I forgot the disk. It was a pretty long day. All of the teaching was out of the textbooks, so it was kind of a grind. Anyway, I'll try to get to the club tomorrow with pictures and a longer entry. For now, it's off to Bulgarian lessons and then some heavy relaxing.
Well, Thanksgiving dinner was a gathering of four Americans and three Bulgarians. The Americans did the cooking and we made porkchops, applesauce, mashed potatoes, gravy, and apple pie. It was a great meal. To simulate watching TV in America, we watched Die Hard on DVD, guessing that USA would probably be having one of their "Action Thanksgving" weekends. Unfortunately, we were left without any kind of football to watch, but losses had to be felt somewhere.
The cat, Yuli, had some problems with the sudden massive influx of people into an apartment that is usually pretty quiet. She started out checking everybody who came in, then started getting frisky and nibbly to the point where Jody thought she needed to go into the bedroom for a while. While she was in there, she impressed everyone (myself included) by jumping up, pulling down on the door handle, and walking back into the living room with all of us. Later on, she still stayed in the living room, watching people, but she did it from her hding places around the room and started to freak out whenever somebody got near her. The next day, she was back to her normal self in a more quiet apartment.
Summary: Good time had by all, minus the cat, maybe, but otherwise another successful Thanksgiving.
On the administrative front, I've decided to stop the comments section. It's just a bit too high maintenance for me when I only have an hour or two to spend at the internet club every day (I can't get cable internet at my apartment and I don't really want dial-up. Plus going to the club gets me out and about). So if you have anything to say, go ahead and send an e-mail and we can chat that way. If it's particularly important, I'll toss it up on the site.
So that's that. Should be more to come tomorrow. Pictures probably, too.
I'm grateful for being in a great country that still shows me something new every day, whether it's good or bad. And if we're talking about being somewhere, I'm glad to be in a country where I only got to see every angle of the Ron Artest--Detroit brawl once, and never had to hear a single commentator spend fifteen minutes analyzing it and/or defend Ron Artest. What I got from World Sport was just enough to see that Ron Artest did not start fighting the person who actually threw the cup at him, but instead went after every person in the crowd other than the guy who threw the cup. It also proved that Stephen Jackson is insane.
Along the same lines, I'm happy to be working for a great organization that keeps a good watch over me and never makes me forget for even a day that they're there. Proving once again that Peace Corps provides much better security than the Palace in Detroit.
I'm happy to have a cat, even if she stubbornly refuses to accept water as a place to do her business. The experiment is slowly failing. Sigh.
I love that I teach at a school that continues to show an effort in improving discipline, no matter how much the Ministry of Education keeps their hands tied. I just spent the last hour looking up American codes of conduct so they can have examples of what works. I told them that American schools aren't exactly pillars of discipline either, but they wouldn't really buy it. Basically, the answer these codes of conduct provide is detention, which the Ministry won't allow, as I understand it. But hopefully they'll find something useful in there.
I adore the idea of my students instantly connecting the idea of Thanksgiving with "POIKA!" (Bad transliteration? Well, that's how it sounds when they shout it, so work with me). American kids don't instantly draw a one word summary out of the holiday like that. I don't think I've ever heard a class in America shout "Turkey!" The eighth graders also had a lot of fun with the idea of looking for a cookable turkey. Turkeys here are (usually) only in villages and are very much alive until their owner finishes them off and brings them into the house to cook. A turkey isn't a city bird, and Bulgarians aren't quite as sold on them as lunch meat as Americans are. So they're a bit of a village delicacy.
I'm not very big on the fact that, for the second year in a row, I'll have to work on Thanksgiving, even if it is for only two hours. But I'm eternally grateful for having friends to celebrate it with in the town where I live. And hopefully one of us will figure out how the hell my oven works by tomorrow night.
Beyond all this though, I'm thankful for having friends, pets, and family back home who read the site and e-mails, send packages, and support me here more than I'd ever hope to expect. You guys keep me going.
I'll be home cooking or eating for most of tomorrow, so I won't really have time to come to the internet club and say...
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
I'm coming out of a good, long weekend. A wedding Saturday followed the necessary drinks and celebrations Friday. The wedding was an American/Bulgarian affair, and civil was the way to describe it. There were about 15 guests in the "Ritual Room" at Silistra's cultural center. Jody, the American and the groom, walked down the aisle, stood to the side, and waited for Radost to come along with her father.
I stood at the front of the group of people on the right and took photos, acting as one-half of the photography team Jody had "hired" before the wedding. Next to me, a DJ was popping cds in and out of a changer, jumping from march to march and throwing in a quiet violin bit whenever the woman presiding over the ceremony began speaking after consulting her notecards and putting them back up her sleeve.
Not a very long ceremony, the usual questions (only this time in Bulgarian) and a couple of "da"s and most of it was over. The rings came out in a box designed like a rose that somebody working for the center held very regally by the stem. There was a bit of trouble getting the rings to fit, but they finally went on the right hands and everybody was happy.
Following that came a short reception line, where the audience got to congatulate the family and witnesses, then we all filed out to the center's foyer for chocolates and photos. The photos, like the rest of the procedure, didn't take nearly as long as they usually do at these things. Everybody even got pictures with their own cameras. The Americans all huddled together for a patriotic group shot and we all went outside and joked with Jody before everybody went their separate ways to rest up for the dinner.
An hour later the remaining non-married American contigent walked to a nearby restaurant for the dinner with our Bulgarian friend Stasko. Radost's family threw a terrific dinner, and everybody ate and drank until they'd had what they needed. There wasn't a wedding cake, and only a couple of presents were exchanged, but the emotions were great and everybody was having the kind of time you expect at wedding dinners.
A long night later, I woke up Sunday and spent the day doing the sort of lazy apartment-oriented things a person does after two big nights of partying. As it happens the apartment-working is necessary because I'll most likely be hosting THANKSGIVING SILISTRA 2004 on Thursday. Actually, if anyone's in the area and wants to join in, there'll be more than enough to go around. That's what this whole Thanksgiving thing is about, anyway.
Today started off interestingly enough. Since last Friday a teachers' strike had been arranged for the first hour of classes. It's a national thing about percentage increases, the usual union stuff. The amazing bit was that the students didn't know it was coming. It was the one time where the student body at the school didn't know what was happening long before the teachers.
As part of Peace Corps, I'm not supposed to participate in strikes. And as someone who sees unions as a necessary evil, I would probably never help out in a strike from a union I don't belong to. So I was left with an interesting group of choices this morning. I chose to just relax.
When the strike began, the hall flooded with students, all shouting, some shouting "strike" in Bulgarian. My students all gave me a crazy look like the one a dog would get when it's in a car and it sees a group of dogs rolling in poop in a nearby park. Now, this class is in a tight battle with another one for my least favorite class to teach. There are some great students in it, but there's this terrible chemistry that gets everybody talking and not stopping. Going through 45 minutes of class with them as pretty much the only students inthe building would be hell. I have them for two hours, anyway.
So I turned a blind eye, watched them bolt from the building, and sat down to catch up on a bit of reading. They all came back for the second hour, and on time, too. We actually accomplished everything I'd planned for the day. So the strike actually worked out pretty well.
The rest of the day was pretty cakish. I finished my work at the school soon after that class and went home to take a three hour nap. I'll be going to see Dogeball tonight. Tomorrow's Friday. So I really have nothing to complain about. Good times.
Last night I got to see the traditional Bulgarian rakia-making process. Rakia, for those not in the know, is what everybody around here calls "Bulgarian brandy." It comes in many fruity flavors, the most common is grape, but around Silistra a lot of people like to make it out of apricot. It being a little late in the year for apricot, we distilled some grapes last night.
A friend of mine here in town invited me to help out a friend of his who was distilling 100 liters or so in one of Silistra's boilers. Interesting process. Mostly because the process has little to do with the end result. The grapes and fermentation are what matter. Once the liquid and pulp go into the boiler you can add some sodium bicarb if you're afraid of an acid taste, but other than that you're stuck with what you've grown.
The kazan, or boiler, or distillery, we used was a good sized shack just outside of town on the road to Varna. Apparently, these kazans keep a hectic schedule and all three of its distillers are in constant use through the fall. So we arrived there on a suddenly cold November night and huddled around the warm door waiting for the three groups inside to finish their distilling. Inside was warm enough from the three fires burning under the boilers, but it was also coated in flies. They say it's worse in early fall when fruit juice coats everything and the flies don't care if they're in or out, but it was still pretty bad. Two flypaper strips hung down from the ceiling and, as long as a fly slipped into one of the millimeter cracks between the thousands of corpses on each sheet, they did their job.
When it was our turn, we hauled two big plastic barrels full of wine pulp up near the door and brought up a good pile of sticks and wood. As we did this, the kazan's manager cleaned out the boiler we were going to use. He popped open the lid and shoveled all of the remaining mess inside out a hole in the back where it landed with a steaming thud among the cooler remains of all the other unused bits from past distillings. These bits get combined with other fertilizers and are put back into the earth. Circle of life stuff, indeed.
When everything was ready, we poured the wine pulp into smaller buckets and brigaded it into the boiler. When the boiler was full, the manager closed it up and we put more wood onto the dying fire below. Then we sat and waited for the first drops. Distilling liquid into hard liquor is one of the things that I can't imagine ever being invented. I'm sure I could look up the exact minute-by-minute account of the opening days of liquor distillation, but it's better to imagine a few guys sitting around, drinking wine, and one saying "You know, Ivan, I'll bet if we took this here wine and boiled the living hell out of it, then passed it through some cool water so it would turn back to liquid, then drank the product--you know I just think we'd get drunk a hell of a lot faster. You think?" and they try it and by gum, it works.
So while we were waiting for our own rakia to have all hell boiled out of it, we sat and talked about various liquor making processes. Whiskey gets mosts of its taste from the oak it sits around in and the water it's made from, vodka's tasteless vodka, and rakia gets its taste from the fruit. So really, it doesn't matter what you do to the stuff before or after you distill it. I went through the options with the guys there. Storing rakia in wood wouldn't change the taste that much, but it would yellow the color. Storing it in plastic is just as good, and cheaper, apparently. There are, as always, some benefits from letting it sit in bottles for a while, but when you come right down to the basics, it's the fruit. That makes it unique among most of the hard stuff you can get around Bulgaria. Bulgarians, the guys said, could never make whiskey because no Bulgarian would have the patience to sit and wait a year or two for it to become just right.
When the first drops of rakia came out of the distiller, about a half an hour after we had closed the lid on the boiler, the manager shoveled some of the coals from the fire into the kazans barbecue and we did a bit of an optional ritual. We had bought some sausages and bread before we came and we went outside and cooked up some dinner with the very fire boiling the rakia. The sausages cooked to perfection and the four of us cleared two plates and a loaf of bread. Then we tested and tried some of the rakia.
It tasted strong enough, as it should have. At its best, the first rakia out of the distiller should test at around 60% alcohol, the last out should be 30% and a good final number somewhere around 45% alcohol for the whole product. The stuff we made came out at 55%, which left satisfaction but no leaping for joy. When the process was all over, about 4 or 5 hours later, the stuff we made came out to around 16 or 17 liters of 40% alcohol. Not too bad for a night's work.
Most, if not all, of that rakia will go to the friends and family of the guy who brought the wine pulp. I'm not a die-hard rakia fan myself. I'll drink a cup or two of it at parties for toasting's sake, but I'm certainly no alcoholic. Anyway, rakia's part of the process that keeps Bulgaria going during the winter, and never has that season seemed so ominous as it did this morning when, while I was staring out a window at the morning's rain and wind, one of my students said "Now you'll get to know what a real Bulgarian winter is." After reminding her that I'd been here last winter, she said "I know, but they say that this one will be the coldest in ten years." and then she walked off to talk on her phone. Spooky.
Well, I can understand why the Bulgarian in "The Terminal" hasn't been a huge deal around here. Tom Hanks mumbles most of it, and what's there isn't much. There are a couple of "opa"s that the crowd in the theater laughed at, but the rest is muttled "kasvam se"s in an accent that, in my view, was more Russian than Bulgarian.
Good movie though. I'm not exactly sure why Spielberg is giving all of his movies a glow from light these days, but it worked less in this one than anything he's used it in going back to AI. I think the movie would have worked a little bit better if it weren't so much a fairy tale. Nevertheless, it was a fun two hours and not a bad way to spend a lev fifty.
The news all over the stations I have here is that Arafat died last night. Almost the full half hour is given to his life and death on Euronews, and his terrorist activity is mentioned maybe once. Israel is mentioned maybe twice. He was a man who struggled his whole life for peace, apparently. This is why I hate that Euronews has to be one of my primary news sources.
For something completely different, the cat toilet-training has finally turned a corner. She has all four paws on the toilet seat when she does her business now. I can now attempt to slowly remove the litter in the bowl within the toilet bowl and replace it with water. Then the bowl will go away altogether. At least that's the theory. We'll see how it goes.
Terminal's a fun word. It can also be a tragic word. It has a sense of finality to it and it also implies travel. According to IMDB, about 50 movies have the word "terminal" in the title. And one of them is playing at the theater in town this week.
Anyway, tonight I'm taking a break from grading tests and going to see "The Terminal," where, apparently unbeknownst to my Bulgarian students, Tom Hanks speaks Bulgarian for part of film. When I tell my classes that I've heard he speaks Bulgarian in the movie, they look at me like I'm telling the lamest joke they've ever heard. Then when they finally figure out that I'm telling the truth, they look surprised and start talking and suddenly have some desire to see the movie. When I tell them that his wife, Rita Wilson, is herself Bulgarian, they seem not to care so much.
So hopefully The Terminal will mean a little stress relief from the worries of a busy week. It's been hectic, but fun, I guess. Review of the movie to come.
For some reason, this weekend I decided that I was at a point in my peace Corps service where I could do a complete apartment reset and clean-up, and have it last until the final cleaning when I leave. Having an apartment last for nine months until I leave in July, with only small maintenance clean-ups to keep it going, seems a bit hard to me. Hopefully what I did this weekend will make it okay.
What I did was a complete old-papers purge, book organization, bathroom and kitchen cleaning, and floor scrubbing. Laundry was also thrown in to boot. I'm pretty happy with the way the apartment turned out. It looks new, but lived-in, with books on the shelves and everything arranged. If only I can keep it this way.
On the real work front, last week was test week so this week will be grading week. Not fun times, tedious times, and I actually have to get back to them. But last week went surprisingly well. My new system for getting the cheaters and talkers worked much better than I expected. The old system suffered because it played by American rules. I was under the assumption that is I challenged a cheater, took away his/her test, and failed that person, the rest of the class would gasp, shake their heads, and slap a red C on that person's chest for the rest of the year. It may not always happen that way in America, but someone who gets caught cheating always seems to have that bad luck stigma attached to them.
Here in Bulgaria, cheating and talking during a test is inherent. When I tell them to be quiet, the students look at me like I'm violating a right. So, I've gone quiet too. Before each test I tell the class that I'm going to sit there with my own gradebook open, and if I see talking or cheating, I'll take down names and record the violations depenfing on how bad they are. Worked like a charm. There was absolute silence during every test. I was satisfied. There are still tests that have all the same wrong answers--that just comes from having students sit at tables for two--but those are usually the worst tests anyway, the students that get the best grades usually don't let the others cheat. They're nice that way.
We'll move on from yesterday and just cover the new in Silistra and Bulgaria. There's a new hotel, for one thing, it's on the river and a beaut. America's agricultural attache was the first guest to receive a bill at the hotel since he was passing through on his way to Romania. Great guy, actually, we had coffee and breakfast on his full day here and talked about life in Bulgaria. The embassy folks, on their visits, always seem to fill in some of the blanks, and there were a few detail questions I had about Bulgarian agriculture that he was able to answer.
The hotel though, is something. It has its four stars right under its name, Hotel Druster, above the doors. It's absolutely revitalized the east end of the park running along the river. It's the only area of the park that's well-lit at night now, and new pavement is being put in along the walkways on the approaches to the building itself. Although huge, the building is pretty well-hidden behind trees and you have to look for it if you're walking through the park. It's really a triumph, I'd say.
Last night there was a private party that came complete with guards in camouflage pacing the front entrance. Apparently, the president himself was there, but some have it that it was "only" the vice president. None of Silsitra's illustrious ex-pat community got an invitation, though, so I can only imagine that the party really wasn't worth going to.
And speaking of parties, Bulgarian TV has gotten really interesting all of a sudden. One of the national stations ran a marathon from what I think was the second season of "Beverly Hills: 90210" today, which was a season mostly of holiday parties, for some reason. It's great to see BH90210 here, though, I've tried to reference it in class a couple of times before, and none of the students had any idea what I was talkign about. Now they may have a better idea, and know how strangely Americans dressed in the early nineties.
Also, miraculously, Diema 2 has picked up NBA basketball. This morning, very early, I got to watch Memphis and Houston play live. It was an ESPN feed and they kept teasing the Spurs and Lakers, but Diema 2 cut off the coverage before I got to see the Lakers. Just as welll though, I imagine, seeing as how they lost. It may be a rough season. We'll see.
There was a lovely, long entry about politics, school, and Bulgarian life just sitting on the screen. I was reading it, checking for typos. It looked good. Then the power went out here at the internet club, and because I don't do these things in Word or save them, all was lost. I'll retype the content tonight and bring it all in tomorrow, because it was a pretty okay entry. But I'm far too cheesed-off to do anything about it right now. I'm going to read ESPN.com or play a game or something...See you tomorrow.
Well, it's all done now. Might as well pack up and go home. The elections over, Bush is in office again, and the world will wait for America to sink under the waves. Might as well sit back and wait for the four horsemen because I already hear the trumpets a-blowing...
Hey! The Lakers Won!!! And Chris Mihm did well. Good for him.
It's gotten cold here in Silistra, if you call high 40s cold, which I tend to do when I'm not in Alaska. And as is apparently the custom on the first cold day, several city blocks in Silistra had a scheduled brownout. This left me out of the internet club for a while, and my Bulgarian tutor and I worked on my lesson in darkness, but it's all better now. The heat will probably be on tonight.
Basically, I'm short on keen insights today. None of my students really cared about the US election when I asked them about it, but they could tell me the candidates, which is better than last year's could do with local elections. They'll know who the US president is, but they won't be able to tell me their mayor's name. Kids these days.
For what it's worth, all apocalypse talk aside, I think a Bush presidency will only heat up the world over the next four years, and I'd rather have a nice, calm world than a hot terrorist factory. Whether Kerry could have cooled things down I don't know, but I know Bush won't take things that way. Basically, the Bush win was sad news for me, but at least he has a reasonable mandate (Ohio aside), which will mean less backbiting, hopefully.
I'm hanging out in Sofia for just a few hours to take care of some medical and administrative fun things. Terrible bus ride in. It involved seven hours next to a chubby person who kept complaining about lights being on and never slept. Also, after a fun-filled Halloween weekend (I wore a kilt!) not sleeping more than a couple of hours on a crowded bus is not the way to get me going for the week.
Fortunately, I have Monday off, which explains my being in Sofia. There's a holiday of some kind that's just for teachers and students. Everybody else still has to work. Hardy har har, I say. it's about time. Peace Corps office gets American and Bulgarian holidays off. It's about time I get some holiday payback.
Ummm, details though, people like details. Well, Friday afternoon I had to do to Silistra's police station. It's always disconcerting when the house staff at the school runs up to you, urgently hands you a note from the police, and says they haven't the slightest idea what it's about. I spent the whole day pondering, and it turns out it was a pretty basic thing. You see, the case of my missing GSM is now being thoroughly covered by both Silistra and Sofia. Silistra even has a folder on it and I was on the other side of the country when the thing was stolen. There are at least two detectives trying to track down my secondhand Motorola, and I, sadly, can't give them too much help, not having the serial number they seem to so desperately want.
That was what my meeting with Silistra's detective was about, the serial number. He wanted to know if I'd found it yet, and after I said no, he and I hammered out a letter for the file and for Sofia on his ancient Goldstar word processor. He was certainly nice, all "zapoviadiete"s and "priyaten den"s, and he had a fascinating office. On one wall were these two yellowed maps. One was a giant map of the Balkans that charted each of the battle during Russia's war with the Ottoman Empire over Bulgaria's freedom. I actually learned a couple of things about the war just sitting there. There was also a map, posted high above shelves, of the world with CCCP front and center and big as life. East Germany was there too, and the U.S. was shoved far to the left, in a tiny corner. The map was torn and old, but it gave the room and the meeting a James Bond feel that I had fun with.
Later on that night, the first phase of Halloween Party: Silistra began in our local "jazz" club Infinity, where the local cover band was unveling their new singer. 12 years old and she looks and sounds 20, and the numbers sound alike in Bulgarian so I went through about five minutes thinking she was just a spritely little twenty year-old. She's scary good and was belting, absolutely belting American classics until 2 or 3 in the morning. She actually managed to triumph over a bad soundcheck, which is something the band always struggles with. Their singers have a tendency to disappear. And here she was at 12. Absolutely incredible.
A lazy Saturday melted into an early observation of Halloween. I, as noted, was wearing a makeshift kilt. The other Americans present were in a Harry Potter get-up and pajamas. The partying Bulgarians were also into it. There was a "rich villager" (A guy in dark shades and a bad, gray suit), a statement against Che Gueverra from a guy dressed as Che Gueverra, a pirate or two, and several things that I just never figured out. It was a good time, we all had our fill of food and drink, and went home happy.
And a long, Daylight Savings Sunday later brings us to Monday, where the weather, as it always is when I'm in Sofia, could be a little bit better. Oh well, I'm heading home in the afternoon. Tomorrow's a big test day that I have to gear up for.