If people have had one complaint about the site recently, and they've usually had more than one, it's that there just aren't the pictures there used to be. I've even had Silistrans come up to me and tell me this. True, since the Silistrans that have complained don't really read English all that well, they have a special need for pictures on the site, but I think the point still stands. So, the problem will be remedied. Here are some of the reasons why it hasn't been remedied yet, so you know why--and can look forward to the things I'll be ignoring in order to once again bring you photos.
1.) My camera is on its last legs. It's a great digital point-and-shoot Kodak which has seen me through a lot over the past two years. The problem isn't with the camera, but me, really. My problem with gizmos is that if they can be taken outside, I run them through the paces--holding them in my hand as I run down dirt hills, throwing them into any handy pocket, etc. And this camera has seen its share of troubles. The screen on the back is cracked and unusable, so I have to rely on the viewfinder and I can't go back and review photos, something which has endlessly pissed people off over the last few months when they want to see the photo I just took. Also, the lens, or something near it, is a bit off, so the pictures usually wind up looking like they were taken with a cell phone camera. All this has left me a bit insecure about showing less-than-stellar quality photos on the site. But now you know, and I have nothing left to hide.
2.) My computer at home went on the fritz about a month ago and it took me a while to gather a copy of Windows XP Home so I could reinstall it on my laptop and a copy of Photoshop so I could reinstall that on my laptop. And I also lost the Kodak software in the reinstall so I've been using the plug-and-play picture uploading that comes with Windows, which always seems iffy.
3.) I've been lazy when it comes to most things on the site or in the internet club, and photos are no exception.
So there you have it. And to make things better: Until it becomes useless or more boring than what can usually be expected out of the life descriptions of a guy living in a small corner of Bulgaria, there will be a "picture of the day" with every entry I make on the site. I'll even put a bunch of photos on a disk and leave the disk in my jacket so I won't forget every time I walk out the door of my apartment. We'll also have a bonafide photo day the next time I come to the internet club, which should be tomorrow since I'll be on a school trip beginning Wednesday. Look forward to it!
This week saw the big local volleyball tournament. Here in Silistra, volleyball has the place basketball had when I was in high school in Alaska. It's the big sport that everyone gets excited about and pumped up for. There were games every evening this week and the gym at the math school (The best gym in town, which isn't saying too much. But still a nice gym, don't get me wrong) was full by the time the guys started playing every night. There aren't any bleachers in any of the gyms in town, but there is a very long bench and quite a bit of standing room.
I'm not a huge volleyball fan by nature, but the girls' team makes a habit of inviting me and keeping me up-to-date on all of their games, so I feel an obligation to go. Their games are usually fun to watch, and the language school's team won the city championship for the first time in a while, but I always have the problem when watching less-than-stellar volleyball of not wanting to cheer for the other team's mistakes. The only points the girls' team made this week that came out of skill were on great serves. Girls here seem to think that jumping for a spike isn't really part of the game, so most spikes are just a way to get the ball over the net.
Still, fun games to watch, I just always feel iffy when I cheer for our team because the other team bumped the ball into the net on their third hit.
The guys' games, it turned out, were a completely different animal. And it all starts with the warm-ups, which always turn into a game of life and death for everyone in the gym. The warm-ups around here start nicely enough. Guys on the same team bump, set and lightly spike the ball back and forth on their own side of the net. Then it starts to turn deadly. The second warm-up is a spiking drill, where both teams spike balls across to the other side of the net at the same time. This means that spikes regularly whack players on the other team in the head and the occasional bouncer catches somebody in the audience unawares during conversation. Last night, it was during this warm-up that a guy from the math school, No. 5, got hit in the face by a spike from our side, got angry, and drew my attention for the rest of the match.
The third warm-up is a service drill, where players seem to stand anywhere they want on the court, hit the ball as hard as they can across to the other side of the court, and seem to be trying to get it inside the lines about half the time. Before this drill, No. 5 started yelling at the language school's fans. Then, during the drill, he served ball after ball straight into the crowd. Since balls were flying back and forth across the gym like cruise missles and audience members were getting hit in the head, arms, and legs every minute or so, his little indiscretions went mostly unoticed, but it was a small step in the anger he could never fully control, much less use, the entire match.
So, after surviving the warm-ups, the crowd settles in for the game and all the players come out and show their numbers. Then the guys play, and they play pretty well. My school's guys, a team full of seniors, ran through the entire tournament, and season, without losing a game in any match. Absolute domination from guys that aren't too tall, but could all jump out of the gym and certainly had some power behind their hits. They won the first two games in the best-of-five easily last night, and the other English teacher I was watching the game with and I kept a close eye on No. 5 between plays.
Her contention was that anger was a huge part of sports in Bulgaria, with guys getting ticked off and roaring around the court for small reasons, and she believed that there was no room for anger in sports. She also believed that one of the best ways to see a person's character is to watch what happens after that person takes a hit to the face, whether or not it's accidental. Intuitively, I agree with her on the second argument, although I don't have libraries of experience in watching different people take hits to the face. Her first point though, I disagreed with. Sports in America have the same anger management issues, but the key is, whenever anger rises, to take that anger and use it for something in the game. Directing anger at any other player on the floor is useless, and directing it at the other team's fans is just plain harmful, but if anger is used for focus on the game itself, it can be some of the best stuff in sports. It's part of the magic that gave Jordan his best games, and makes linebackers hit a little harder. I think she bought this argument pretty well.
At any rate, our No. 5 did not use his anger well. He yelled at his teammates after their mistakes, he spiked as hard as he could into the net, and the only plus he offered his team during the match was a very solid service game. He didn't drive his team to 3 and out, but he certainly didn't help.
So after the fury of 5, and all the cheering and chants of "Ay-Gay!" (Language School, abbreviated), the old school is left with volleyball domination and dim hopes for next year. The best girls will still be around for another year, but over half of the guys are graduating. The coaches will need to find 3 or 4 new players from within the school just to put six on the floor next year. But that's the high school cycle, I suppose. I'm just kind of glad I won't be around to watch.
From a student of mine who I ran into on the street: "My father says you'd have a perfect body if you were 120 kilos." I'm at 100 [about 205 lbs.], if that, after almost 2 years on the Bulgaria diet, and 20 lost pounds. There's no way I could ever gain the necessary 40 to meet the high standards of my students' parents. Sadly enough.
And in an earlier report from a complete stranger talking to his friends in Bulgarian: "Hey, it's the American. [Much quieter]. F--- the USA!" Glad to have your support, friend!
It's been a long day. I woke up at 6:30 to teach at 7:30 and haven't been back home since 7:00, so over 12 hours now. The cat must miss me.
After school there was a 2 hour, well, press conference I suppose, on the hot topic of the possible removal of a parallelka from next year's class. A parallelka is a group of students that studies one language together and stays together as a class for 5 long years. They switch up when it comes to the second foreign language classes, but, otherwise, they're stuck with the same 25 classmates for the duration. The removal of a parallelka would mean 25 fewer students in the incoming class, half as many French and Spanish students (they would combine into one parallelka), and the loss of about 5 or 6 teaching positions, as I understand it.
At today's press meeting, a man from the French Embassy defended the students of Silistra's right to study his language in larger numbers. His chief argument was that French will be absolutely necessary when Bulgaria joins the EU in 2007. Yes, I suppose so. Everyone applauded when he finished, although part of that, of course, was that a Frenchman had come all the way from Sofia to defend 13 students and (probably) 1 French-teaching job.
The school's German teachers piped in with a couple of speeches, although they're relatively safe with their 2 groups of students. The 1000-kilo gorilla in the room, the English staff, didn't say anything and was never mentioned. They have their 2 groups, like the German teachers, but English is what sells the language school. If the students can't study English because there isn't enough room, they're usually happy to study another language. But, in the end, a large majority want to study English when they come.
I thought about that from the Frenchman's perspective. If a school decided to cancel its English program, and the American Embassy somehow found out about it, someone there would probably shrug, say "their loss," and set the news aside. I wondered if the guy was angry that he had to come all this way to defend his language. Or if it was a source of pride for him to go to bat for the old Lingua Franca. Or if I'll ever see the day when English will be defended with that kind of emotion.
I don't think so, not without a major war and a horrible turn of events anyway. China or India may somehow rise to be international powerhouses in the next 20 years, but that won't mean that English will stop being the world's most powerful language. I think the turnaround would be far too quick, especially in a world where India is succeeding as well as it is right now because the people there speak English as flawlessly as they do.
But I respected the guy's passion (he really was passionate in his speech) and I could vaguely see myself doing something like that in a similar situation. But I was thankful it was, for the moment, mostly unimaginable.
Well, Silistra seems to have gotten a lot more cosmopolitan in the last week. Last Wednesday I was having drinks and chatting with a friend when two overly-boisterous Germans came sidling up and introduced themselves in solid English. One of them is working on the landfill just outside of town and the other works as a conusltant in a local factory, I gathered, although his English was a bit fuzzy, and since they were so overly-boisterous, I wasn't really hunting for details.
They seemed like they could be nice enough guys when they weren't trying to figure out their bill with the waitress in their non-existent Bulgarian and her non-existent German or English, but the amazing thing was that I hadn't seen them before. They've apparently been here for a year, and since I've been here for a year and a half, well, you'd think we would have run into each other. But I suppose these things happen. Hopefully, if one of them manages to remember why he wrote my name and number on a sheet of paper, they'll get in touch with me. But I'm not optomistic.
Germans aren't exactly rare around here. There are far more German toursits coming through Silistra than there are of any other nationality. But it's always interesting running into any outsiders around here, it makes the city seem bigger, and more important, I suppose.
A greater curiosity sprang up at the disco last night. Not a place I love to go that often, but the group went, so I went along. From our table we had a view of the person that had the whole room (and it was a pretty big room) keyed up and edgy. There was a black guy in the disco! Let's put this in context: For most of the people there, that was probably the first time they'd ever seen an African outside of television or in the movies. The edginess wasn't from any kind of prejudice, but just looking at an Unknown for the first time.
I went down and introduced myself, assuming in my American bluster that he spoke English, and learned that he's a Nigerian here in Bulgaria to play soccer. I didn't get the details in this case either. It was in a disco, and as bad as I am at talking to native speakers in discos, talking to someone with broken English is near impossible. I did, however, learn that he was in Silistra for two months. Which means we'll almost certainly run into each other again. He was there with two Bulgarians, and they were mostly just chilling on the side of the room.
After the short conversation, I went back to my group's table and answered the the hundreds of questions everybody had about him. I told any Bulgarian that could speak English that, if they were so curious, they ought to go down and politely introduce themselves, too. But, perhaps understandably, there were no takers.
Small steps here and there, I suppose. After a year and a half here, even I still feel like an alien a lot of the time. The times when things are most natural comes when I'm talking. Just talking in English helps, but speaking in Bulgarian instantly makes me part of the team, usually. Sometimes, it just makes me a greater oddity. Sometimes it's frustrating, but, then I think and remember what I'm doing here. That usually makes it better. Sometimes.
But it's just one of those days, that hopefully, someday, I'll be able to deal with better. It's the middle of the week, in the middle of February, and there just isn't much going on that I can imagine anyone wanting to read about. So now I've gotten over staring at this blank box at the internet club and have started to write...just to see if something comes up...but nothing really.
Better stuff to come later this week, hopefully.
I've noticed in these two years in Silistra the city going in a direction. Now, I'm one who calls a country like Bulgaria becoming more globalized "progress." I can understand, if not condone, those who get freaked out at the sight of a McDonalds in foreign lands, but I'm not one of those people. Silistra isn't very globalized in that sense anyway. The ubiqitous Coca-Cola signs may be everywhere, like they are in any Bulgarian town or village, but the Supermarket here is Bulgarian owned and operated, with a Bulgarian name; There are no McDonaldses within a 150 mile radius; And Silistra won't be the first place Starbucks settles in if it ever spreads to Bulgaria.
Silistra is still very much Bulgarian as far as commercial attempts go, but western tradition has tersely stepped in and pushed things aside. Today's traditional Bulgarian holiday, Trifon Zarezan, was celebrated by many on the first of the month, and several others and I celebrated it last Friday. What's taken precedence instead is, of course, Valentine's Day. And the celebration this year exceeds last year's (as I remember it) just as much as this last Christmas went past the Christmas before in, well, Westerness. Florists are out in force today, and there are booths lining the street selling small stuffed animals and hearts and all the other things a person associates with Valentine's Day. The supermarket has even opened a big flower section in the holiday's honor.
Tonight, the local cover band is putting on a concert at the usual club. Everybody's saying "Happy Valentine's Day!" to each other, and last year it all seemed like a mystery to everyone when I brought it up. This year I'm getting SMS valentines from some of my more assertive students, last year well, not much.
Celebrating Valentine's Day may not be the greatest sign of a nation moving forwrd into the new millenium, but it certainly makes me feel more at home. And it's just a small part of the trends that I see pushing Bulgaria closer and closer toward the West.
The town is melting very, very quickly. Walking across town, it sounds more or less like rain . The snow on the top of buildings was thick enough to make the eaves form a downpour with the temperatures today being around 40 F. There are mushy, brown, slush-filled lakes in the middle of every road and sidewalk, and everybody is walking around without gloves and hats. It's pleasant, but will be a lot more pleasant when the slush clears.
On Friday, the male population of the school and some special guest stars celebrated Trifon Zarazen, which is pretty much a fertility ritual with a focus on wine and vineyards. Everybody brought their best homemade wine and rakia, and the rookies in the school's TZ celebration (Including myself. I can't really remember why I didn't take part last year) had to make the lunch. So the new French teacher, art teacher, and a few new security guards spent the morning making a chicken and potatoes lunch for 40 people. It was all fun and right on schedule, and somehow, miraculously, not only did not a single person die of salmonella, but most agreed that it was some of the best chicken they'd ever tasted. Credit goes to everybody, but a lot of it goes to just plain luck since none of us had any real idea about what we were doing.
During the lunch itself, the fertility ritual took on all of its proper forms. There were a few too many dick jokes, a bunch of speeches and explanations of tradition, everybody wearing a grapevine branch, and the initiation, which involved walking between two paddle lines and getting "baptized" with wine. All good times, lots of laughs. And apparently this warmer weather can be chalked up to these ceremonies, so all's good. Glad I could help.
Now it's just a matter of walking through a slushy and soaked city. But that's a tiny hassle when Spring's just around the corner and getting closer.
Three more school-less days! This week we have a "cold vacation," presumably since the school district can't properly claim a flu epidemic like much of the rest of the country. So there were no classes yesterday, there were no classes today, and there will be no classes tomorrow. All because of a dubious claim that temperatures hit -20 C Tuesday night, thus presenting some kind of safety hazard to the children of Silistra.
Really, it's a money issue. There's no way they can run the schools' heating systems when the buildings leak like collanders, so they allow a couple of weeks here and there in the winter for vacations. It's a small part of the reason why the school year runs from September to July. Last year, there was no need for vacation, just a half-day here and there, so the students got some extra education. But this year, the winter has suddenly gotten to a point that could, in some circles, be called cold. It doesn't justify the running around and hand-wringing a lot of people here seem to be doing, but it is cold, I suppose.
That cold has left the River partially frozen, and with that and the snow-covered park, I don't think the riverside has ever looked so beautiful. Walking to the internet club, I decided to detour through the park and take a look at the ice floes. It was hypnotic. They float down the river at a few miles per hour and as the larger ones hit the smaller ones they make a brittle, creaking, breaking sound that's just quiet enough to make a constant and pleasant white noise. As the sun set over the river, the whole thing looked like a well-made tequila sunrise on the rocks, with the odd shade of purple thrown in for variety. I didn't have my camera, but most of the effect came from the movement and sound, so a still wouldn't cut it anyway.
The river freezing is just one more sign that Bulgaria is using to claim that it is very, very cold. Despite all evidence to the fact that it is only "cold," Bulgarian news programs are regularly claiming temperatures in the Silistra area to be in the low minus twenties Celsius. A town in central Bulgaria allegedly set a record at -34 C, which is absolute lunacy if you just stick your head out the window, read a thermometer, or read weather reports from non-Bulgarian news. The thermometers around Silistra (and there are two very public thermometers) have never shown me anything lower than -8 C, which may be cold, but isn't even booger-freezing cold, a necessary factor in any determination of cold. Still, it's -8 C, so I'm not exactly shooting hoops outside.
But the apartment's warm! And that leaves me plenty of time to read Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which has been sitting on my bookshelf, looking impressive, since I picked it up from the volunteer library last year. I've never read Pynchon before, and so, after reading 100 pages, I was very, very surprised. It's dense, sure enough, but also incredibly pleasant, often funny, and in every way like reading page after page of the weirdest dream I've ever had. It's something Terry Gilliam would write if he were a good novel writer and decided to gun for a 770 page tome. Post-modernism at its best. And I'm only on page 200. I've never had so much fun reading a book I knew would be good for me.
So, the glorious winter service continues. Long days spent reading with a cat on my stomach, long nights in cafes discussing the pros and cons of America and Bulgaria and every country in between. And occasionally, I teach.
Nope. Nothing. Instead of the Superbowl, SAT 1 in Germany showed writhing, naked Germans for a couple of hours. While we were in full emergency mode as contingency plan after contingency plan fell through at 1:30 in the morning, we kept checking the channel and new people would be writhing. No one in the room had ever been nearly as angry to see such a thing.
So, for year number two I was deprived of a Superbowl when my schedule would have allowed it. I should note that I'm not normally an enormous football fan, and the thought of missing the Superbowl in America wouldn't normally piss me off like it did Monday morning, but when the oppotunity to really feel like a part of American culture comes along in, not just Bulgaria, but a town of 30,000 in a quiet corner of Bulgaria, well, it hurts when you miss that opportunity.
There are volunteers who (more or less) dislike all there is in American culture and are happy to be away from it for two years. More power to 'em, I say, but I love most things Americana and this self-imposed two year exile weighs pretty heavily occasionally. It's always good to feel home, and--though I really didn't need to see the Pats win--it would have been nice to closely connect for a few hours with the culture that raised me.
It probably isn't a coincidence that, since Sunday, the idea of "six months" has been passing through my head more often than it had before. I really like Bulgaria, it's been good to me, and Silistra has given me almost two great years. But, at the heart of things, it's been two years without home, or anything dramatically new to push thoughts of home further back in my mind, and the six months until my completion of service seem both tragically short and unbearably long. There are things cropping up every day that I think I should be doing in my time left, ideas are coming more easily now. But most of the time I realize that I don't have anything near the time needed to do any of them.
Six more months in Bulgaria. One more missed NBA playoffs. Just six months to do all that needs to be done here. Six more months to figure myself out. Any way I look at those six months, they're pretty scary.
Well, there may be a Super Bowl after all. For the moment, I'm stuck in Silistra. The roads are clear here, but there are hundreds of miles of 2-lane country road between Silistra and the Super Bowl parties sprinkled around Sofia and, apparently, some of those roads aren't getting cleared as well as they could be. I find this incredibly odd. The entire northeast end of Bulgaria has been shut out for over a week now, and there have only been two significant nights of snowstorm. Doesn't this, I don't know, affect the economy a little? I know for a fact that there are Silistrans waiting in Sofia for the first bus they can take home. Some take the train, but that's been packed to gills without buses (And is a schedule nightmare for me, keeping me from using it.) I would think that all those people would be missed at work.
Anyway, the good news is that SAT 1, a German channel, is supposed to be showing it and if you look hard enough, you can find SAT 1 here in Silistra. Strangely, SAT 1's webpage doesn't advertise the game (at least, that's what I understand using my non-existent German) and its program doesn't list it. But there's always hope.
I can't fathom why there are no bars around here with a satellite connection capable of picking up SkySports, but that's the way it looks. Most of the bars and cafes here seem to have a little dough, but the only things on TV are the Discovery Channel, Fashion TV, and the occasional Bulgarian soccer broadcast.
So now it's a waiting game for the 1:30 AM kickoff to see if it all comes together. There will be nachos, there may even be buffalo wings. And it will all go toward making Superbowl [Mon]day as American as possible here in Bulgaria. Reports on success to follow.
Well, since the snow's still falling, slowly eliminating the chances I may have to see the Superbowl this weekend, I might as well repent and do something good. I've been horribly remiss in not updating the links you see on the left side of the page. There are some great sites about Bulgaria, in particular, that you should all be taking the occasional look at. So today, I'm going to update that. And apologize to all the greatness I've ignored on the site for so long.