Happy Latw Thanksgiving Everyone! Internet's been out since Tuesday, so I didn't have a chance to give an eary or on-time Happy Thanksgiving. I hope this one works.
The Silistra American contigent and co. had a great Thanksgving dinner last night. Our supermarket is selling turkey these days, so we got an 8-pound bird for about 6 people. This was pretty much the first Thanksgiving where I was involved in just about everything that went into the oven. I basted the turkey and decided when it was ready (It came out beautifully, incidentally. Honey seems to work well, and my nightmare of the dinner scene from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation went unfulfilled. Although the turkey was maybe a liiiiiitle bit dry, I'm blaming that on the oven we used being the size of my laptop.), I mashed up the potatoes after the were strained. And as a piece de resistance, I did pretty much the entire apple pie. From peeling the apples to mixing the dough for the crust, to pulling it out of the oven.
I wouldn't be nearly as proud of these things if it hadn't felt like Thanksgiving eating them, and it certainly did. Right down to the Tryptophan and ballooning stomach. Everybody ate tons of food and left full.
In class things have been interesting too. I've been covering the holiday these last few days, and some of the basic ingredients that pique the kids' interests aren't here in Bulgaria. These mystical foods like cranberries, sweet potatoes, and marshmallows never fail to delight or disgust. The idea of sweet potatoesgets their tastes buds gagging, in particular. Marshmallows, they seem hesitant about and cranberries just don't interest them beyond the explanation of the name of the band.
And that's pretty much the Thanksgiving news. Hope everyone had a great one. It's back to reading Chaucer for me.
One reason I'm not writing as much these days (Other than the fact that the internet, which has been great for a whole month, failed on me for a couple of days) is that time is flying these days. It's Wednesday right now. If I blink, it's Wednesday again and the weather is ten degrees cooler. It just doesn't seem like my entries are that rare. I feel like I wrote my last entry yesterday.
Silistra itself seems to be assisting in this wierd sense of time. Shops go up, shops close. Bars open and shut down and open again twice as fast as they went away. Restaurants are springing up in all corners. Every block has an American-like "touch-and-feel" grocery store now. It's like one of those cheesy movie cuts (See L.A. Story, Devil's Advocate, Serendipity, Futurama Ep. 1, and many, many others) where you see the city change and cars flying by in streaks. The city's a blur. That's a good thing. I don't think I saw as much positive change during any similar period at UCLA. Germanos, an electronics franchise with a new store here, has even picked up a Playstation 2 demo machine, which in my world is like jumping from the copper arrowhead of pirated computer software to the steel sword of retail video games in less than a few months. Behold Progess!
I'm amazed basically, and have little to do but be glad that I'm seeing theis kind of change in my time here. That said, I have to run before it's Thursday and I miss my classes. Or at least before my dinner gets cold. One or the other.
There are many answers to this question, which is to say, I have no direct answer, but I can weave around several different ones in order to present some kind of response.
The core of it, I think, is that Bulgaria itself isn't really inspiring me to write 100 words a day as much as it used to. It's not that it's boring here. Far from it. But the things that happen are part of life for me now. It's the same reason a lot of volunteers seem to stop taking photos of everything after their first year. It just doesn't seem reasonable to take photos of everyday life.
With that also comes a lack of willingness to be snarky about Bulgaria and complain about every little thing. These days there's much less to complain about anyway. Every "point-and-choose" store in Silistra is becoming the kind of supermarket we're all used to. The supermarket in my building actually reminds me of the place where I used to shop before Ralph's came to Westood at UCLA.
Things are just plain peachy here, is the thing. But it's not everything. I'm also trying to conserve the writing I'm doing for the tests I have to write, the assignments I have to create, the essay I have to write to (hopefully) get into grad school and the short stories I need to write to maintain my sanity and (hopefully) get into a creative writing program. Again, that's not to say I'm sitting in front of my computer all day typing. But whenever it is I get through with whatever I'm working on any given night, I like to browse around the internet a little. And by a little I mean for 4 or 5 hours. Writing an entry while browsing not only dampens my browsing buzz, but also makes for silly, substandard entries.
So, by popular request I'll try to double my efforts here. But, we'll just have to see how far that goes.