Alaskan Bulgarian

An Early Halloween

Silistra celebrated Halloween a bit early. Friday, in fact. And I mention only Silistra because, for the most part, Bulgaria doesn't celebrate Halloween. There's no trick-or-treating, no costumes. It's just not a part of Bulgarian tradition. But that's not to say that Bulgarians don't know about Halloween. All of my students can explain Halloween as well as any American student can, and there is the odd party, like ours, but usually only when there's an American around to certify it an official Halloween party and not just a night where everyone dresses up in order to drink beer.

This year, ours was a great party. We had a pertty high costume turnout, as you can see, and a nice quiet tavern that we all love. I went as a big, fat American after getting the idea from watching "Super-Size Me!" on DVD the night before. The first line on the back of the box read "Why are Americans so fat?" and my students' opinions on Americans have always backed up my belief that most Bulgarians think that all Americans are fat. Here's the money shot of me in the fat suit and "make-up":

The chocolate was only a temporary special effect. I decided, correctly I think, that the costume shouldn't be disgusting. Just funny. And I got that effect I think.

And boy did I pay a price for effect, carrying around that weight in just pillows, sheets, and shirts is no easy thing. I can't imagine how hard it gets with real fat. The worst part was the rear, where I had put my second biggest pillow. There wasn't much I could do to be both comfortable and keep my rear from drooping most of the night. I wound up settling for a drooping rear that I had to adjust every five minutes. Which I think also helped the effect.

Anyway, it was a good time. If I've done nothing else here, I've helped give enough reason to throw 3 great Halloween parties. Good, solid times

The Things That Make Me and My Students Happy

First Off: GO BRUINS!!!!! December 3rd, BABY, December 3rd!!

The season started and I believed...mphhh, ha ha ha. Sorry, no. I didn't give a crap. Honestly. I didn't give a single darn about UCLA and their returning .500 squad. I just didn't care. Maybe I had a glimmer of hope for the basketball team (tee hee), but the football team was a write-off. I may have decided to pay attention to the other American's alma mater, Georgia, so I could mock him if they ever lost, or sympathize with him if they ran the table and got screwed by the BCS on their way to a third place finish in the polls (Now that's just kind of sad. What with their quarterback down and all. I really hope their defense can beat Florida next week. I really do.), but I kind of figured we'd always be mocking UCLA more.

NOT ANYMORE BABY!!! USC's going DOWN!!!

I can't really watch the games, though, that's not great. And, granted, there are still three more games on the schedule, and a team with UCLA's history of late season flops can't afford to look past Stanford and the two Arizonas. But now, now that they've finally had a good, solid PAC-10 win over Oregon St. I'm beginning to believe. All the way from Bulgaria, I'm beginning to believe. They had my full and undivided attention after the Cal win two weeks ago, and I was glad to see them survive Washington St on the road. But now we have something. And we could have the NEW Greatest Game Ever if everything works out okay for three more weekends. Just three more weekends and weeks of practices. After that, UCLA could have a championship game, Maurice Drew could win the Heisman, and USC could have humiliations galore. But that's looking really far ahead, isn't it? Let's focus on the present.

On Friday, it occured to me that most Bulgarians probably haven't seen "The Princess Bride." I've never seen it on television here, and no student has ever mentioned it as their favorite movie. I don't know how things are now, but when I was in high school, I'll bet that out of 200 odd students, one would have said that the "Princess Bride" is their favorite flick. So I thought it might be fun to show my more advanced class one of my favorite films. I brought in my DVD player, and I got a student to lug the TV to the classroom and we sat down to watch.

The great thing about "The Princess Bride" is that you're experiencing the story with Fred Savage as it's being told. His proto-Wonder Years kid complains about all the slow bits you want to complain about and celebrates when you want to celebrate. So you always get to see the film with someone seeing it for the first time, but I'd never watched it with 25 teenagers who'd never seen it, and that was an amazing experience.

I used the English subtitles on the DVD so they could understand the English that much better (After all, I finally figured out what Andre the Giant was saying in one line watching the movie with subtitles. That guy really had a muffled voice). They payed attention the through the whole movie and really, really got into it. Some were sold after the greatest swordfight ever between Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes. And everyone was sold after Wallace Shawn's laughing fit/sudden death. They all made fun of the special effects in the fire swamp, and I could certainly see what they were saying, but we have to suspend disbelief don't we? They learned new grammar when I pointed out my favorite line in the movie: "We are men of action. Lies do not become us." They didn't know what "become" meant in that context. I'll admit I've probably never used "become" that way myself, but some people may find it useful.

Oh, and they also learned a new word: "Inconceivable!" "Unimaginable," I told them, and they got that.

Near the end of the movie, the class bell rang and I got up to get everything ready. When I made a move for the DVD player, they all yelled "NO!!" and we sat through the rest of the movie. They cheered when Westley got up off the bed, and when Inigo finally got his revenge. They actually cheered and clapped. I don't think I've seen a crowd get into a movie like that here in Bulgaria. It was a lot of fun. Easily the best movie day I've done in class.

Until I find the next great movie in my collection I've forgotten about, I'll just have to get my kicks from paying attention to the Bruins and their run to the title. GO BRUINS!!!!!

It All Happens At the Lake

What a night, Friday. I needed a day to separate myself from it a little bit. And then yesterday the bigger news hits: Villagers out near Lake Sreburna are starting to see a lot of dead birds. There's nothing confirmed yet, of course. But there are confirmed deadly cases of bird flu in Romania and Turkey. Near the Danube Delta in Romania, the end of the very same river that runs across Silistra, Romanian officials have culled just about every bird in at least two towns. I hate things that make me integrate new words into my vocabulary, like "cull." I instantly knew what "cull" meant when I saw it. I've probably seen it before, many times. But now bird upon bird is being culled barely 100 km from where I live and I have to use it in general conversation.

I'm reading Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" at the moment, and it puts this whole flu thing in perspective. Nearly every virus we humans have came from the animals we've domesticated. Pigs gave us the last great flu pandemic almost a century ago. Now it looks like it might come from birds if things don't go our way. A virus doesn't need much to figure out that it would be easier to spread itself among humans than birds. With humans you get off the migratory pathways. The world is a migratory pathway when you're a virus in the human bloodstream. And applying Diamond's theses about the success of germs in killing off most of the natives in the New World to possible future encounters, one thing is clear that makes this whole flu thing a little more appealing: Each of these pandemics gives us one more leg up on those alien invaders, whenever they may come. They may have small pox, they may have swine flu, yet if those don't work, we'll still be able to take down their mothership with bird flu, or die trying. So we have that to look forward to...

Anyway, Friday night out at Sreburna 13 students from 12B and I were in a little set of bungalows where the only source of income seems to be these little 12th class parties. Every 12th grade class seems to have a party near the beginning of the year to spark off a good, long year of doing nothing but talking about parties in class. These parties are condoned and more or less made possible by the school and a chaperone is sent along. I did one my first year and the worst that happened was a kid drank too much and threw up in a toilet. That was largely deemed a success by everyone I talked to. This party, though still apparently a success, was a wee bit different.

As mentioned, alcohol was involved, and a lot of it. This year, I noticed the level of it was higher than it had been two years ago. There was about a bottle of hard liquor for each student in the room. There was vodka, tequila, rakiya, the works. We got to the bungalows by bus at about 6:30 in the afternoon, got everything into the small, apartment-sized gathering hall by 7:00, and everybody was on the way to Loopyville by 7:30. My job, as I saw it, in those first hours, was to not look like a cop, while still letting everyone know that they might want to slow down. In retrospect, I probably should have been a little more persuasive.

By 8:30, there were two kinds of students, some were whacky, having fun, dancing, and doing good-natured drunk things. But a few, near my corner of the room, were getting more and more sullen, especially one, who will be called Yavor to protect his name from local gossip hounds. Yavor kept telling me that he wasn't drunk, and that he could handle anything, and all of his friends said that I didn't have to worry about him, even though he kept getting more an more sullen.

At about 9:00, around the time another teacher--Vanya--showed up to see how things were going, deliver a gift of red wine, and congratulate the kids on being in 12th grade, Yavor was out in the rain sobbing about not getting enough love from his girl. Vanya and I worked together to get him inside and I suggested (for the first time out of hundreds of times) that he get to bed. I must be nuts because, until about 2 AM when he himself suggested he knock off, no one else in the hotel seemed to agree that sleep was the best policy for the kid.

A half-hour later, Yavor and his girl were out on the balcony discussing things with Vanya nearby while I stayed inside accomplishing what was then my goal--to keep the unshielded fire in the hearth and the students throwing masses of wood into it from burning the place down. Suddenly, I heard a slam and glass shattering, and I stood up to see Yavor storming through the room after throwing the door shut. I forced him to lay down on a couch in the main room and walked over to the door and balcony where his girl, one of my better students, said "We'll pay for the window" in a voice that was barely audible. Vanya was talking with other students on the balcony. I cleared the loose glass from the window in the door and cleaned up what was on the ground. Then went back to the main room to convince Yavor to go to bed while watching him to make sure he didn't do anything stupid.

Fifteen minutes of that and another of my better students noticed that I was having any fun. She came up to me, asked me to dance, and because I didn't want to look like a jerk, I accepted. I noticed a moment later that Yavor had begun to dance with his girl. So this good student and I chatted for a while and near the end of the song, something caught my eye. A split second in my brain went something like this: Knife. Hand. Yavor. Bad. S--t. That last bit was audible and I gently spun the girl I was dancing with out of my arms and took a step over to where Yavor's best friend was trying to pry the knife out of his hand as Yavor's girl was pleading with him. One finger at a time, I separated the knife from Yavor's hand and he stormed out of the room while I made sure everyone was okay. Yavor's friend had a small cigarette burn on his hand where Yavor had grazed him with his cigarette.

At this point I didn't care about anyone's protest and was about to call either the police or a taxi company, when I remembered another of the night's little problems: The bungalows were far enough from civilization that cell phones weren't working and there were no phone lines running to the rooms we were in. So I was stuck in some horror movie while everyone else at the party was telling me that everything was okay, and that, yes, while Yavor would be in a hospital or jail at that point in America, in Bulgaria these things get handled internally. In the family, in a way. Some agreed with my opinion that that attitude was insane and that they were all just as loony as Yavor is while drunk.

Somehow, between another girl sobbing over her much older, knee-breaking boyfriend possibly not loving her back, and another knife-holding incident out of Yavor (that I stopped--again. I mean really, I thought I was there as a chaperone, but if I hadn't been there, I swear to God lives may have been lost.) things managed to calm down by 1 in the morning and by 2 most of the class and Vanya were asleep in their rooms. I doused the fire at 3, was the last one in bed, and I made sure I was up at 7:30 to catch the first bus out of that place. Before I left, the owner of the bungalows and Vanya both talked about what good kids this class is made of. When I was slow responding to the owner, she told me that the last class that came through broke all of her glasses and more than a few windows. So I did better than whoever watched that group. Yay. Vanya also confirmed that the night had been great. Still, Ave Maria was running through my head all that morning until I went back to sleep sometime around noon.

And so after decompressing for a day, we arrive at Sunday night, where Star Wars is on TV and Obi Wan's about to tell Luke about the dangers of Sand People. Time for a little escapism before another week with the hard-drinking, knife-wielding little hellions.

Newsweek, the Friday Savior

Today, I need a bit of a boost. Friday's can be a bit rough because my two two-hour classes are both 12th graders who demand more out of their lives than textbooks, usually they all want to go get a cup of coffee. Some of the other teachers let them. And mine get angy when I say no. So, today, I brought in the artillery. Every volunteer gets a copy of the international version of Newsweek every week and I store them up for days like this, when I know I'll have a small battle on my hands in the classroom.

They're really just great insta-activity. They're full of pictures, so I can, on-the-fly, have them do creative story writing or play-acting based on a picture I give them. Also, the articles are useful since they use a level of vocabulary just barely over the heads of Bulgairan students studying English as a second foreign language. That is, the students understand all of the entertainment articles and very little of the articles about Iraq or the economy.

With that in mind, I can have them read an article, and write down the words they don't know. For each student, the most important of these words goes on the board and every student gets to know them.

The point is, my students love when I bring in entertaining things from outside Bulgaria. Newsweek holds their attention well, but many of them get bored when they realize how much of the magazine is *gasp* politics. Fortunately, that boredom only lasts until a new batch of Newsweek's comes into the classroom (a few months later) and they renew thir hope of a magazine filled with I don't know what.

Also, I did something crazy this week. I agreed to chaperone one of the 12th grades at their little 12 grade party tonight. Reports on all the legitimate craziness (One of my colleagues asked me how I could agree to it, knowing that all the students would just be drinking and dancing. And this is a school party, remember) sometime later this weekend.

Fall is Here

It's gotten cold. Not so much that you walk outside and see you breath in the morning, but it's a steady progression away from the warmth we had in September toward the coat-wearing evenings we have now.

To go along with that cold, I have my first stuffy nose of the season. Lots of sneezing, and lots of hacking to keep the sore throat away. It seems to be going away well enough.

As far as school goes these days, well, it's the same old thing. A little babysitting, a little teaching, and a lot of "no"s. Basically, there isn't anything revolutionary going on. Can't say I wish there were either.

The one minor disaster of the week involved the cat and the toilet as disasters often do. Yuli has a habit of jumping up to the top of doors whenever I look like a good springboard to her. So, late at night, I was in the bathroom and had just flushed. The problem was that the toilet hadn't been working too well lately. It had the kind of flushing mechanism where I had to pull a button on top of the tank lid. For some reason, that button's string had gotten loose and the only way to flush the toilet was to pull the enitre lid up to the string would tighten up and pull the water drain.

As I was lifting the lid up, Yuli took the opportunity to jump from the bathroom door onto my shoulder and then on to the lid. The back corner of the lid slammed back onto he tank and bit of the corner of the lid chipped away. I thought that would be an easy fix with a little glue and it would have been, if I hadn't noticed the leaking coming from the back of the tank. On inspection, it came up that a crack was running down the length of the back of the tank and water was running out as the tank was filling up.

So I shut off the water to the toilet, asked the school to take a look at it, and 3 days later I had bought a new tank for the bathroom with a better flushing mechanism and better porcelain. It cost me 90 leva, which in the end, wasn't too bad. There are worse things in life than having to get a new toilet tank.