Alaskan Bulgarian

Happy New Year!

Well, the always strange week between Christmas and the New Year is ending. Here, it's going out with a bang. All day long little firecrackers have been going off in the streets. One just went off about five feet from the internet club and really boomed. It's all well and good I suppose, although I feel like strangling the people I see throwing them. The holiday season has to be respected and that can best be done by blowing up small bits of your town. Perfectly understandable.

New Year's Eve is always a bit awkward until things start happening at 9 or 10. Here we have bombichki to level things out, but much of the day is still spent watching Sidney and Hong Kong and everyone celebrate first. I have no real idea what New Year's Eve was like before global news showed us how the rest of the world celebrates. I assume that everyone used to see midnight as the time and the rest of the day as a build-up. I guess a lot of people still see it that way. I've grown into seeing New Year's Eve as this rolling celebration where every city in every timezone has to play its part in moving the calendar along in style. Sidney has always had this big image in my mind as the source of it all, and they usually seem to throw a pretty big celebration over there.

And it always reminds me that I need to get to Australia at some point, if only to confirm that it isn't this mythological place that gets everything rightm as it is in my imagination. Throw them the Olympics, they nail it. The first New Year, every year? They nail it. An opera house, for pete's sake? They nail it. And there are picutres of Sidney all over a couple of the cafes here in Silistra, although that's probably an entirely unrelated coincidence.

Anyway, Happy New Year! I hope everyone has a great time and a prosperous 2005 filled with good health and promotions and fantastic life choices. I'm sure there's lots more I could put into a good toast, but you get the idea.

Rain

It's raining now, still not that cold, but raining. The rain really doesn't seem bad when you contrast it with the problems with water elsewhere in the world. I've never been quite so freaked out by any natural disaster as I am (still) by the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. Part of the reason for this is because CNN Int. is covering the disaster for 25 minutes in a half hour, and the Iraq bombing and Ukraine election in the other minute not given to ads. If I want news, I have to confront the disaster.

Most natural disasters a person can prepare for, but this one most have really been horrible. You've had a great Christmas, say, and you're sleeping in on the 26th in this really nice little beachside hut you got for a week on Phuket. You wake up when you here this booming sound, and think "Whe--Where'd the roof go?" Then the water drags you out to sea, and if you don't hit any debris, you're probably stuck a mile out by the time it's all over. And that's it. That's the end. Not just of a great vacation, but--unless you're a particularly good swimmer and very lucky--life. And then there are the tens of thousands who lost their livelihoods. It really gives me the shudders, 4 days later.

But, fortuantely, I have rain to deal with, and it's been raining since yesterday. It makes the choices necessary during a stay-at-home vacation awfully easy. I just stay at home, until I need to shop or visit the internet club. Then I hustle off and maybe buy a duner on the way for a snack. The time at home I spend cleaning, reading, and doing masses of laundry. It's all very relaxing and just what I was looking for.

Strange Days

It's warm out. And not warm in the "Yay! My fingers aren't freezing!" sense, but in the "Leave the coat at home and let's grab a cool drink at one of the tables outside" sense. Very strange two days after Christmas, which was pretty warm itself. Jody and I even played a little basketball on an 8 foot rim outside before the ball rolled in a bit of dogdoo and we couldn't play anymore.

That game came in the middle of a relaxed (okay, slightly boring) Christmas Day that came right after a great, fun Christmas Eve. Jody (A volunteer who arrived here a year before I did, isn't really doing anything anymore, but got married to a Bulgarian about a month ago), his wife Radost, and I took a bus down to her family's lodge near a town about a half hour south of Silistra. There we attempted to get into the Christmas spirit as quickly as possible. Most of two sides of Radost's family were there. It made for a total of about fifteen people, most of them kids. While the kids watched TV and played with presents, the elderly folk played games. Jody and I played ping pong (where he beat me), chess (where I beat him...badly), and dominos. We also played with other family members. Radost's dad is quite the chess player. I was only able to get him once, and that felt a bit like a consolation game.

Among all the fun, we ate and drank to our hearts' content. Tradition in Bulgaria holds that people shouldn't eat meat for forty days up to and including Christmas Eve. This has mutated a bit into just no meat on Christmas Eve, and Jody was even peeved when he learned that there wouldn't be meat like there had been last year. As soon as the news got to him, he fumed and kept saying how he couldn't wait for midnight, when Radost's dad was going to fire up some sausage on the grill.

Used to the whole vegetarian holiday thing, I ate until I was stuffed and then some. It was really good food. A couple kinds of salad, great bread, and my favorite regional food, sermi, which are these little balls of rice and other little bits rolled into grape leaves. I can pop those things into my mouth forever. Also served was the warmed and spiced rakia which I've been hearing so much about. You start to feel that stuff as soon as its near you and you take a breath. And, of course, there was enough Christmas toasting to make sure my lungs didn't get all of it.

After the dinner and games, most everybody headed off to their rooms, and Jody, Radost, Radost's dad, and I stayed in the living room, pluckign at little bits of food and talking about Bulgaria and politics and life. I'd hit my Bulgarian stride by then, I'd had some trouble communicating with the bus driver earlier in the day and was a bit afraid of a night of Bulgarian, but around midnight I was in Bulgarian zen. I understood all and could communicate all. Radost's dad even stood up and shook my hand when I'd rolled off a bit of 1 AM philosophy that his 1 AM philosophy agreed with.

Finally, and far too late, the living room was abandoned to me and the couch which had been apologetically assigned to the outsider (There was an unexpected side of the family and they really didn't have an extra room available just for me). I got a reasonable night's sleep and was a good, respectable part of the zombie herd the next morning. One interrupted game of basketball and a meat-filled lunch later, we piled into Jody's brother-in-law's car and he drove us back to Silistra.

I had to walk a short way back to the apartment, and on the way I dodged a few bombichki the adorable little rodent children are throwing around lately. They make this short little flare on the ground and then boom with a concussion big enough to set off any car alarms in a twenty foot radius. They're still going off. In my apartment I hear, during morning and sunset, an average of about 5 bombichki every fifteen minutes. Some are close, some are far away. Late at night, though, it's usually pretty quiet, thankfully. I'm told, and I expect, that it will get much worse nearer to New Year's Eve.

But it's warm, and I've gotten used to the blasts so that I don't even flinch if one is about ten feet away or more. I'd be great in a gunfight, I suppose. Another of the millions of benefits of being a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria! Who can complain?

Christmas Card

Not only does this picture cleverly wish everyone a Merry Christmas, it also reveals the goatee. But that's not really important. MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!

There's a touch of snow on the ground here, giving us the hint of a white Christmas, and I'll be spending the holiday with Jody and his new wife's family in a village near Dulovo.

Hope everyone enjoys themselves and eats enough of everything. I certainly will.

Compost

I love it when I have to explain strange words in class. It's always an exercise in lateral thinking. I'm going to be a heck of a "Taboo" player when I get back to America. Today's reading in my 11th class had such classics as "compost," "repository," and the always fun "stray." "Stray" is a good time because it always brings up stray dogs and the fact that they're picked up by animal control on sight in America. My students universally think this is the strangest thing they've ever heard.

Strays here live on the street until a city adopts a "clean-up" program and the population falls for a while. Silistra has quite a few strays that I've seen regularly for the past two years. One of the interesting things holding back a strong animal control program here is the cultural angst about euthanasia. Animals are rarely put to sleep here, so slimming down an oversupply at an animal shelter would seem horribly inhumane. I usually explain that Americans get by this inhumane problem by ignoring it and prefering it to half-dead, lame dogs wandering the sidewalks.

Then came compost. My only real experience in the word "compost" comes from "compost heaps." So I explained it like this:

"Well, some environmentally, um, sound Americans--and I guess Europeans, too--like to throw all their organic garbage in a big pile in the backyard. So they'll throw banana peels, orange peels, things like that on the pile, and then bacteria get at the food, and it breaks down, and after a while you have fertilizer. (Do we know "fertilizer?" Good.) That's the compost."

And people do this in their backyards?

"Well, most of the time they leave the pile in a shed, or something, so the smell isn't too bad. Oh, and most people don't throw meat or dairy on the pile. That's just bad. Anyway, it's environmentally-friendly."

Huh.

And we moved on. The best times come when I have to resort to drawing things on the board. That's high comedy for all involved, although I've gotten much better at quickly drawing whatever thing I mean to show. I'm awfully good at drawing America at this point, for those times when I need to show the students where certain places in the country are.

Anyway, it's all fun. Which I need this week, because as bad as the "can we go early"s usually are, they're worse now, when all the students think it's their right to leave. At least vacation was just officially lengthened. It's running until the 10th now, extended from the fourth. That made everybody at the school very very happy. Very.

A Long Week's Journey Into Christmas

It's been a pounder of a week, what with the students expecting nothing more than Christmas songs every day and my constant prodding them into doing work. Every hour needs a new whip and chair, just to stay on top of things. But it's over now. Friday has finally come, and a good weekend stands between now and the few party-strewn days before Christmas next week.

I'm in a bit of a jam about Christmas. Someone who always seems to change his plans changed his plans and I'm stuck with Yuli for family at the moment. But Christmas can be improvised. What I'm looking forward to is the week and a half after Christmas where nothing will be between me and whatever I want to do. Nothing? Sure I'll do that. Parties? Probably. New Years? Definitely. Vacation at home is really where the good times are. If you travel you always wind up haveing to do things. Nothing against travelling, but I've come to praise relaxation, and trips can be short on relaxation sometimes.

So I'm here, in Silistra, relaxing. I can't wait. It'll be fun to see how this place does Christmas and New Years.

Catching Up

Let's see. Back to Saturday. The GRE Literature test went fine, I suppose, but if I ever have the following thought process again it will be too soon:

"Hmm. Richard Wright and James Baldwin are both black authors, so are the rest, but the others came way too late or early. Anyway, the FBI must have had files on both of them. But Wright spent most of his life living in Europe, and I think he was too old to have much of an impact on the civil rights movement. Plus, Baldwin was gay, so the FBI probably had a much bigger file on him. Also, Wright's already been one answer that I know was correct earlier on the test. And the odds of seeing him twice on the test are pretty slim. Gotta' be Baldwin."

I'm pretty sure I got that question right. Most of the test is that way. It doesn't test an ability to identify, but an ability to eliminate. It makes a person think, but it was pretty rough stuff.

After all that, I had lunch at one of Sofia's Pizza Huts and got home on the first bus. Read P.G. Wodehouse on the way home. That guy knew how to write comedy. He wrote the same thing two or three hundred times over, but it's funny every time you read it. If you ever want to enjoy reading about early twentieth century upper class British life, give Wodehouse a read.

"A Few Good Men" was on TV Saturday night, fit for my vegging pleasure. I really love that movie more every time I see it. Except for the part were Cruise gets Nicholson to say "YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT I DID!" I don't get the emotional hit it's supposed to give anymore, but it's a funny movie and a fun movie to watch. And so much the dialogue is mumbled or spoken quickly that something new seeps through with every shot. It may be a glorified TV movie with great acting, but what a TV movie! and what acting! Even Demi Moore is acceptable, and almost good. Absolutely amazing.

So after all that excitement, I spent Sunday doing nothing but watching a "Blue Planet" marathon on the Discovery Channel and playing with the cat. I really just wanted to relax, and I got it done, which left me in great shape for the start of the week.

Today, there wasn't any heat in school, which led the director to panic a bit and declare a half day. However, since the sun-facing side of the building is all windows without blinds, the building was probably getting up near 80 degrees by 11 and some rooms were, as usual, uncomfortable by noon. Still, the shorter day was appreciated and left me time to shop before Bulgarian lessons.

Where I had one of the great "DUH!" moments of my life. I was reading a story and for the first time saw "mesechina" instead of "luna" as the Bulgarian for "moon." I figured out that it was "moon" based on the context, and that led me to see that it was derived from "mecets" or "month" in Bulgarian. "Moon," "month," they sound alike! thought I. So that's where "moon" comes from. Or that's where "month" comes from. Chicken and egg, really. Etymonline kinda sorta confirms it. Learn something new every day.

Nightmares and Things I'm Okay With.

I woke up and looked at my watch next to the bed. It said it was 7:30. 7:30! What had happened? I went through my head to figure out the situation. I was supposed to take the GRE at 9 in Sofia, and here it was 7:30 and I was still in bed in Silistra. As I normally do in these panic situations, I leapt out of bed, went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. While I was brushing, my heart about to break through my ribcage, I wondered whether, since I wouldn't be taking the test in Sofia, I should go in to school to teach. I was wondering if I could call-in sick to the testing service and take the test later. Then I decided it might be a good idea to look at my watch again. 19:35. Somehow, 19:30 had instantly gone through my brain as 7:30 AM. I still had 4 hours before I even had to catch my bus to Sofia.

I still have no idea how my brain functioned then. I can't imagine the neurons that were skipped over, but I was awfully happy when I realized what was going on. I'd woken up from a two hour nap and brushed my teeth. Phew. Back to bed I went and slept until 10:30, when I got up and got ready to leave. Cat taken care of and backpack stuffed I left and got on the bus.

As usual, Ruse proved to be a hassle. The midnight bus gets into Ruse at about 2 in the morning and always fills up. In Silistra, I'd picked a seat next to the window so I could have two seats of my own until Ruse and not sit right next to the person next to my real seat, which would have, of course been odd with an empty row laying there right next to us. In Ruse, an ugly couple woke me up and started pointing at their tickets, saying that I was in one of their seats. In sloppy, 2 AM, Bulgarian I asked them if one of them could take my old seat since I was comfortable and the only change in their lives would be their being separated by an aisle. They said "no" and demanded I get up.

So I sighed, cursed Ruse under my breath, and got down into my horrible aisle seat, which coincidentally, also had much less legroom. The two lovebirds on the other side of the aisle spent the rest of the trip leaning away from each other. SIGH. So the remaining five hours of the trip was a little like being in surgery and being slightly knocked out. I kept going in and out of a haze, not really acknowedging being asleep, but understanding that the trip didn't feel nearly long enough to justify my being awake the whole time.

The naps and the fitful sleep meant that after I got into Sofia's bus station, washed up, and had a cup of coffee and a croissant, I was feeling pretty peachy and ready to take a test. So I hopped in a cab, gave him the address and in a couple of minutes we were there at about 8:15, a full 45 minutes early. Also peachy. So I went in and relaxed with a group of Bulgarians waiting to take the TOEFL and GMAT. And at ninish I got to sit down at a computer and take the test.

Didn't seem like any time went by. It started and it was over. And because it was computer-based, I got the scores that weren't writing related right away. 700 Verbal, 610 Math. It should be noted that the only thing that seems to have changed since my SAT days is the math score, which has lost 50 points. Oh well, life goes on. If we want percentiles, and these are unofficial, the Verbal puts me at 93% and the math around 85%.

I'm disappointed in the Verbal. Even though it's enough to put me near the top of any English Dept's score requirement list, I really feel like I've botched a gimme. I had a prime, Grade-A chance of getting an 800 on some kind of test. And, because I only made an educated guess on two or three questions, the 700 means I missed a question or two I was confident in.

Anyway, I'm satisfied. I didn't pump my fist when I saw the numbers, but satisfaction sums it up. Now: More studying, the GRE Literature test is on Saturday. But I might also try to catch a movie while I'm in town. I saw Collateral in Silistra and wound up reading Bulgarian the whole time because the audio completely drowned out dialogue. Bad times.

Darn Lake Poets

Literature is just a collection of names that hung out with each other and exchanged references to Greek mythology. That's pretty much what the GRE Literature test preaches. If you don't know that Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb spent time as neighbor's in England's "lake region," you're in the dark. If you don't know that Pater influenced Wilde, even if it's only because Wilde misinterpreted Pater's work, you have some problems. T.S. Eliot was born in America and a big Wagner fan. He also wrote some poetry. Something about peaches, or April being a bad month or something. Nobody really cares about the poetry anyway.

So that's what I'm studying, almost as we speak. Trivia and lots of it. Fortunately, I have a 15-odd year head start on the Greek mythology part of the test. I'm a bit slow on trivia about 20th century black authors, which seems to be a big part of the test, but I'm catching up quickly. And then there's the regular ol' GRE, with all it's fancy words and math. That's important too.

So I'd better be getting back to the studying, I suppose. Not much use sticking around here doing nothing. Marvell and coy mistresses and all that.

Gotta Study

Well, thank somebody, I'm over a cold, pretty much. All of this week I've been scuffling into classes, babysitting between blowing my nose, then going home to lay down for a while. Today, things are solid, I played basketball with some students, and made it through an entire day without thinking that I was way too tired to be doing any of it. All very, very good because less than a week from now I have to take the GRE, and to avoid looking like a fool on it, I need to finish my personal refresher course in algebra and geometry. The GRE doesn't seem to have difficult or even challenging concepts, but I need to be able to do them quickly. And I should also touch up on my vocab, too. Also, I have to prepare for next saturdays GRE Lit test.

So I have my weekend sorted out then. Lots of practice tests.

And all this in the middle of a good movie month here in Silistra. By the time certain movies come here, a person develops a certain reverance for them, and I let Man on Fire, which I saw last night, get by with a lot. It was entertaining, yes, but I keep toying the idea that it was actually a good film. Terrible ending, great acting, meh, I don't know. And by this time, Collateral, which is playing this week, might as well be a lock for Best Picture. All this talk of great acting n' stuff. I'll probably wind up seeing collateral next Wednesday, as a relaxer before the bus ride down to Sofia.

So that's where we stand, creepy warm weather, no cold, and a bunch of books waiting for me when I get home. Later.

AIDS Day

Today was AIDS day, which meant a presentation from two students at the beginning of the day and a small lesson from me in the English of AIDS in each class I taught. One of the more interesting things I've seen in Bulgarian kids so far (and this may apply to kids in general, I don't know) is that well over half of them think that mosquitos carry HIV around with them and transfer it into each person they bite. This, somehow, never seems to worry the kids who believe it, even if they say they get 5 or 6 bites a week during the summer. If I had thought that when I was 13 I'd have bled myself dry every time I got a bite. Somehow, I guess it never occured to me until I could figure out that the idea is ridiculous.

Also a bit ridiculous was a "fact" on the brochure all the kids got today. In the "How you can get it" section was written something to the effect of "YES. If you use a toothbrush with the blood of someone with AIDS on it and you have a bleeding sore in your mouth, you can get AIDS." "All who have bleeding sores in their mouth and enjoy using toothbrushes dripping with the fresh blood of their infected friends SHOULD BE CAREFUL!" was not written. I understand the need to convince kids to be careful about AIDS, but isn't the toothbrush thing going a little far? Of course, "NO! Your friend's toothbrush is perfectly safe. Use it whenever you want" would also seem a bit strange. I would say that the toothbrush thing is a sticky issue, but I've always been one for whom using somebody else's toothbrush is about 500 steps in desperation beyond using my own finger to brush. The whole toothbrush argument is moot for me.

The last bit of craziness in the day was the reaction I got whenever I said that abstinence was the best way to prevent STDs. I expected sighs and "you square"s, but instead I got absolute riotous laughter, a pause, and then questions like "are you really serious?" Sex is a loose issue here, I understood that. What I didn't understand was that having sex, or projecting in as loud or boisterous a way possible the false idea that one has had sex is nothing near a matter of debate here. Pubicly avoiding sex simply isn't done around these parts. Some in my tenth grade tried to convince me that it's a chemical need. Nobody, not one person, not one brownnoser, told me they were going to be a virgin for while. I don't think I've ever seen that in America, but that certainly doesn't mean it doesn't happen over there.

I didn't try to brainwash them. It's not my thing, brainwashing. I just told them that they should find other ways to be in love if they can, and if not, make sure they stay safe. Then we jumped right into grammar. Just the way AIDS Day should be.