class that the school was at war and that they were soldiers in preventing future gluing. I was just a bit uncomfortable with that imagery in regards to school vandalism, but whatever works I guess. The day went on normally after that.
So, big earthquake, small deal. Peace Corps warned us earthquakes could happen in Bulgaria and people either freaked out or chuckled. I was one of those who chuckled, since the odds they had given us on earthquakes happening were pretty small. But, there we go, an earthquake happened. What do you know.
In other news, I've taken to toilet-training the cat, who (if you must have a segue) freaked out before the quake for reasons I didn't then understand. I'm toilet-training her because litter is awfully messy (It's even messier in the bathroom I've found) and expensive and i think it'd be cool to have a toilet-trained cat. I've been using the Misha method which has worked well so far. At the moment, the litter box is at a point level with the toilet and she seems perfectly comfortable hopping up into it. All in four days. She's a smart kitty, is Yuli.
Unfortunately, this all means I'm headed straight for the annoying phase, where a litter box has to be removed each time I want to use the toilet. Then I have to somehow get Yuli used to not having any litter at all, and this is a cat who loves her litter. Also, the last step involves filling the litter bowl up with water, which I'm guessing Yuli will drink instead of "use" as she drinks anything that isn't the water in her designated bowl. All fun challenges though, and when it's all over, I'll have a toilet-using cat, which will be pretty nifty.
Last year I wrote about a class-long discussion about race and nationality in Bulgaria and how Bulgarian kids see themselves within the outside world. It all came out of some comment or other that absolutely shocked me when I heard it. Shocked me in a "I can't believe they think that way!" kind of shocking. Well, moments of strangeness still happen off and on, but I've gotten used to them. So far this year, I haven't felt the need to sit on my desk and spend a class talking about something. Oddly enough, I do it every week in my literature class as a matter of course. They're a very free-thinking and participatory sort to this point, so we can spend an hour talking about a few lines of Chaucer (After pounding our way through a translation into Modern English). Unfortunately, that's only once a week. It's a good couple of hours, but it comes rarely.
Most of the time this year I'm working from a textbook with kids taking English as a second foreign language. The textbooks I use (Reward textbooks from Macmillan) are pretty good and get the facts across well, but their subjects are about as far away from inflammatory as you can get. This is great for permanent teachers who want to pound through year after year and turn out good crops of English speakers. But I'm a Peace Corps volunteer, dammit! I want to get into people's heads and understand what I don't know. I want to soak up two years of Bulgarian adolescent knowledge like a sponge. For all their ability to provide examples of non-defining relative clauses, passages about chocolate, the better things to see in London, and the path of St. James in Northern Spain don't spark any fires.
So, when I can, I leave the textbook and talk about things that are going on, and I'm discovering more and more that I can predict the answers and opinions the kids will give. It's still interesting, but the moments are brief and by the time class is over, I forget all that we've talked about except that Cortez first tried chocolate in 1519.
Preventing total reliance on the textbook is a valid and necessary goal for me over the course of this year. It keeps the students interested and prevents me from turning into a male Mrs. Crabapple from The Simpsons. I'm often reminded of her here in Bulgaria. There was an episode where Bart brought in bottles of liquor to give a "how-to" demonstration on the cocktail Homer had invented. Crabapple, shocked, says "Bart Simpson, you take those bottles of liquor to the teacher's lounge, immediately. You may have whatever's left at the end of the day."
On Monday, one of the teachers brought in a bottle of Alaska vodka. It's cheap, terrible stuff. Bottled here in Bulgaria. No doubt trying to cash in on Alaska's famous reputation for, uh, vodka. Does Alaska even bottle vodka? I can only guess that they're trying to duplicate Finlandia's success by using an equally northern landmark. Finlandia cannot be duplicated, in my humble opinion, and Alaska vodka doesn't come close. Anyway, the vodka was there to celebrate the birth of another teacher's baby. Fine, celebrate, but let's not empty the bottle before 11 AM, hmm? I didn't have any on teaching principle and because cheap vodka doesn't work well with me at 10 AM on a mostly empty stomach.
Expected moment, yes, teachers do have the odd drink during the day, though I've never seen anybody drunk. But seeing the bottle next to the box of chocolates still made me chuckle.
I found this, here:
"TCI's stated purpose is "to promote tall awareness among tall men and women, and in the community. To provide social activities of mutual interest, travel to cities around the U.S. and Canada for gatherings including members from several TCI clubs, run a convention each year to conduct the business of the Corporation with representatives of all clubs, and select a new Miss Tall International®, the official public representative and goodwill ambassador for TCI."
The idea that tall people need "awareness" made me chuckle. Never in my life of always being tall for my age and now being a tall 6'7 have I felt a need to scream out "I'm here, dammit!" If anything, much of my life has been a self-conscious worry storm as I realize day after day that my head, shoulders and chest are usually always sticking out above crowds. A different sort of person would use that to his advantage, but the idea of being a person who always makes himself known frightens me a little and seems like an awful lot of work.
And there's a "goodwill ambassador" in the organization. If you too are curious about tall people, the current Miss Tall International® is also a member of the finance board of the TCI Treasurer Club. Shnazzy.
In all honesty, I came to the site by googling "tall people" in an effort to be more "aware" of those great mutants like myself. A fascinating group of pages pops up. Steven Landsburg has an old Slate article that concludes that it isn't the way people see tall people that makes them more successful than the average. Instead, the self-esteem that we get while adolescents gives us a great little push through life (Good for us!). Noted in the article is the fact that early youth has little to do with permanent self-esteem in tall folk. I can attest to this. Being a gentle giant type only gets a person made fun of in the early years. People expect a bully or something, I don't know. Anyway, high school was where I hit my stride and although not everything in life is clicking even now (maybe a lot isn't clicking), I definitely feel like that higher gear is there if I keep trying to hit it. Being tall probably has something or other to do with that confidence.
For now, being tall in Bulgaria as a Peace Corps Volunteer means that every doorframe, tree branch, and piece of rebar is out to get me. Pretty much it, really. I also get asked daily about the old height. In America I'd joke that people asked me every day about how tall I was, even if it was, maybe, once a week. Here it's a reality. Strangers come up to me in the center of town and ask how tall I am. The number 201 (cm) has been burned into my Bulgarian memory. It's pleasant, in its way, I seem more comfortablt with the tall conversation here than I did in America. In America I always wanted to come up with something clever and it probably made me look like I was brushing people off. Here I just run through the paces like I do with any basic Bulgarian conversation. Usually, the strangers just keep walking on, awed by the power of the number, I guess.
So, Awareness? No, I don't need awareness. Maybe those with Marfans could use a hand every now and then, and I hope that's what TCI means in its intro. For me, I'm just happy to be tall and know that it's probably the one thing about me that will never change.
Today was supposed to see a school sports gathering happen at a picnic ground south of town. It almost did happen, but it rained last night, and everything was in doubt from the get-go. We started at the school, all of the students gathered outside and the teachers all in the lounge. Then came 20 minutes of loud discussion over what should be done. The final decision came to walking.
So we walked, about 500 students all moving in a giant column toward the picnic ground. I went with some of my students from last year and remembered why I had such fun with them but also why they were so incredibly annoying a lot of the time. We'd be talking about something or other in English for two minutes and one of them would come up and say "Mr. Young, Gergana hit me. She's STUPID!" and I'd shudder. They're in ninth grade now, it's time for them to stop acting like prechoolers, in my humble opinion. Not that my opinion on that matters much to them, they take me thinking they're monkeys as a badge of honor.
So 45 minutes of complaining and moaning and volcabulary discussion later, we arrived at the picnic ground. It was soggy. Unusable. So we all turned around and walked back. Two of them started smoking when their class teacher was out of sight, and that led to me giving them a guilt trip the whole way back to school. When we arrived, everyone went their separate ways, the day was over. So, that's why I'm at the internet club a bit earlier than usual today. Good times.
Also making life better is the recent opening of a grocery store near the school where a person can actually hold and touch the food before buying it. And you can use baskets and everything else...It's not a supermarket. That won't open for another month or two, but it's better than the usual guessing game I have to play at the corner stores around here. "Is this the spaghetti you want?" "Nope! Try again!" "This one?" "Nope." Now I can just grab the spaghetti and go. Convenient.
Finally, today, the Young family is seriously peeved about Kerry's latest attempt to please everybody. I agree with Mom and sister that it's a little late in the game to start kissing the collective ass of Bush's base. He needs to remember that for every NRA good ol' boy he picks up by parading around with dead birds, he'll lose nine PETA vegans to Nader. Kerry hasn't really been on a roll lately, what with his wife going around cracking Laura's work ethic and his own gaffe about Cheney's daughter. If Bush manages to win this, Karl Rove will go down as the best campaign man never to have gone up against a good campaign. And we all know that Rove's legacy is what this election is really about.
When you're teaching literature to eleventh graders for one year in Bulgaria, you want to take your chances on some things. After giveing them Shakespeare's over-studied sonnets 18 and 130 two weeks in a row, yesterday we talked about a play I've never heard of anyone really studying, "Troilus and Cressida." I chose it for a couple of reasons. They'd already studied "Hamlet" in Bulgarian last year, for one, and that would be the one standard I'd go for. Another big factor was the popularity of "Troy" around these parts. I wanted to show them that 400 years ago Shakespeare had written something about that battle just as entertaining and unfaithful to the original story as that Brad Pitt thing that played for three weeks here in town.
It's really not one of Shakespeare's best plays, but it is a fun and reasonably easy read, with themes we'd already talked about in class. Immortality through fame is part of both sonnet 18 and T+C, and they connected on that. The oddest thing about the play is Achilles' anger. He's not not fighting because Agamemnon took away his woman, he's sitting it out because, as the other characters say "he's proud." Why Shakespeare never mentioned the woman factor is beyond me. He might have been trying to secretly highlight the "relationship" between Achilles and his Robin, Patroclus. Patroclus is almost a main character in the play.
Anyway, I don't want to analyze it too deeply here. I just think the students had a good time with it, and I'm glad I took a shot at a play I don't think any of them would have to read unless they absolutely devoted themselves to English. It turned out to be a great lesson. That's all.
A couple of months ago I asked my Bulgarian tutor to start coming up with short stories for me to read. With short stories I could see new words and phrases, their context, and also pick up some of the finer points of grammar. This has worked out pretty well. Every lesson is a new story and a new glimpse into Bulgarian culture. After every lesson she has me write a 10 line story similar to the one we just read, so I've also gotten very good at dreaming up and writing in Bulgarian very short fairy tales on the spot.
Most of the stories we've been reading lately have been about a fellow called Hitur Peter, or "Clever Peter". Pete's a smart kid, with an intellect not unlike Bugs Bunny's, who helps out the mentally disadvantaged while outsmarting the rich or mean. So far I've read stories where Pete has proven that his boss' wife doesn't love him as much as his dog; stolen pears from a Bulgarian Scrooge while pretending to be an angel; returned a collection of fez hats to their merchant after a gang of monkeys had stolen them; and twice outsmarted an Anatolian Turk who thought he was smarter than everyone.
Today's (the one about the Turk) was pretty typical and classic Hitur Peter. The Turk travels to Bulgaria to challenge Peter to a duel of lies. Peter starts the challenge while holding up a fence he's repairing. He agrees to the match, but asks the Turk to hold up the fence while he runs to the house to grab his bag of lies. The Turk, honorable and brilliant man that he is, agrees to the request and Peter runs off around town, chatting up the ladies and having a good time. HITUR PETER: 1 TURK: 0
The next day, the p.o'd Turk asks Peter to take a walk through a forest. He tells Peter that in Turkey there are two suns, the rabbits lay eggs in the upper reaches of trees, and the donkeys fly on fast wings. Peter, clever boy that he is, doesn't buy any of it. All the lying makes the Turk hungry and the two of them see a rich guy hanging out around his sheep. Peter lays a footstep trail that inspires the rich guy to go after his shoes while Peter grabs one of the sheep and bolts.
The Turk and Peter get to Peter's house and Peter tells the Turk that he isn't going to get any of the sheep. The Turk doesn't believe it, and moments later Pete says he needs to go to the kitchen to grab some salt. In the kitchen he shouts something about the rich guy being there and beating him and that the rich guy is coming after the Turk (All of this made me think of the scene in The Godfather where Michael offs the police chief and Solazzo. If you can think of two reasons why, you get a cookie). The Turk buys it and bolts (PETER: 2 TURK: 0) and the narrative uses a very interesting line. Translated it reads: "The Turk spat on his heels and ran." Unfamiliar with those who spit on their heels, I asked my tutor about it. She said that, like those who spit on their hands before heavy-lifting, a runner would do the same before running. It's a figure of speech, and an interesting one at that. The story pretty much ends there. Peter is victorious and the Turk is on his soggy-footed way back to Turkey.
After some questions about the story, my tutor then asked me to write a similar tale about two liars. I thought a bit, and came up with this (mind you, it was on the spot and in Bulgarian):
Two Americans are living in Bulgaria. One's called Paul and the other Bill. They both think they're smart fellows. Bill tells Paul that he could fall from from the seventh floor of a block without injury. Paul, unfamiliar with the world of Bulgarian apartment blocks, believes him and Bill jumps. Bill suffers the fate of all who jump from the seventh floor of any building. Paul is distraught, he's on the losing side of a very good lie and has no chance of getting Bill back because, well, Bill's dead. So he thinks day and night and comes up with a plan. He shouts at the top of his lungs "I'll never see you again, Bill!"
80 years later, in the afterlife of your choice, Bill sees Paul and comes up to him. "It was a great lie, Paul. I believed it until just now." THE END.
I don't know. My tutor thought it was fiunny. And like every one of the stories I get from my own students, it has death as a primary plot point. It can make for morbid reading, but what's a guy gonna do? At least they're dealing with mortality. One student of mine even had his hero's girlfriend get it in the head with a falling icicle. What's a little falling from great heights when you have girls getting killed by icicles?
So we have lying, death, and stealing as principal themes in Bulgarian storytelling. Can't argue with that. It's probably better than the witch-killing in Hansel and Gretel or Snow White, or the almost ritual maimings of Looney Tunes. Maybe we all have to grow up with a little cartoon violence.
So why not say it anyway, then? Much of my time at the internet club has been used bouncing around Wikipedia, lately. It's addictiveness has been praised before by others, but that site's amazing. A person could spend hours there, read about everything and learn nothing beyond trivia. Absolutely fantastic.
Knowledge-gaining is even weaker on the TV front. CNN and Euronews have nearly round-the-clock election coverage. Euronews, people! Look, I'm all for the world participating in the U.S.'s affairs, but the fact is that this race is too close to call. The French and Germans will learn nothing from seeing Bush say for the thousandth time that Kerry did nothing in the Senate. Unless one or the other of them strips and starts bouncing around in front of whatever haybales or bushels of apples they're stumping in front of, it isn't news. And even then, I wouldn't want to see it.
At least, fascinatingly enough, it takes some of the attention off Iraq and the stories of car bombings and mutilations in Falluja don't occupy the first headline of the half hour. Now the reports from day to day seem to mold together and form one contiguous mass of "Iraq is messed up." I'm sure good things happen in Iraq, but you can't expect Walt Rogers or any of CNNs correspondents to report on them. Blood on the streets is far too interesting.
I want peace in Iraq, I want Iraq to be a stable country. I know the media is supposed to be objective, but when terrorists use the media to gain attantion, doesn't the media have an obligation to humans to not show each and every thing their darling freedom fighters do? Maybe they could show a story of an Iraqi finding work. It may not be happenening everywhere, but it is happening. Let's see some of that.
Uggh. Basically, I'm laying low this weekend and watching too much TV, and with MTV doing "Hip Hop Weekend" and Cartoon Network still in French, I shift to the news for mindless entertainment. Always a mistake.
Odd that I have to re-type an entry called "Rebuilding." The computer here at the internet club burped while showing me the preview page and all was lost. I usually try to copy entries before trusting a Bulgarian internet club connection, but I let it go this time. Oh well.
It's getting cold here. It felt like winter this morning, although that was just an illusion brought on by unexpected chilly hands and visible breath. So what does winter mean in Silistra, Bulgaria, you ask? Construction time! At least 10 new mid-sized projects have begun in the past two months. The biggest and most important of these is the construction of a large building near my school. A large building that is rumored to soon become a Billa. Billas are large, yellow, Austrian, grocery stores that can be found in just about evry major city in Bulgaria. In Billas a customer can touch food before buying it (A luxury, believe me), ride down aisles on the back of shopping carts, and find an actual selection of food instead of whatever wholesale product the momandpop on the corner stocks. The rumor is that it will be finished in November, to which I give a resounding HA! But if it does open next month, it will make my life much easier and happier.
Currently making my life easier and happier is Peace Corps--Bulgaria, which is doing everything it can to make my wallet rebuilding process as easy as possible. It's all going very easily and well and I've actually had to do very little, although that will change when I get the police report from Sofia and have to start in on the ID card process. PC-B is really the best group of people a person could ask for for a safety net. They take care of 200 volunteers and give each and every opne unending attention if needed and sufficiently ignore those who don't want or need attention. Any stories you hear about Peace Corps not taking care of its people is bunk. Pure bunk.
But, because of the prospect of a Billa, because of a rapidly rebuilding wallet, and because--with each 11th grade literature class I teach--I'm getting closer to being sure that I want to teach English in universities, because of all that, life is getting peachy. Pure peachy.
Well, I've been meaning to update for a while, but things kept cropping up. Friday night I went down to Sofia on the midnight bus. I was going to play some American flag football and hang out in the evening. It was going to be good times. And it was, for a little bit.
I got in to Sofia at 8 in the morning. The bus ride had been good. I didn't get a perfect night's sleep (I don't think I ever have on a bus), but I got some sleep. I went to Peace Corps headquarters, muddled around the internet for a bit, looking for news on the debate, then just before ten, I took a taxi over to the National Sports Academy for some football.
Surprisingly, there were even more people there, ready to play, than there had been in spring. At least six teams of more than seven players were there with each player putting up eight leva for the orphanage fund. Flag football here has a short but already infamous history. First, the B-14s have won the tournament both times, mostly because they have a speedy little former high school quarterback who runs much better than he throws, and he throws really well. It's still nice to watch the B-14s beat, say, the Marines' team, but the streak has got to end sometime.
The second major thing about the tournament is that bad things happen. People inevitably get hurt, for one thing. I think 3 people were medivac'd to America for reasons related to last spring's tourney (they all came back, fortunately). This year hasn't seen a medivac yet, but a kidney got bruised, a head was smacked severely, and my wallet and cell phone were stolen.
You see, the weather was perfect for fall, crisp clear and warm. Everybody was playing in shorts, but wearing pants everywhere else. What you got then, was a side of the field covered in pants stuffed into backpacks. Some pants were tossed loosely near backpacks. Mine were completely in my backpack. However, when I came back from the first game I played (We--a mix of volunteers--beat a Bulgarian rugby team by a touchdown. They couldn't throw, but they could run and they were huge. They were scary more than good. Still, we won!), I noticed right away that my wallet wasn't in the pocket as it should be. That, as one would expect, freaked me out a little.
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I didn't want to make much of a fuss. These missing wallets usually tend to turn up at somebody's feet and the person who freaked out about it usually gets chuckled at. So I quietly searched every pocket of my backpack and clothing until I was sure it was there. Then I noticed that my cell phone, too, was missing. That gets a person's attention.
So I went loud and started telling people, and when it got to one of the admin guys at the game, a full announcement was made telling people to watch out for their stuff. Anyway, the wallet and phone are gone.
After the day had ended, I went to a nearby police station to file a report. Not because I enjoy going to Bulgarian police stations and filing reports about things I know are gone, but because I need a police report to get a new Bulgarian ID card. Amazingly, and this was the American Football Day Miracle, the police station was filled to the brim with really nice people. My friend and I sat down, and one of the officers asked us very politely if we wanted to fill out the forms ourselves or have another officer help us out by listening to our Bulgarian and doing it on a typewriter. We opted, of course, for the latter.
That introduced us to Krassimir, who was easily the nicest public servant or customer service person I have met in Bulgaria. He didn't know English, but he made jokes, helped us out when we made the odd mistake, and didn't get angry when we didn't know exactly what we were supposed to say or do next. It was pretty incredible, and if you ever lose anything in Sofia, I recommend that you do it Studentski Grad, so you can go to the station there. Highly recommended.
So instead of having a night of fun, I took the fifty leva advance I had gotten from one of the admin guys at the game and went home to Silistra by 1 AM bus. Yay!
The next morning, one more night of less than perfect sleep later, I got home and was relaxing when my home phone rang. Apparently there were two Alaskans in town and they'd be at a church service in town.
So, having never been to a church service in Bulgaria, and wanting to meet some Alaskans, I took a quick shower, dressed up a bit, and hurried downtown to the Protestant church. Interesting thing, a church service here. It was part Christian rock concert and part revival, with the younger Alaskan, a great guy named Jonathon, presiding over the revival duties. There was some great translation as just about every outstanding English speaker in town goes to that church, which is an interesting coincidence I have yet to explore. People were healed, and Jonathon, some of the basketball regulars, and I arranged a game for four o'clock.
Had lunch, coffee with a friend in the center, then some basketball. Turned out to be a great day that I would have missed if my wallet and phone hadn't been stolen. Strange how these thing work out.
For now, I have to focus on getting the wallet rebuilt and, more exaclty, run off to Bulgarian lessons, which I'm late for. The exciting details of my rebuilding the old wallet will follow, I'm sure.
Well, according to what I've been gleaning from Euronews and a few other very quiet sources lately, Bulgaria and Romania are trudging ever closer to a successful 2007 entry into the EU. Bulgarians--my students, their parents, my tutor--are even beginning to sound optomistic about the date. It could actually happen! Great for Bulgaria, great for the EU.
More interesting these days is the thought of Turkey beginning its talks next year and perhaps, in a decade, the EU forming a continuous economic body with a border hitting Georgia (!), Syria (!), and Iraq (!). If the EU was freaking about the Polish border with Ukraine, maybe it's time Brussels look ahead and help improve the situation with its probable future neighbors. If Iraq were going to be your neighbor in ten years, and you had the capacity to improve it if you'd just build some goodwill, wouldn't you want to do everything you can to make it better, even if it weren't immediately profitable?
Furthermore, I'd think that Europe would have a vested interest in making Syria less of a haven for terrorists, unless it wants Al Qaeda pouring through Turkey's currently sieve-esque borders and having a free, passport-less road into London, Paris, and Madrid. Europe might want to stop worrying about an adultery law that was just plain zany to begin with and start focusing on the long-term, life and death problems having Turkey as a neighbor will create.
The benefits of a European bridge direct to the Middle East will be incredible, but it'd be nice to see the EU have a hand in getting some of the problems out of the way first. Or they could sit around and complain about Muslims wearing religious apparel in schools and the American effort to introduce democracy into the countries they'll soon call the Joneses. I mean, really, would France and Germany really rather have had Saddam as an economic neighbor?...Wait, don't answer that.
Point is, whatever hard feelings most EU nations may have towards Bush and his desire to see right prevail, it's in their own, very personal, interest to get into Iraq and make it better, and to get diplomatically involved in Syria and make it better, and maybe even start sending some money Georgia's way. It'll be expensive, but nobody ever said expansion was cheap.
I've decided that every Monday after school I'll set aside an hour for my old eighth graders (presently ninth graders) to come in and have a chat if they want. Kind of like office hours, I suppose. Today was the first day of it and it went pretty well. They all have their own private little agendas for the class, things they really want to talk about, vocabulary, the detritus of being fourteen.
Today, the guys rushed in early and wanted to talk sports. One of them spent a while telling me about an Englishman married to a cousin who came in for the weekend and bet with him on the weekend's soccer matches. Apparently there are booking rules in Bulgaria. The last thing I think I understood was that you have to place at least 3 bets if you want to place one. This makes a certain amount of sense for bookies, but also seems to demand that bettors spread their wealth a little and put some money on a safe bet. Throwing a few on Arsenal any given weekend would probably be a good way to make up some money if Middlesborough boffs it. I don't bet--it wouldn't add any more fun to the games for me, and frankly, betting on soccer is just plain confusing--but it's fun to analyze the strategy going on there.
After warping their fragile little minds by listening to them lecture me about gambling in Bulgaria, I temporarily appeased some of the other kids by going over stuff from their science classes. They're in to learning the technical side of the language, I guess, and good for them. Today was a bit of mechanical physics. Fulcrums and levers and stuff.
Then it kind of ended all of a sudden when they all had practices to run off to. Some went to soccer, some to judo, and another to tennis. Good kids, all of them. It's fun to hang out with them again.
The Ambassador, James Pardew, is in Silistra for a couple of days and with him came one of the great headlines I've seen on a front page: "Pardew Brings Money." He has with him a contract for a grant that he'll sign in order to give money for the rennovation of Silistra's mosque, but he's more or less here sightseeing and meeting with luminaries and company owners and having breakfast with a couple of volunteers.
He and his wife invited me and the new sitemate to breakfast at Silistra's hotel in the center of town. The usual fare from that place, a nice, warm, continental buffet. It was a great conversation, bouncing around the life of a volunterr, life in Bulgaria, and things of not terribly great importance but not overly pleasant or formal ideas either. It was a good time, and I got to have a cup of coffee and a good breakfast before I ran off to school, which was a bit of gravy on top of the whole thing. He asked us if we'd seen the debate, and we all chuckled about that. That one question was pretty much the extent of the political conversation at the breakfast table.
None of us had seen the debate, what with it being on at 4 in the morning and my not willing to get up that early to hear the same old stuff out of the same old mouths. I would love to hear John Kerry say, just once, that he voted for the Iraq war in good faith but that Bush made the wrong decisions before, during, and after the war as far as planning went. Furthermore, I'd love to hear him give a point by point plan on how he would solve the problems there without going Spain and pulling the troops out right away. He could even publish a book about it, that would be pleasant and profitable. He would argue that he has done all this, but he really hasn't.
He can't say he's argued this because he insists that Bush gave the French and German governments the finger and that they would have loved to have kicked Saddam out if Bush had only gone along with the UN. Well, they never would have agreed to it. They were set on running their own coalition, one that just happened to go against the "empire" they resent.
I think mistakes, significant, tragic mistakes, have been made in Iraq, and by all parties concerned. I think France and Germany and even little Belgium should be there aiding the democratic ideal their governments are founded on. I think Bush should admit to making mistakes and provide a plan to prevent further mistakes along the same lines. I think we need to win in Iraq and win beyond all doubt. And I'd like to hear Kerry say that.
The thing is I think Kerry believes all that, saying it would just mean leaving the comfort zone of his base a little more than he'd like. I don't think Bush believes the things I'd like to hear him say, in a battle of greater or lesser evils (and this rivals Kang and Kodos. It really does) my mind was set on John "Kodos" Kerry before this debate. I just wish he'd do a little more that I agree with. Like every American, I suppose.