Winter has come to the party like a couple of guys who are an hour or two late. You can instantly tell that they've started well before the party began and that they're headed for the toilet sometime in the future. But before all the really bad stuff happens, you begin to think that they could be a lot of fun if you look at them the right way...
So what happened, you ask? Well, snow came this weekend and it came in a storm. Silistra woke up to a completely white world Sunday morning. Some drifts were 3 1/2, 4 feet high. A couple of cars are completely buried. Needless to say, I spent all of Sunday in the apartment, reading, watching TV, and loving the idea of being warm.
This morning I was pretty sure there weren't going to be classes, but I left for work and walked along the barely cleared streets anyway. Silistra doesn't seem to have an actual snow clearance program. Instead of plowing, slating, and maybe plowing again, Silistra plows the main streets and leaves the smaller ones to be driven down. This works great in that it will leave the town nice and white for a week, at least. It also means that schools around here have declared snow days for today, tomorrow, and (rumor has it) Wednesday.
This means that I get to go to school and write grades in the registers in peace, without students trying to argue themselves up a grade. It will make this week so, so, so much easier, even if school still happens on Wednesday. I can't stress how much the idea of not having school for part of this week, of all weeks, pleases me.
So I have a bit of freedom. And that freedom has left me time to do a very important thing, read the copy of Phil Jackson's The Last Season that I miraculously received from Grandma back in the states. Of all the things I get introspective about, the Lakers are pretty close to the top of the list, the key question I always ask being "Why do I care so much?" Jackson certainly didn't answer that question in the book, but he did write a great narrative about a season that caused a lot of Laker fans to take stock of their fan-ness.
Two themes really stood out in the book, one about the Game, the other about Laker management. Jackson's theory that the way the game should be played and the way players play are far apart is pretty obvious, but something everyone has been trying to get around for a long time. Collections of severe individuals make for bad teams, basically.
The other thing I had no idea about, but it served as a great little narrative device. Jackson treats GM Mitch Kupchak and owner Jerry Buss, in his own Jackson way, like two good friends who are really, under it all, the bad guys. The kind of people you'd find in some Kafka or Orwell dystopia. They both always tell Jackson they have the best intentions, and for much of the season he seems to believe them, then it slowly seeps in that they're looking out for The Lakers, not the team (if you get my drift, it's a money thing, basically) and that Jackson is clearly not on their side. They play antagonists, is not villains.
There are all kinds of tidbits about the league and the Lakers that I found interesting, but the book is kind of limited in that it's autobiographical and topical. This means that Jackson really can't burn too many bridges. Although he does blow up the Kobe bridge, then run over the pieces a couple of times with a steamroller, then break up the smaller chunks with a jackhammer, for everybody else in the book he has many comments, but nothing really damning. This keeps the narrative pretty light. I wanted to read tragedy--hubris, downfall, weeping, the whole bit, and I got all of those things, but it all felt a bit hollow. A lot like the hollow feeling I get when I realize that, from Bulgaria, I'm supporting I group of 12 guys I've only seen play together once and a coach I've never really liked all that much, just because they wear a purple and gold uniform. It makes me think, sure, but I know that I'll be watching every game I can when i get back to America, and loving it, as they say.
Well, I've taken to swimming every day. There's an indoor pool here in Silistra that's worth going to and the new art teacher at school is a regular. He invited me last night and after an hour and a half of not swimming very well and running out of breath way to fast, I figured out that I needed to do it more often. So, I'm going to go every night before I head to the internet club. It's not exactly the best decision I've ever made as far as writing here goes. I'm pretty much just staring blankly at the screen most of the time. I'll probably need to do more of the writing at home and then bring it here. I think that'd work.
Anyway, a roughish week is almost over and the grading is winding down. The term ends next Friday and the long 3-day weekend that follows happily coincides with Superbowl Sunday, which means the absolute necessity of making another hellishly expensive trip to Sofia. Lately, the newer volunteers have been complaining about the bus trip to Sofia from up here in Bulgaria's Northeast. The trip I've gotten used to. The restroom timing is down to a science, I sleep when I need to and read when I need to. It's all happy. The problem is the inevitable 100+ leva I wind up spending in Sofia every time I go down there. It really nips at the monthly pay. But a Superbowl, and the chance to come back from it without missing school, is just too good to pass up.
So that's my schedule for the coming weeks, there's (sadly?) not much new beyond all that.
This semester refuses to end. Here in Bulgaria, semesters don't end at winter break, they keep going on into February. This means that the kids come back from break and have to take tests for a month while complaining and begging about grades. It's not what I would normally call fun. In fact, it's a grind. But it all ends in a week or two when a new term begins, so it's a waiting game really. While I'm waiting, I'm grading a lot of papers at home, which means I have the great, mindless drone of Euronews on quite a bit.
Big stories on Euronews lately have followed, first, the smoking bans across much of Europe and, more recently, the apparently strong campaign to ban fatty food ads directed at kids. Now--
On the ciggie bit: Bulgaria recently put into action its own law against smoking and almost a month later, I can't say that it's completely ignored. I've been in one restaurant that actually had a non-smoking room, but the non-smoking section in most bars and restaurants is a table near the restroom, front door, or four smoking tables. The bar near the internet club here keeps its "no smoking" signs stacked in a neat row along the bar along with the upright menus and napkin dispensers.
At school, the situation is a little bit different. The kids still have to go across the street to smoke, of course, and they still do it in plain sight. It's the teachers that really got punished by the new law. Right next to the teacher's lounge was a tiny room with a window, clock, and three ashtrays. If you ever opened the door you needed a gas mask and at least ten seconds to let the door-shaped cloud float away. Now a sign that says all kinds of things about smoking being absolutely forbidden is on the door and all of the smoking teachers are royally peeved. I haven't found where their new hangout is. Not really my business or desire to go around following the smokers. But the saddest thing about it all is the door to that tiny room, which might as well be covered in ploice line tape. It has that condemned look to it.
Stranger than all of these smoking developments in Bulgaria is what may be coming later from the EU if all of this fat food talk turns into anything. On CNN last night, there was a lovely little "analysis" piece that covered it all. The focus of the story was a British nurse, about 76 pounds overweight herself (although that was never mentioned), who insisted that her three kids only want the Happy Meals she buys them every day because of the toys that come with them. "As a nurse," she knows the danger of fatty food, but blames marketing for her kids' weight problems.
Then a doctor came on (I think he was Belgian, but I could be wrong) and said that obesity was rampaging across the EU and that the only way to stop it was to end the ads promoting junk food. Which Euronews (featuring the same doctor) says he describes as processed, fatty, sugary foods that are usually cheaper than the average. The CNN story ended with the news that Kraft foods (See, everything links back to cigarettes eventually) has already agreed to cut out its ads for junk food including, CNN noted, its popular Oreo cookies.
Now, by way of introducing my argument to all this, a question. Has there ever been a kid, who, after getting his $5 allowance, ran straight to the grocery store and snatched up the first package of Oreo cookies he saw because he remembered that great ad where the father and son were sitting at a ballgame and the son eats the cookie wrong so the father shows him how to twist off the top and eat the Oreo correctly? Has that ever happened? How many kids have ever actually bought Oreo cookies? In my experience, parents buy the cookies and leave them up in the cupboard and complain when the kid eats more than three before dinner. Sometimes, Mom packed a few with my lunch. It may have happened--somewhere in Europe maybe--but I don't remember ever seeing four kids hunched behind the playground garbage cans whispering "No, dude, the father in that ad said you should eat 'em this way. Dude. And keep quiet or we'll get caught."
Yes, it's been my view that parents usually buy this stuff, and the chubby nurse in the CNN story bought the Happy Meal and handed it to her kid. And since they buy, doesn't that make them the regulators? Their kids may beg them to buy Fruit Loops because Toucan Sam told them to, but parents are supposed to be a little more powerful than Toucan Sam, as I understand it. They're supposed to be the ones saying "no" when the kids are asking for everything in the grocery aisle. Every kid needs junk food, of course, but giving kids everything they want will usually result in a spoiled, fat kid. Sad but true.
Smoking laws are great--second hand smoke kills, after all--but legislating to keep those without self control from feeding their children into obesity and blaming it on Ronald McDonald is just a waste of money and would mean the loss of some great cultural icons. What would the world be without the Nesquick Bunny? A sad, Bunny-less place.
So, I'm once again in Soifa, writing from the Peace Corps computer lab. Not all that much happening here, though. The garbage strike that saw piles and piles of garbage stacked all over Sofia's streets has ended and everything is (relatively) clean again. It's still a bit chilly, but nothing that a person would call cold. Not even the movies have changed.
If I'm lucky, this thing under my thumbnail that I'm getting checked will be nothing and I'll be able to take a 5:00 bus home to Silistra. If I'm not lucky, or the entire process goes very slowly, I'm here until the 1 AM bus, because I have some kind of strange demonic desire to teach tomorrow. Either way, I'll survive, and hopefully won't be too bored. Thankfully, I ran into another volunteer at Sofia's book market earlier today, so if all goes bad I'll have someone to hang out with until the late bus.
But other than that, it's all just pluggin' along.
I tried to update last night, but kept getting distracted by other things on the internet and didn't see my account for time at the internet club slowly run out. So an entire entry is lost deep in a computer's hard drive, possibly forever inaccesible, more likely already written over in some random process the computer had to perform. Anyway, it wasn't saved. At most it was a collection of little black lines on a computer screen. Now it's nothing. The fact that this isn't absolutely killing me (it's only a small part of a long chain of things that are absolutely killing me) is probably a sign that the entry wasn't very good, by whatever strange standards I judge these things, and that I've gotten used to these internet club mishaps. They're part of the fun. Peace Corps could be much, much worse.
So, to summarize last night's bit. A weekend in Sofia saw me lose a very late game of Trivial Pursuit, have some great meals, see the Jets and Steelers play and see three movies:
Alexander: Long, long, long movie. Not particularly bad in many ways, but never good. And very, very long. Would be great on the Discovery Channel if they brought in a couple of professors to replace Anthony Hopkins' scenes.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Great movie. Creative writing to the point of being utterly original (I know you can't qualify "original," but sometimes it just needs it). Great direction to keep all that great writing understandable. Great acting to make it all believable. BUT, it didn't really teach me anything, something I need to be able to put a movie in the ol' top three or four.
Ocean's 12: It was like hanging out with the 14 main actors for 2 hours. Sometimes they do bits from the last movie, sometimes they're just themselves, but they're all having a good time. I loved it. It was light and I was chuckling the whole time. I can understand why some people wouldn't get a kick out of all that, and it certainly won't win any awards, but it was still a fun flick to watch.
That was the weekend, pretty much, with a meeting thrown in at the start and a walk-in medical check-up that requires me to go back Thursday for a follow-up.
Since then, I've been teaching, of course. Yesterday I did a replay of the old race discussion for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It's never as interesting after you know all the opinions and prejudices the kids will throw out. It turns into a lecture and vocabulary discussion. It also made me tired. I actually napped most of the afternoon yesterday.
Today was just a headache. Not bad classes, really, just one mildly bad class after another with no great one in-between. They build up on a person. But life goes on, and I effectively have Thursday off, so all's well I suppose. More from Sofia on Thursday. Promise.
I get to (must? have been asked to? I don't know) get out of town for the weekend again. This time it's a VAC meeting in Sofia. VAC stands for Volunteer Advisory Committee and the reason I've never gone to a meeting is that I'm not really a part of the thing. I was elected an alternate at the end of training a year and a half ago and the real deal has done a shing, shimmering job on the committee since then.
Well, she's taking this weekend off so I get to participate in the debate on volunteers' use of vacation days and an apparent drop in usage at the volunteer library at headquarters. I also get to see some movies that may take their sweet time getting to Silistra. There are a few big, fat ones sitting in Sofia right now. I'm looking forward to The Incredibles in particular, which may only come to Silistra dubbed like most cartoons when they come this way.
So I have all that going for me, although a big part of me wants to hang out in Silistra. Travelling too much throws me out of a rhythm here and upsets the cat, although she rarely leaves my side whenever I come back from a trip. In the end, though, a quick break after a standard first week at school will be good for everybody concerned. The kids are still in the midst of a vacation hangover and probably need a test to throw them out of a funk. Final term grades will also help liven them up at the end of the month.
Anyway, I'm set for the weekend. If I don't get anything on the site Saturday, expect an update Monday.
The lack of entries over the past week has come due to bouts of travelling around the country and long periods of laziness. The laziness, of course, was inspired by the prospect of a walk across town to my favorite internet club when the idea of sitting down with a good book was just sooo much better. The travelling came at the end of last week when I dropped down into Lovech, in Central Bulgaria, and spent a day in Pleven.
You may or may not remember Aaron, who was part of my group in training two summers ago. Since then, he's been teaching down in Lovech and I had never taken the time to go down and visit him. I've been remiss, apparently, because Lovech isn't a bad place. It's more or less similar to Silistra, only their river is much smaller and the surrounding hills there are far more interesting. Aaron gave me a tour of everything I really needed to see and I left pretty satisfied, but without any photos since I forgot to bring a camera. Oh well, all the more reason to go back in spring.
The first thing any Bulgarian will bring up when Lovech is mentioned is the covered bridge over the River Ossum, which isn't the real wooden bridge as designed by the famous Bulgarian architect Koliyo Fitcheto but a wood and steel replica built after the first bridge burned down. It's still a nice bridge, and the sun lights up the interior beautifully through the windows along the side. There's also a statue of Bulgarian hero Vassil Levski at the top of a nearby hill, overlooking Lovech's historic quarter. Fascinating little stories about Levski and Lovech.
Levski, of course, was the hero martyr who led the first stages of the Bulgarian revolution against the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. He did his planning in Lovech, and he was betrayed in Lovech. He was then hung in a central square in Sofia. Now Bulgaria is free from Turkish rule and Bulgaria's currency (the Lev) is named after him. So the statue of Levski looms over the town and can be seen from pretty much anywhere in the city. Apparently, the descendant of the person who betrayed Levski still lives in Lovech. I didn't get a chance to meet him, but he is quite popular and has a certain amount of pull in town. The pull was, in part, handed down through the generations, since his ancestors were powerful enough in the city to be a part of Levski's inner circle.
Aaron and I talked about the fact that the great-grandson of a betrayer could be so successful in the town where his family did the betraying. We decided that it made sense. After all, if some fictional descendant of Benedict Arnold was still around and famous for it, he's probably have a kind of giddy notoriety. It certainly wasn't his fault, after all, but the story would still circulate and everyone would know his name. He would have to popular.
After the bridge and the looming, judging statue, Lovech is a collection of interesting projects of dubious necessity. It all starts with the second largest zoo in Bulgaria, perched on the top of a hill and completely hidden if you don't know it's up there. It's not even on the map in the town's brochure. It really should be though, since I was going in set for an hour of heartache at the poor plight of the animals and came out satisfied and actually very happy with the way the animals looked and acted.
It was built back in the late sixties, when Lovech was making an effort to be Bulgaria's premier, interior tourist destination. Most of the cages are from the sixties, but it only really shows in the bird exhibits, where no bird really has any room to do anything but hop. Most of the other animals have all the space they seem to want or need.
Every pen really surprised me, but among the most impressive were the two bison, chewing on their hay. They were immense things, and they didn't do much except eat and stare at us, but we could get close to them. We could have touched them if we wanted to, and the bars in the gate were so open a person twice my size could have gotten in and run around with them. It's an impressive thing to see a bison that close. I could understand how some idiots could want one of them for a trophy. It wouldn't just be a cow head on the wall. It would be something. But, much more than that, I failed to understand how someone could ride up on a horse and do anything but simply stare in awe at a herd of these things galloping. Shooting one of them seems beyond all bounds of human decency.
So we watched the bison doing nothing for a very long time and then walked around and saw the ostriches walking along the trenches in their pen, and then up the hill, past a small duck/swan/goose/pelican pond to the polar bear pit. One polar bear sat on our level and looked at us occasionally. The water at the bottom of the pit didn't really look like something a polar bear or any living thing would want to swim in, but the bear looked healthy and full and just like a polar bear should. He may not have been the largest polar bear I've seen in a zoo, but seeing any kind of a bear always impresses me.
The brown bear in the pit just down the hill was a little less impressive. He looked like a circus bear who'd gotten lost and just decided to work at the zoo instead. He was a small bear (No one would ever dare calling him a Grizzly), and when we came up to his fence he sat upright on a rock, looked at us, and yawned. He was, it seemed, very used to having food tossed his way when people showed up, and we disappointed him.
Moving on, we found the three lions and two lion cubs in simple lion cages and two jaguars and two jaguar cubs in cages next to them. They don't get a copy of the Savannah like the big cats in San Diego, but they looked content with their easily defended territory and watched us suspiciously as we went by. Nobody, I was glad to see, was pacing.
Then we came to the baboon, who probably seemed the most unhappy with his lot in life. He slapped the ground through a hole in his cage, demanding food as we passed, and when we didn't give him anything he went under his tree and sulked. Up the hill there were deer, and wolves and foxes all in big, new cages that had been built with the help of the UNDP. They had just been fed and the wolves didn't give us any trouble at all when we passed.
After seeing everything we left, and talked about how surprising it was that everything in the zoo was pretty much what you would expect at any small American zoo. It wasn't an ecological playground like San Diego, but the animals seemed content and everything was reasonably well-kept.
After climbing all the hills and exploring the zoo, there wasn't much left to do in Lovech. There is what is said to be the biggest climbing wall in the Balkans, but Aaron tells me that it's never open and sits there unused. And, as in any Bulgarian town, there's the massive project left unfinished. In this case it's a pedestiran bridge that was supposed to connect the city's central plaza with another plaza under the zoo's hill. The bridge was built, and statues were built right alongside it, but communism fell before they could build anything on the zoo side and the bridge ends in a pile of rocks underneath a cliff, still waiting to be blasted after all these years.
On Saturday, we both decided to go to Pleven, since I hadn't seen the Pleven-area crew in about three months and there was a chance the movie playing in town wouldn't be bad. As it turned out, the movie was the Jimmy Fallon/Queen Latifah thing "Taxi," which we decided to skip, and the whole Pleven crew was in town for the weekend. We had a great dinner at Kate's place and talked about all the gossip that I hadn't heard in such a long time. I'd forgotten how insular and out of the loop I'd gotten in Silistra.
Being in Pleven brought a rush of personal information and talk about people's lives that I really wasn't prepared for. I just had to sit there and soak it all in. Nicknames had developed for certain people that didn't have them when I last heard the same stories, and new stories had, of course, cropped up about the nicknamed folk. We also talked politics, religion, and all of the other highly-charged stuff that makes a Peace Corps dinner worth living through. We were about to watch "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" on DVD, but the conversation overpowered it. No matter though, the conversation was great and I'll get to see it in a theater at some point here.
Aaron and I took a taxi back to Lovech and I went back home through Pleven the next day. Everybody there was on the verge of leaving and I picked up my ticket and hung out at Kate's apartment before my bus left. Then I was in Silistra and all of a sudden, Jody (the former PC sitemate who still lived here with his Bulgarian wife, Radost) sent me a message that the time had come and that he and Radost would be taking off for Sofia and then America on Monday. By all obligations known to friendship I jumped off the bus, dropped off my stuff, said "hello" to the cat, and took a cab over to the hangout, where an informal little gathering was already in full swing.
I probably stayed out far too late for a Sunday, but it was worth every second. Jody's been a great guy to have as a sitemate, and he felt the thanks from everybody at the gathering. No one left until Jody decided to leave and then I went home and got a quick four hours of sleep before school, unfortunately, interrupted all that good vacation.
And since then, classes have been the usual. No great daily breakthroughs, but no disasters either. Today, the routine was briefly jumped on by Peace Corps running an emergency drill. I got a call from headquarters, and as I have been burdened with the Great Responsibility of being a regional warden, I called the two volunteers on my "team" and relayed to them the valuable message that Peace Corps was using as a stand-in for something more urgent and critical. And that leaves me here, back in the school pattern once again. Expect more posts to come.
At long last, the little firecrackers have finally stopped booming more than a couple times a day. 2004 left with bangs, and lots of them and 2005 has come with a chilly silence. The fulcrum between them was purely nuts. Never have I seen a stranger New Year's Eve than here in Silistra. It threw me for a loop at least once an hour or so. I'm still torn between whether it was good or bad. I'll probably have to go with the old half-assed side and call it all very interesting.
At around 10 PM I decided to go out for a walk to see what was happening. It was a cold and foggy night, and would have been creepy even without two very important factors. The first thing I noticed was the blasts that were going off all the time and everywhere. Occasionally I saw flashes of light on apartment blocks in the distance, or saw flares shoot out over my head. Later on, I noticed that I was most of the population outside. And not just on the streets, anywhere. The restaurants were closed, the bars and cafes were shut down, most of the stores were silent and dark. It all came together to make the whole city feel like a giant backlot primed for an urban warfare movie.
I wandered through a lot of town for about an hour before deciding to go home and warm up a bit before the big celebration in the center which I assumed would be gearing up around 11:30. I was a bit wrong.
I got to the center at 11:30 and wandered around watching people trickle in. Fathers were giving their daughters firecrackers and a sprinkling of cops were laughing when the daughters accidentally threw the firecrackers among groups of people. Not once, not once, did I see a police officer do anything other than stand with their arms across their chests. Not that I needed their help or anything, but the way they act here makes the police in America seem downright dystopic in their oppression.
Around midnight, I'd say there were about forty people gathered in the center, with daughters all happily throwing firecrackers toward groups of people. There was no countdown, and when everyone just kind of glanced at the clock and saw "00:01," they all chuckled and said "Chestita Nova Godina!" to anyone standing nearby. I was just about to call it a night, forget about meeting the other Americans and go home to sleep, when a very curious thing started to happen.
People began to show up. And beyond that, people were putting speakers up on the stage, and more and more firecrackers were being thrown among groups of people until the whole central plaza was beginning to look very cloudy. Finally, it was around 12:30 I think, the whole thing suddenly took on unimaginable life. A band was playing traditional Bulgarian music on the stage, all of the lights were slammed on, and within the shadowy haze half the town seemed to be dancing the horo in long snaky lines. It had all turned very Whoville.
Over the river a show of massive fireworks began, and when I walked over to the nearby park, I could look up and see the fireworks go off almost right over my head. And I felt the boom pulse through me and I completely forgot everything, like the fact that I had a camera, until the show was over and I went back to the center and met up with my friends.
At that point, I had the obvious explained to me since I was still confused. Without Christmas, Communist Bulgaria had Dyado Mraz instead of Dyado Koleda, or Santa Claus. Dyado Mraz came on New Year's Eve instead of Christmas and families would treat New Year's Eve the way they now celebrate Christmas Eve. It was, basically, a family holiday until midnight--when everyone migrated to the center to start the party. The tradition, obviously, still holds. So the people who were in the center, failing to count down to the New Year, were just the ones that had arrived early, like me.
Satisfied with that explanation, I carried on with the rest of the night, spending it with the general herd at a nearby club where our favorite band had started playing at--of course--12:30. For some reason, I wasn't in the best of spirits and wound up spending a lot of the night in mildly bitter navel-gazing. Can't explain it, just the way the mood struck me, I suppose. But since I wasn't caught up in overwhelming New Year joy, I'm thinking that the Bulgarian celebration didn't quite have the impact of some of my better New Year's Eves. It all certainly caught me off-guard, but I never caught up to it all. Oh well, probably my fault.
On to frigid, holidayless January. And, more importantly, the homestretch of two years. Expect lots of looking back in the future.