First off, my project proposal was approved! I am so excited. This is going to be really great for my school. I put in a LOT of work (not to mention dealt will a LOT of frustration), so it's kind of a relief that it wasn't all for nothing.

Speaking of projects, if you feel the need to help out in Bulgaria, check out this project, which is soliciting funds through the Peace Corps Partnership Program (tax deductable for US citizens). The volunteer involved, Dan, is in my group and he lives in what's probably the most remote and...well, let's say, unfortunate village of any of us here in Bulgaria. Basically, they need a lot of help up there. Every time I see Dan he's got some new bizarre tale of woe of life on the Serbian border. (The best was when he got tapeworm. Tapeworm! Can't beat that story, sorry.)

Summer is winding down. I can't say I'm too sorry - I am looking forward to school, which starts 15 September (which is a Saturday...yes, the Bulgarian school system is so committed to starting on 15 September that we have school on a Saturday). I have lots of plans for my kids!

Well, it's still going on, but it's passing by quickly!

I spent the last couple weeks rewriting a grant proposal for an addition to our school. That was a fairly stressful experience. I spent all of last week rushing around the town trying to get some documentation from the city officials. It was a pain in the ass. I needed to get a bank statement from the municipality to prove that we had enough money to pay for our portion of the proposed project, but no one would give it to me, because "the amount in the bank account is a secret". I eventually got them to write a letter promising to pay the specific amount mentioned in the proposal, but I had to go back four times and beg and plead and finally, be really pushy. In some ways, this experience sort of exemplified the problems in Bulgaria. The money exists, largely through the European Union, to make a lot of improvements all over the country, but people are generally not very savvy about how to go about doing this. I've never written a grant proposal before, so it's not like I'm some kind of expert, but my jaw practically fell out of my head when the man at the municipality told me that the bank account was secret. I hope he never tries to apply for some kind of credit line. (The whole idea of credit is kind of new here in Bulgaria. Credit cards have only been available for a couple years here. I was with my host mom last year when she bought a new TV on credit. She was amazed!)

So on Friday, I took off for Varna. Here's a little map of Bulgaria to show you where it is:

I live just above the "g" in Stara Zagora, so you can see that it's quite a distance, especially since there's a mountain range running across the middle of Bulgaria from east to west that I needed to cross. It took so long to get there that about nine hours into the travelling, I was beginning to wonder if it was worth it.

It WAS. I had a great time. Varna is the third biggest city in Bulgaria, and really nice. It's the most touristy place I've ever been in Bulgaria, though. Not just backpackers and travellers, too, I'm talking lots of British and German tourists on beach holidays. I'm not much of a beach person (too much sand, inevitable sunburns, I can lay around and read a book at home anyway), but sitting on the tree-lined promenade above the sea was lovely. Really peaceful - I could feel the stress melting away.

I stayed in a hostel full of travellers from all over the world. Interesting bunch. On Saturday, after walking around town for a couple hours, I was hot and tired (the weather was dreadful - really humid), so I went back to the hostel to chill for a little. The owner of the hostel, who's Irish, was doing some accounts in the sitting room, and was just putting on The Big Lebowski. So we sat there and recited the movie together, cracking ourselves up. People kept wandering in, but no one else wanted to watch it with us. Can't imagine why. Afterwards, the whole lot of us went out for drinks. (Mike, the hostel owner, and I had White Russians.) Then we all went dancing at a club on the beach.

Now I'm back at work, which is probably a good thing; Varna is not good for the bank account. My new project: writing an intermediate-level textbook for adult students. I'm collaborating with another volunteer on this project, though, whew.

Yikes, I haven't posted here forEVER. Sorry.

I spent the first couple weeks of the summer teaching English at a conversation camp in Blagoevgrad. It was a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun. Probably about a third of the kids were Bulgarian, most of the rest were from Montenegro, and there were also kids from Serbia, Russia, Kazakhstan, France, and Italy. It was so neat to have an international group - I learned a ton about their countries, especially Montenegro. (Montenegro is the world's youngest country - it's only been independent from Serbia for a little over a year, and the kids are all really patriotic in an endearing way. They were all happy to show us pictures and tell us about life in their country.) All of us Volunteers who worked at the camp want to go to Montenegro now.

Then I came back to Pavel Banya. It was crushingly hot for awhile, that wasn't fun. I started up my summer classes for my kids and I've been working on a grant proposal to remodel a room in my school. Last weekend I went to Veliko Turnavo, which I'd always heard was one of (if not the) most beautiful cities in Bulgaria, and I must agree! It's absolutely lovely. Of course I forgot my camera. Oh well, an excuse to go back. I met up with some other volunteers there and we had dinner and that was nice.

The new group of volunteers, the B22s arrived on Monday. The next group that arrives, next spring, will be the group to replace MINE! That seems almost impossible.

Today my stupid cat tried to run out the door when I opened it and I reached down to grab him and pulled something in my back. It's fantastic. I'm getting a taste of what it will feel like to be a baba, I suppose.

Okay, it's a welcome invasion, to the citizens of Pavel Banya, who are happy to have the business, but if you want to pop by our town ploshtad (square) right now, you'd swear you were in Turkey, not Bulgaria. I have no idea why, but it seems like a lot of Turkish people come to PB for their summer vacations, and they're all sitting in the ploshtad right now. Lots of stout women with headscarves and skinny men with moustaches chatting in Turkish.

We have our own local Turkish-Bulgarians here in town, but these visitors are noticeably different. First of all, the women are wearing headscarves, which I never saw during, say, the winter, when we don't have so many visitors. Second, they're actually speaking Turkish. Now, I know my Turkish students speak Turkish because they have told me so, but I have literally never heard any of them speaking anything but Bulgarian (and English, of course!). I guess they must speak Turkish at home, but I've seen my kids speaking with their parents in public - in Bulgarian. I don't know why they do this. I know volunteers who live in all-Turkish villages and they say that everyone speaks Turkish in their daily life, but here in PB, where the Turkish are a significant (and well-integrated) minority, Bulgarian is the language of choice.

In other news, it's painfully hot, and my summer English classes were supposed to start today, but no one showed up. I was hurt and puzzled by this turn of events, seeing as 24 students told me they wanted to come, but when I talked to one of my adult students (who's the mom of two of my kid students), she told me that everyone seems to think that classes start NEXT week, and everyone is off in their villages this week. And probably everyone who isn't in the village was at the pool or the river. Can't say I blame them. We'll get classes started eventually.

HOT.

That's how I feel today. Blech. It's not all that hot, but it's humid and it's just beginning to rain...everything is sticky and yucky. School ends on Friday and my kids are out of control. Today my seventh graders whined that we should have class at the "beach", by which they mean "pool". (It sounds funny in English, but in Bulgarian, a pool complex is called the beach.)

They crazy.

And on Saturday, the first day of my summer vacation (ha!), I have to go to Blagoevgrad to plan the camp that I'll be working at in July. Then it's off to Dupnitsa for my Mid Service Training Conference. I'll be back in Pavel Banya on Wednesday, and my summer classes start on Monday. No rest for the wicked Peace Corps Volunteer.

Last weekend I had three gosti (guests) over - members of the new group of Volunteers, the B21s. They have been in Bulgaria for a couple months now, and they haven't had the chance to see much of the country besides their training sites and immediate surroundings. They had to go through Sofia, which made me very nervous - I was like a frantic mom! There are two bus stations in Sofia, and I knew that they would arrive at one and leave from the other, and it was the trip between that made me nervous. Sofia is a pretty big city and it isn't particularly easy to get around. But they arrived safe and sound and bearing avocadoes. So we made guacamole, which was awesome.

Sometimes I feel like I just got to Bulgaria, and sometimes I feel like I've been here forever - and my old life back in the US seems awfully vague and unreal. Talking to the new volunteers gave me a good sense of perspective, I think. I've learned a lot in the last year and I feel much more confident and sure about the coming year. I had summer classes last year, and I remember floundering around, trying to find appropriate lessons, which was hard because I didn't know the kids or their language abilities. I'm planning my summer classes now, and I have all kinds of ideas. I'm finally figuring out what I'm doing, which is feels great. Of course, this is the last week of school, so it's kind of frustrating that school's ending just as I'm learning how to do my job.

In other news, I got cable! Shiny, shiny television.

I finally started the community English course I've been wanting to do for month. We met for the first time about three weeks ago now. I have around seven students, all adults who live in Pavel Banya. (Several of them are the parents of my kids, who want to learn English so they can help their children with their homework.) It's going fairly well so far.

The funny part - last week I got an email from another Peace Corps Volunteer, in Gabrovo. She wanted to know if some acquainances of hers, who live in Kazanluk, could attend my "famous" class. That's right - within two weeks, people in other cities were already talking about the free English class for adults in Pavel Banya. Ha! And here I thought my actions were only being followed by the people here in town.

Today is the last day of class for the second through fourth graders. From here on out, I only have school with the fifth through seventh grades. During the summer...I don't know. I have some ideas, but the only fairly concrete ones are that I'm going to have summer classes for my younger kids, and I'll continue my class for adults. I'd like to have a project that doesn't have to do directly with teaching - I don't know if my plans to translate the town's website into English really counts, though. Also, I'm going to work at a summer camp for advanced English students at the American University in Blagoevgrad for two weeks in July. I want to go to Romania, too.

That's what's up. Everyone keeps asking me if I'm going to the sea this summer. I don't know if I'll have the time!

I recently wrote about Den Po Budui, a mysterious (to me) Russian holiday that we were celebrating here in Bulgaria, but after I wrote about it, I realized I was parsing it wrong in my head - it's actually Den Pobudui, which I figured meant "Day of Victory". (The Bulgarian word for "victory" is close to the Russian.)

So now I am extra amused that my coworkers were celebrating it because...Bulgaria LOST in World War II. They didn't have a hell of a choice, since the country was occupied by the Nazis at the time, but that they celebrate the victory of another country says a lot about Bulgaria, and its relationship with Russia.

Gotta run. Class!

This is actually not Bosnia, but rather (the Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia. I had several hours between busses here in Skopje.

Finally, after a 15 hour bus ride, I reached Sarajevo!

Did something happen here? This is an ordinary building photographed at random. Pretty much everything in Sarajevo (and Bosnia, really) looks like this.

Okay, even for Bosnia, this is a little extreme. This house is the Tunnel Museum. During the war, the Bosnian Army built an 800 meter tunnel that went under the Sarajevo airport. For three years, it was the only way in or out of Sarajevo. (Except with UN escort, but the UN and the Bosnian Army had slightly different priorities, as you may imagine.) Serb forces attacked it six times.

Inside the tunnel. Only about 20 meters of it are open now.

The bridge of deeeeath. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia, on this bridge, which he then jumped off of in an attempt to commit suicide. Alas, he only succeeded in breaking his legs. D'oh.

Then I went to Mostar. I wish I could show you how amazing the scenery between Sarajevo and Mostar was, but taking pictures from a bus doesn't usually work very well. Anyway, it was spectacular.

Most means "bridge" (in Bulgarian, too), and although there are 12 bridges spanning the river, this is the most. The original version, built hundreds (I forget exactly) years ago during the Ottoman Empire time, was destroyed by Croatian shelling in 1994. This new version, an exact replica of the original, was finished in 2004.

More Mostar. This here is the eastern (Muslim) bank of the city. (By the way, both of these pictures were taken from the minaret of a mosque that's open for visitors.) As you can see, Mostar is a ridiculously pretty place, but all of these buildings are new. You can tell because of the lack of bullet holes. All one has to do to see how terribly devastated this city was is to walk about two blocks from the tourist area, where shells of buildings, missing windows and covered in bulletholes, sit, trees growing out of their roofs.

I didn't take any pictures of these. I didn't want to be a tourist of other peoples' tragedies. Besides, I think I'll remember okay without photographs.

First, I have a bunch of pictures to post. I've just had some problems getting them on the internet.

Second, today is Den na Evropa, the Day of Europe. What I find most amusing about this holiday is that 9 May used to be an entirely different holiday - Den po Bedui, which means...I don't know, exactly, because it's Russian. (Day of...something or other.) It marks the end of World War 2, and this morning on the news, they showed the big ceremony in Moscow, complete with marches and Vladimir Putin staring down at everyone.

But some years after the end of World War 2, the European Union was founded on 9 May (which I haven't researched, but I doubt the day is a coincidence). And so now it's Europe Day. To celebrate Europe Day, for whatever reason, the kids get to run the school - and lord preserve us - the town. So far, nothing has been destroyed, but it's still only noon. Two of the best eighth graders "taught" my second grade class this morning. I think maybe they now have a clue of how tough teaching is.

Right now I'm in the teachers' lounge. We're listening to patriotic Russian songs, very loudly. My colleagues who also have a break this hour are singing along and laughing.

Let me tell you two things about Sarajevo.

1. Sarajevo (and Bosnia and Hercegovina in general, as far as I can tell) is really beautiful. The old town area is almost too charming to be real. It's like if Disneyland had an Ottoman Empire-Land. Lots of twisting, narrow cobble-stoned streets, lined with cafes and shops selling rugs and ornately worked silver and copper pitchers, and old mosques and churches here and there. Outside of the city center, Sarajevo is cursed with the scourge of Eastern Europe - hideous communist architechture. Fortunately, the topography helps somewhat; the city is built in a valley, and the hills rising up from the river are very pretty.

2. Sarajevo (and Bosnia and Hercegovina in general, as far as I can tell) is absolutely covered in bullet holes. I first started seeing them as my bus wound through the suburbs of Sarajevo. Imagine this idyllic scene on a pretty morning in April: middle-aged woman puttering around in her garden, admiring her daffodils and tulips and doing some weeding. Behind her, her house is pocked with enough holes to cause it to resemble gray swiss cheese.

Yeah.

The juxtoposition is very strange. Walking around the city, I watched the pedestrians around me. They all looked very normal and ordinary. Sitting in cafes drinking coffee, shopping with their friends, etc. Whenever I saw someone about my own age, how could I help but think about how their life has been different from my own? When I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird and struggling with geometry, they were dodging sniper bullets. (There are loads of bullet holes in the sidewalks, which I found even more unsettling than the bullet holes in all the buildings.)

There are a lot of images of the 1984 Olympics. Sarajevans do seem to savor the irony that in ten years, they went from holding the Olympics to living without electricity and worrying about their apartments being struck with mortars.

Yesterday I went to the Tunnel Museum. During the four year seige of Sarajevo, Bosnian militiamen dug an 800 meter long tunnel under the airport. (The airport itself was controlled by the UN, who knew about and disapproved of the tunnel.) The airport was located in a sort of bottleneck, with the Serbian forces very close by on either side, and the tunnel was the only way to get supplies into and out of the city. It's pretty amazing.

The sheer ordinariness of the people in the Balkans is what makes this so frightening. They aren't monsters or heroes. They're just regular people. It makes one realize the capacity for horror that is within humans.

Today I am in Mostar. I haven't done much yet, so I don't have a lot to report, other than I got a damned good deal at my hostel. I chatted with the owner for a couple hours last night. I spoke Bulgarian and he spoke Bosnian and it was okay! A lot of the words are the same, but accented differently. Like, the word for 'why' in Bulgarian is zashTO. In Bosian it's ZASHto. The elongation of the opposite vowels makes it sound sort of like Bulgarian with an Italian accent to me. (Macedonian sounds like Bulgarian with a German accent, by the way. I am aware of how little sense this makes, incidentally.) My Bulgarian style head nodding isn't going over well, but I can't seem to stop!

The bus ride from Skopje to Sarajevo was something else. Let me first say that in planning my trip, I had to decide whether to travel via Skopje or Belgrade. There is no direct line from Sofia to Sarajevo. Unfortunately, there is also no information on the web comparing these two options, so I spent a lot of time comparing and contrasting, and finally went with Skopje because a. the Belgrade bus station people struck me as idiots (I emailed them to ask how much the bus ride cost, and they emailed me back when it arrived; further emails received no response), and b. I'd heard Skopje was nice and the Belgrade wasn't.

What I didn't realize was that I didn't even need to choose! Because the bus from Skopje went through Belgrade. Best of both worlds! Look, here's a map. Feel my frustration:

We also took a little detour into, of all places, Croatia. My best guess as to why is that we were following the best roads. Balkan transportation is not always very efficient.

Total time spent on bus: 15 hours.

And I get to do it again, in the opposite direction, on Friday! Yay!

However, I'm not at all regretting that I didn't go through Belgrade. Because I have no reason to think that would have been any better, honestly.

Anyway, I have a lot to say about Sarajevo, but I'll save that for my next entry.

That's right, I have escaped Bulgaria! Though as of yet I have not gotten very far. At the moment I am enduring a VERY long layover in Skopje, Macedonia, as I wait for the bus to Sarajevo. With my nine hours to putter around Skopje, I had been planning to find some bookstore with English books and browse, which I can do for hours and hours. Unfortunately, Macedonia has yet to embrace Americanism as much as Bulgaria (where everything is open all the time, including Christmas and New Years Day), and everything is CLOSED because it is SUNDAY. Boo!

Turns out that April Fool's Day is a big deal in the FYROM. A couple of German backpackers who were on my bus from Sofia and I went off to explore the city and promptly ran into a gigantic crowd of children in costumes. We escaped the crowd by heading across the river to the old city, which is completely charming and very Middle Eastern-ish. There are a BUNCH of mosques here, and, unlike any of the mosques in Bulgaria's big cities, they actually call to prayer, which I love to hear. It just sounds so cool. (I know some volunteers who live in really small all-Muslim villages in Bulgaria and they say that they do do the call to prayer there, but even though there are big mosques in the centers of Sofia and Plovdiv, they don't do the call.) It was a really lovely day here in Skopje, so German dudes and I found a lawn on top of what used to be the Skopje castle and relaxed in the sunshine. Don't worry, mom, I put on sunblock first.

So, it's been a nice day. I took a bunch of pictures that I will post. (I know I said that before, but the computer I usually use at work has been destroyed by some evil virus, AND I've been really busy with Official Peace Corps Volunteer Work lately, so I haven't had a lot of time recently.) If I hadn't spent all of last night in the company of some crazy English people revelling in how much their pounds can buy in Bulgaria and had gotten more than 3 hours of sleep, today would have been better, but it's been pretty good anyway.

Catch y'all in Sarajevo.

Hola. I'm in Sofia right now. On Friday, I was thinking, "okay, must go to bed because I have to get up early and go to Sofia," which led into "...when did I become a person who goes to Sofia, Bulgaria?"

Strange.

Things are going okay. I don't update this blog enough. Let me give a summary.

3 March is the Bulgarian national holiday. I will admit to not being entirely clear on the concept because it's not independence day, which is in September. It commemorates a battle between the Russian and Ottoman armies...that took place in August. Anyway, the battle was at Shipka Pass, the main pass in the Balkan Mountains, the range that seperates the north and south of the country. As it happens, I live really close to Shipka (there's a big monument built on top of the mountains, I can see it from Pavel Banya), so I went with a group of students and teachers from my school for the national ceremony at Shipka. It was pretty cool and really cold, being above the snow line. It was less cool when the 8th graders started singing the same two patriotic songs over and over and over and our bus didn't show up for an hour. Anyway, an interesting experience. Bulgarians love Russia for freeing them from Turkish tyranny. (Not because the Russians were so altruistic, Bulgaria was just a pawn in a greater game.) It's interesting because I know that a lot of Eastern European countries hate Russia for imposing unpleasant communist dictatorships on them. Not so Bulgaria. Lots of Russian flags flying at Shipka.

The other thing going on is Baba Marta, very possibly the most charming Bulgarian holiday. It's pre-Christian, which means that it has no religious significance, so all of my kids celebrate it equally (about 30-40% of my students are ethnically Turkish and Muslim). Baba Marta (literally Grandmother March) is the personification of the month of March and on 1 March everyone exchanges martenitzas, little bracelets made of red and white string. You wear martenitzas until you see the first stork of spring, when you tie the martenitza to a tree. It's supposed to ensure good luck and fertility to the tree. It's very cute because everyone has martenitzas and it's somewhat funny to see the bits of red and white string poking out of the sleeves of the TV news anchors' expensive suits. Anyway, I have yet to see a stork, so I'm wearing three martenitzas at the moment.

So, I was in Sofia for a meeting yesterday, and decided to stay overnight to poke around the city. The first couple times I was in Sofia I didn't really like it - it struck me as dirty and confused, but the more time I spend here, the more I like it. You can get pretty much ANYTHING here. (Except bagels. I'd kill for a bagel.) Yesterday I saw a street vendor selling aspargus. That's the first time in almost a year I've seen asparagus! I'll probably pick up a couple of avocadoes before heading back to Pavel Banya this afternoon. Bulgaria is developing very unevenly, and I imagine most people who come to Sofia would be surprised to know that there are even Peace Corps Volunteers here. It's only when you leave the capital that the disparity and poverty of the country really becomes apparent.

I have lots of pictures, but they're all back in Pavel Banya. I'll post them soon!

I went back to Boboshevo for a couple days back in January. I hadn't realized it when I left, but it was Yordanovden. This is a slight digression: every day is some saint's feast day. The feast day of the saint you're named after is your name day (imenden), and is celebrated something like a birthday. Some other saint's days are holidays for other reasons, which I generally don't know. Like, St. George's Day, Georgovden, is the Day of the Bulgarian Army. Don't ask me. The biggest feast days are, of course, the ones with lots of people named after them. So Ivanovden, St. John's Day, is a big holiday. Sometimes, a completely random (as far as I can tell, anyway) woman's name will be associated with a saint's name too. For instance, Arcangelovden is the name day for anyone who is named after one of the Archangels...and it's also the imenden for women named Galina, which is fairly common. It is, in fact, my counterpart's name, and I didn't get her a gift, so I felt like a big jerk.

ANYWAY. I was in Boboshevo for Yordanovden. That's...St. Jordan's Day? Is there a Saint Jordan? I don't know. Maybe it's just Jordan Day, like the River Jordan. The tradition is to throw a cross in the river and all the young, crazy men jump in after it. Remember, this is January. I don't know what you do if your town doesn't have a river.

Everyone in town, waiting.

The pope carrying the cross. I gather that being the pope in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church is not quite as singular an honor as it is in the Roman Catholic Church.

The cross in the river. The young men of the village get ready to jump in the river.

There they go!

I don't know what the winner gets. A towel, maybe?

Also: here's me with my host niece, Danislava, age 8. I've promised to go back to Boboshevo for her birthday in March. Isn't she the cutest?

I was in Plovdiv Monday-Wednesday for PDM. It was nice to see everyone, I hadn't since IST. And now I won't again until MST in June.

Ages ago, I remember saying something to a friend whose sister had been a Volunteer about how much paperwork was involved in Peace Corps and how it served to remind us that PC is run by the federal bureacracy. She said that based on her sister's stories, it's impossible to forget that, and you know what? She was right. If you're interested in Peace Corps, or possibly stalking me, this is what I'm talking about.

1. Staging. This is when all the members of your group arrive in the city in the US from which you will depart for your assignment. Mine was in Washington, DC (really Arlington, VA) and we sat around in a hotel conference room for two and a half days talking about expectations and doing skits and making lists.

2. Pre-Service Training (PST). The biggie. Ours lasted for ~10 weeks. This was when I was in Boboshevo. We had 5 hours of Bulgarian a day, practiced teaching at the local elementary school, and did (largely silly) community entry assignments. My group of B19s was seperated into eleven towns and village surrounding the city of Dupnitsa, and every two weeks we gathered there and talked about how we were doing.

3. In-Service Training (IST). We had this back at the end of November, in Kazanluk. Which was great for me, since I live about 25 minutes from Kazanluk and stayed at home instead of the hotel. More talking about teaching and community entry and Bulgarian. My counterpart had to come, too.

4. Project Design Mamagement (PDM). This is what we just had. Most Peace Corps Volunteers work on projects to improve their school and community, and write grant proposals to get the money to do this. We just had a three day workshop on how to get this done. My school director accompanyed me this time. I like my director, but I was pretty nervous about spending three days with her. I hope she doesn't think I'm awful for sometimes working with my Bulgarian flashcards during deadly dull seminars. (Can we just ban Power Point already? Gee whiz.)

5. Mid-Service Training (MST). This is in June, right after the school year ends. Included in MST is the Experience Exchange Conference, during which we, the now-veteran B19 TEFLs will give our advice to the now only hypothetical B21s, who are due to arrive on April 16.

Then, we are free, free, FREE of conferences for months and months! Yay!

6. Close of Service (COS). This will take place, I think, in March or April of next year. Obviously, I haven't been yet so I don't know exactly what we'll all be talking about. I guess it's more complicated than just saying adios.

In Pavel Banski news, we have a carnival this weekend. I am looking forward to it. Expect pictures soon!

Okay, ages ago, back in November, my colleagues and I went on a trip to Koprivshtitsa, a town about an hour and a half west of Pavel Banya. It's famous for its well-preserved and beautiful architechture, and also for being the hometown of a whole bunch of famous Bulgarians AND for being the site of the beginnings and headquarters of the April Uprising, a failed attempt in 1876 (yes, I had to look that up) to throw off Turkish rule. There's a bridge in town that's known as the First Shot Bridge because it's where the first shot of the uprising took place (a Bulgarian shot a Turkish soldier). Like I said, the uprising failed, but it's extremely significant in Bulgarian history and the leaders are all national heroes.

The town square.

Walking through the cobbled lanes. That's my counterpart on the left. Incidentally, my counterpart's family is originally from Koprivshtitsa, but her great-grandparents fled to get away from the chaos during the uprising. She still lives in Tuzha, the village near Pavel Banya that they settled in.

In the courtyard of a museum house. My counterpart, Galya, is on the left. Deshka, my Bulgarian tutor, is on the right. The whole trip, she made sure I understood everything, explaining what everything was in language she knew I would understand.

This is, I believe, the house of Dr. Petur Beron, a famous writer and educator.

The inside of one of the museum houses.

Shopska salata is pretty much the essential Bulgarian meal. Here's a picture I found:

If you're familiar with the tomato and cucumber salad that's popular all over the Middle East, a shopska is somewhat similar.

Chop up an equal amount of cucumber and tomato. How much you use depends on how much salad you want, but there should be about the same amount of cucumber as tomato. The pieces should be bite sized, but not tiny.

Chop up some bell pepper and some red onion. These are for extra flavor and there should be less than the cucumber or tomato, but according to your own preferences.

Finally, shred a pile of cirene over the salata. Cirene is a Bulgarian cheese similar to feta, but somewhat harder, so you can shred it without it falling apart completely. If you can't find cirene at your local supermarket, crumble a bunch of feta on the salata. Garnish with an olive. (The one in the picture here is green, but I'm more used to seeing green.) Pour a bit of olive oil and sprinkle some salt on the salata if you like.

Voila! Now you have some delicious shopska salata!

That's how much I live on a day, converted into your American dollars. (400 lev=$268/month.)

Things have pretty much settled down here. I wake up, go to school, have Bulgarian tutoring, come home, get attacked by Max, read, watch TV, go to bed. Life is...ordinary.

The first semester ends on Wednesday. Then we have two days of vacation. The second semester begins next Monday. Can you believe it? I'm already one quarter of the way done with my service. Crazy. April (and the one year anniversary of B19's arrival) is just around the corner. The B17s are going to be leaving in a few months, and the B21s - who I guess are just beginning to take shape in some office in Washington - will be arriving! Time flies. I have learned so much this semester, it is amazing. I look forward to continuing to improve my mad teaching skillz.

Here's some spam, but it's for a good cause: Peace Corps Partnership Program. PCPP is a way for outside people to help volunteers get great stuff done! (We aren't allowed to accept direct cash donations.) If you click on the link, you'll see lots of proposed projects that Volunteers all over the world are working on. Right now, there are three projects up in Bulgaria. Matt Sumpter and Olivia Smith each have a project up; they're a married couple (you might notice they're from different states - they actually met here in Bulgaria and got married last year!) and live in Kalofer, which is the town just west of Pavel Banya. If you want to help out, drop them a buck or two - it goes a lot farther than you might think! (If you don't believe me, take a look at my salary up there at the top of this post again.) Donations are tax deductible, of course.

I like looking at the PCPP page from time to time, it is so cool to see what people are up to. They're fish farming in Madagascar, building a maternity clinic in Mali, educating people on HIV/AIDS in Costa Rica, producing spices in Vanuatu, etc. I hope you'll see my name up there sometime soon.

From left to right: Aicel, Teodora, Evalina, Isabella, Ani (giving herself rabbit ears), Saihan, Usman, Slovena, and Ivo.

Evalina's mom is the postal worker who's worried about my electricity bills.

First of all, I am having a gripna vakantzia (flu vacation). There is a nationwide flu epidemic and lots of schools are shut down because so few students are showing up and the ones who do come are making everyone else sick. My school's vakantzia started on Friday and was supposed to end tomorrow, but it got extended til next Monday.

Anyway, today I went to the post office to pay my electricity bill. For reasons that escape me, the post office is Bureacracy Headquarters in Bulgaria. I can't imagine this is really more efficient than mailing bills and pensions (ESPECIALLY pensions, I recently had to go to the post office to pick up a package and it was absolutely jammed with elderly people picking up their pensions; very chaotic and inconvenient) and such, but that's the way it's done. The lady at the post office is the mom of one of my darling little 4th graders. I asked her for my bill. She digs around, and finds it.

"Oh, Kyla!" she says. "It's so expensive!"

"It is?" I ask. "How much?"

"How are you heating your house?" she wants to know.

"I have two little electric heaters...but I don't use them very much, it's not cold!"

Shaking her head, she gave me the bill. It was a lot. Because I didn't know how much it would be beforehand, I didn't have the money. I went out to the ATM and got the money, returned, and paid the bill. The Peace Corps reimburses me for this stuff, but until payday on the first, I'm pretty poor. I think this bill covered the short period last month when it actually was pretty cold.

And by Friday, I can guarantee you everyone in town will know that I'm the person who spent 163 leva on my electricity last month.

I'm kidding. I just had my winter break, but I didn't go anywhere. I wanted to be in Bulgaria when we entered the EU, so I stayed here in Pavel Banya and went to all the town festivities. It was fun and low-key. New Years Eve was funny because we didn't have any kind of official countdown - according to my cell phone's clock, it was 12.05 when the band began to play, and everyone in town danced horo together. It was a blast, even if we weren't really sure what time it was.

I'm planning to go to Sarajevo for my spring break, though. I'm excited to see more of the Balkans.

Here are some pictures! These are of the part of Pavel Banya that the tourists don't visit.

See what I'm talking about with these cement apartment blocks? They're hideous.

I am a teacher, right? Here's an update:

2nd graders - totally adorable, but still working on the whole "school" concept. And the idea that not everyone in the world speaks Bulgarian is kind of new to them as well.

3rd graders - pretty rambunctious, but I have some real gems in this class.

4th graders - I love these kids! I have several students in this class I hope end up going to a language school (magnet school for accelerated language study). They're very good kids and just adorable.

5th graders - will be the death of me. They're good kids but, well, let's just say that we've had two tests so far and one student has passed one of them. I've instituted extra study on the one day of the week they don't have regular class.

6th graders - good kids, last time they had a test, two students got 49/50. Which is great after grading a whole set of failing tests from my 5th graders. (Maybe I'm not the world's worst teacher after all!)

7th graders - terribly rambunctious, but smart and enthusiastic. I've acquired for them penpals (students studying English with a PCV in Romania) and they're really into it. Last time we wrote letters, several of them included their Skype names. I am really hoping they actually end up chatting with their penpals, that would be such great practice!

8th graders - oy. They think they're too cool for school, I'll just say that much.

That's what's going on.

Last night, I was sitting around, watching TV*, pretty dull. And then, suddenly, the power went out and I was left in complete darkness. After a few moments of hoping the power would just come back on, I got up and fumbled around for my cell phone, which has a flashlight in it. (Isn't that the best phone feature ever? I totally bought it for the flashlight.) With the help of my phone light, I went outside, to see if it was just me, or if it was everyone.

It wasn't just me.

Pavel Banya is by far the smallest place I've ever lived. (Except Boboshevo, anyway.) By American standards, Petaluma is a small town, but it's still almost twenty times bigger than Pavel Banya. Even when the lights are on, there are more stars visible than there are in Petaluma, let alone Chicago, where the lights of ten million people blot out almost everything in the sky. I can see the Milky Way almost every night. But I have never seen anything like this in my life.

This, I realized, was what the ancient Greeks saw when they looked at the sky (almost literally, considering how close to Greece I live), and for the first time, I knew why they saw constellations in the stars. It was almost impossible not to pick out pictures and designs in that multitude. In ten minutes, I saw four falling stars. I could see M42, the nebula in Orion's sword beautifully. I think I saw Andromeda, but only out of the corner of my eye. Every time I tried to look at it directly it disappeared.

After ten minutes, the lights came back on.

I wish I could have taken a picture to show you all.

*I know, I bought a TV! Me! Can you believe it? I don't have cable yet, so I only get one channel, and that's with the rabbit ears. Max distrusts the thing and occasionally attacks the rabbit ears and the people on the screen.

First off, my cat has been located! I am really, really happy about this, of course. Max disappeared two weeks ago, but two of my students found him yesterday and brought him home to me.

My mom told me she couldn't believe I had a cat. Which I understand. I don't really like cats all that much. I much prefer dogs, especially Lucy the Wonder Chihuahua. But one day I was...I don't know, puttering around in my yard, maybe reading on the stoop or something, and I saw this woman on the opposite corner from my house pushing this very small cat away from her with a broom handle. She walked away and I looked at the cat. He was tiny and white with black patches, and he just looked so miserable and forlorn, I went over and picked him up. He started purring immediately and ta da! I had a cat. Anyway, he does seem a little bit confused about his life on the mean streets of PB, but I am so happy to have him back. Having a small purring fuzzball sit in your lap while you read a book is not a bad thing.

Do not plan to begin reading Jon Carroll's Cat Columns anytime soon, though.

I know I promised pictures "soon", but...well, I suck. Here are some, finally. Thanks to my dad for scanning these, and to my friend Jeff for hosting them for me.

Okay, this is Max when I found him, in August. He's bigger now, and I have some more recent pictures, I'll post them soon for people who like cats.

The courtyard at Rila Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Rila is close to Boboshevo, and I went there back when I was in training, what seems like ages ago.

The monastary has all of this intricate mural works of devils pulling people into hell and stuff. I found the artwork to be very interesting.

This mural is under the roof of the foyer. If you look carefully, you'll see the signs of the zodiac around Jesus. And the book he's holding open? Your horoscope today! Ha ha, actually, I have no idea what that says, but this says a lot about Bulgarians and astrology: they looooooove it. Once, when I was in a bad mood, I got in an argument about astrology with a Bulgarian. That was stupid.