I made a video to celebrate the end of my two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bulgaria. When I posted it on YouTube I was surprised by all the negative comments I received from Bulgarians about the depiction of their country. I would like to have a turn to speak. First of all, I never set out to make a documentary film about the Bulgarian nation and all that it encompasses. Like the title and description of the video reads, I took video footage of the Bulgaria that I saw and knew best. And the Bulgaria I know best is the Muslim minority. For people to say that this is not Bulgaria, however, is to deny the fact that there is a vibrant minority population that holds Bulgarian citizenship and, yes, is therefore Bulgarian too. To be Bulgarian is not a singular thing. Bulgaria is not just Sofia. It is rural too. It Orthodox Christian, Muslim, and Roma.

Critics say that this video is not Bulgaria. What is not Bulgarian about it? People are eating banitza and dancing the horo. Kids are playing in the snow and celebrating the New Year. Men are slaughtering a sheep to celebrate a holiday. People are kuchecking at a wedding, playing football, and drinking rakia. There are huge blocks and houses with red roofs, mountains, sunflowers, roses, and the black sea. This is Bulgaria. And just because some women, in some shots, are wearing traditional muslim attire, does not make it any less Bulgarian. The critics are right that Bulgaria is more than footage from one village. My video is shot in Altimir, Gorno Dryanovo, Blagoevgrad, Sofia, Pavlikeni, Gotse Delchev, Kazanluk, Razlog, Ribnovo, Shiroka Luka, Bansko, Garmen, Rila, Sozopol, Ognianovo, Varna, Buzludzha, and Burgas. But they choose not to see the rest of Bulgaria because they are too focused on discriminating against the Bulgaria they don't approve of. My message to them: learn to embrace diversity.

Are those your real teeth? -Ayshe in the magazine insinuating that I had dentures.

How many horses does your family have?-Albein as he smoked a cigarette at his table.

Do they have songs in America?-A Roma teenager on a ride down the mountain.

to go on a walk in bulgaria means that Nuka calls to me though my window. we walk nary 10 steps and call for Sabatka. while we wait for our friend we converse with the women sitting outside the closest size store on multicolored plastic stools. then we proceed another 30 steps to another store where Nuka buys a bag of sunflower seeds. with the packet of seeds pushed tightly in Nuka's pocket of the brown columbia fleece that i gave to her last byram and the rest evenly distributed amoung our hands we proceed down the road. as we walk in the evening light the mountains pop out like carboard cutouts in a storybook. kids weave and bob on bikes, babies get pushed in stollers, men sit on benches, and women gossip in the cafes. we gossip too. sometimes i imagine Nuka and Sabatka when they are 80 years old having the same routine talking about those weird days when the American joined them on their walk. the pace in which we walk is painful. it is the slowest walk capable of womankind plus a mandatory shift of all bodyweight to the back heels, thus, making it even slower. it is the anthesis of exercise especially when eating a bag of sunflower seeds. but the point of the walk is not exercise. the point of the walk is to have something to do; to talk about what has transpired since last nights walk and if nothing has happened to talk about the romances on one of the many turkish soap operas. the walk is a ritual in bulgaria not meant to be done alone and never for fitness' sake but only meant for the sake of doing.

korban byram is celebrated 70 days after shakir byram to commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his only son. on this day villagers sacrifice a lamb and give a lot of it away to friends and family. i have a refrigerator full of food. happy korban byram. happy eating.

shakir byram, also known as eid-ul-fitr, is a muslim holiday that celebrates the end of ramadan. it is celebrated many different ways all over the muslim world but in bulgaria is consists of a lot of individual-sized chocolates, short walks, long conversations, family, drinking coffee, and eating meat. shakir byram is celebrated over three days, the first day being the most important. on this first day the men of village wake up at five in the morning and go to mosque. there they pray for several hours and when they exit their procession signifies the end of ramadan, the period of fasting, and the beginning of byram the holiday of celebration. when the men return home the family shares their first meal together during daylight in the last 30 days. this feasting and celebrating in each others company lasts for three long happy days.this byram i was invited to the village of Ribnovo. in bulgarian muslim culture it is typical after marriage for the woman to move into the house of her husband. Nuka, my friend, is from Ribnovo and when she married Albien, she moved to Gorno Dryanovo. although a river only separates the two villages, Nuka only makes the trip to Ribnovo once or twice a year because ofthe terrible road conditions and lack of access to a car. to say this was a special ocassion is anunderstatement. with a knock at my door Ali, Nuka's son and my fifth grader, told me we wereleaving. because Ribnovo is a very conservative village i packed a lot of clothing because i was unsure of what to wear. i felt ridiculous when i threw my backpack into the hatchback and realized that the only thing the family of five had packed was food. someone made a joke about my bag and we were off in our borrowed car.we arrived in Ribnovo an hour later and greeted everyone at Nuka's mom's house. it was a happy occasion that Nuka had arrived back in her village. as the family caught up the children took part in the traditional custom of wishing their elders a blessed byram by kissing their hands and putting them to their foreheads. the elders in return gave children a small bill of money as a gift. as new family members arrived the children made the rounds wishing their aunts and uncles a happy byram and collecting money they later spent on fireworks and plasticimports from china.the day consisted of family coming in and out, going for walks around the village, eatingchocolates, and conversing. there seemed to be a lot of young girls in the village and they immediately took on the responsibility of showing me around. there were few moments throughout the day when a girl was not holding my hand as we walked through the village. Ribnovo is known for being one of the most traditional villages in bulgaria and has retained many customs that can only be found there. in a bulgaria that seems almost obsessed with being seen as 'modern' it was refreshing to see a place that is proud if it’s past.one such custom is called the движение (divizhenie) which directly translated means movement. the dvizhenie is a tradition where men choose their wives. every night the eligible boys line up on both sides of a narrow street. the eligible women walk up and down the aisle in pairs of two or three and the boys watch the procession. the boys call out to the girls, the girls smile and retort with something, and then eventually the boy may get the courage to ask a girl out for coffee. if the girl is willing they leave the divizhenie together and find a dark corner in the village to talk for a half an hour. if they like each other they will become a couple and maybeeventually marry. if they don't then it is back to the dvizhenie to find another partner.i had heard about this tradition from Nuka and was interested to see it take place but had no interest in taking part. but one minute i thought i was walking hand in hand with two of my fast made friends and the next thing i knew we were walking in the dvizhenie. i walked for about two minutes before i started to feel extremely uncomfortable with all the cat calling and touching. i told my friends i would wait on the side of the road and watch. they, however, being their hospitable selves, would not let me wait alone and so we stood together hand in hand watching all the girls in their finest clothes walk by and all the boys picking out their dates or maybe their future wives. at the end of the night i was almost delirious with exhaustion. i am not sure if it was a result of my sugar consumption that day or just the pure exhaustion that comes from being a foreigner in a strange land but when my head hit the pillow, i did not wake up until morning.in the morning i woke up to a complete breakfast and a traditional outfit laid out for me to wear. after watching several videos of past family weddings and eating a full breakfast on a full stomach the women in the family dressed me meticulously in the traditional holiday clothing and we headed out to the streets. everyone asked who i was, not because they knew i was a foreigner, but because i was a new face in the village. when they found out that i was an American dressed as a woman from Ribnovo they were shocked and then humored. all day we walked through the streets greeting people and wishing them a happy byram.when we arrived back to Baba's house we ate a large meal of lamb, grapes, soup, bread, and salad. i have still yet to master the art of deciphering parts of lamb when all parts, including brain and tongue, are piled into one large bowl. this talent is extra hard to master because usually when i am choosing a piece of meat everyone is watching to see what i will choose therefore heightening the pressure. so once again, i choose hastily and wound up with a mostly fatty bone on my plate. i picked away at it throughout the meal and when i did not know what to do with it next it was time to go.we loaded into the car and off we went back to Gorno Dryanovo. but because no trip in bulgaria is complete without a spontaneous side trip we off-roaded in our tiny barely alive hatchback into a tobacco field to get a view of Gorno Dryanovo from the other side of the mountains. it was a bumpy ride but when we made it the view was majestic. the color of the tobacco plants against the mountains looked as if it had been photoshopped and the happiness of beingtogether with family and full bellies made for a most memorable moment.

sugar. pectin. freshblueberries. jars. lids. love. largepot. water. boil. JAM.

it was time. after a long winter of hauling wood in from the outside, fanning black smoke from fires gone awry, fumigating my apartment in peace corps issued chemicals to fight the flea epidemic, and the owning of a long-haired cat during spring, it was time to clean my rugs. not knowing how to go about this i asked two of my seventh graders, asie and fatme, for help.

one hot june afternoon we crawled under the jagged fence of the kindergarden near my house, threw down a rug, pulled a hose from the neighbors garden and got to work. the first rug did not get so clean consdidering we were washing it on top of a layer of dust and dirt, now mud after pouring water on it. so i gave azim, another seventh grader, two leva to buy some tarp from a shop in the center of the village. he disappeared on his bike and returned five mintues later wrapped in tarp, only bicycle wheels visible to bystanders. we laid the tarp down and got back to work. brushing, brushing, brushing, bucket rinsing. brushing, brushing, bucket rinsing. repeat. the bypassing villagers were entertained to see me enagaging in typical village work. when all the hard brushing and rinsing of soap was done we hung the heavy rugs on the damaged metal fence and let the sun dry them.

several hours later i was startled by pounding on my door. when i opened it i was greeted by a group of distraught six grade boys who were concerned that it was going to rain. together we hauled three big rugs off the sharp fence and into my apartment. as we were bringing in the third one raindrops started to fall. once again i was in awe of the villagers foreboding knowledge of weather and how to clean a rug that was in need.

bench sitting weather in the village has arrived. this means that what was once my five minute walk home from school is now a 50 minute walk home from school. in bulgaria everyone has a bench. some benches are made up of two stumps with a piece of plywood balanced inbetween and others are more fancy, complete with backs and arm rests. no matter what type of bench you have, if you live in bulgaria you have one. because my village has only one road running through it everyone places their benches on the main road or overlooking over it, making walking down the street an extreme sport of villager greeting. this is why it takes me an hour to walk the equivalent of two city blocks. ела тук is what i here when i walk down the road "come here!" so i do. and i sit. and sit. and talk some. don't understand a lot. sit. share some pumpkin seeds. sit. and then excuse myself. i continue down the road until i hear another ела тук and then proceed to do it all over again. if i gathered all of the food eaten when sitting on benches and put it onto a plate it would reveal a full meal of nuts, seeds, fruit pulled right from the tree above, and chocolate.

bench sitting is a nice pass time. i have truly learned to love it. when i first arrived in the village i dreaded the long bench sits, the food forced upon me, and the never-ending questions because i didn't speak very much bulgarian and it always seemed to last for hours. but now it almost seems like a luxurious part of summer that i need to revel in before the cold puts everyone back inside sitting next to their stoves. the eight o'clock hour is the best time to bench sit. it is a nice way to end my day. in a way i feel like i am narrating my own goodnight moon book. while sitting on the bench i say goodnight to the sun, to the goats coming home from the fields, to the babas, the diados, and the kids. goodnight to the mountains and the muezzin. goodnight to the part of my brain that needs to conjugate bulgarian. goodnight to the fresh air, the wildflowers, and the tobacco leaves waiting to be strung and dried. goodnight village. until tomorrow, or in bulgarian до утро.

yesterday i attended my first bulgarian wedding. like most villagers i wasn't actually invited to the wedding but just showed up on the village square to dance. this is the norm in the village because the expense of food is so great; families usually invite a selected few to dinner and the rest of the villagers show up in the morning and evening to dance. the video below is the traditional bulgarian dance called the хоро [horo]. there are many variations but the constants are holding hands, dancing in a circle, and dancing for hours. we danced from five until nine. we did not break for cars but we did break when the cows and goats came home from grazing. they walked right through the circle of dancers with no regard for the bride's feelings leaving a trail of poop on their way. dancing became a little trickier after that with the added obstacle of cow diarrhea to hop over. april and may are the wedding months in the village because the summer is reserved for work and more work. there is another wedding next week in the village. look for me on the village square.

the only redeeming quality of winter in bulgarian besides the occasional snowball fight and sledding excursion is the mandarin orange. not the little 'cuttie' crates of mandarin oranges you buy in america that have been picked green weeks before and ripened on a plane and then a truck. real fresh greek mandarin oranges with the green leaves still attached. i can tell that spring is approaching because the last two kilograms i bought were terrible. the mandarin season has passed which means winter as come to an end and spring has arrived. i just double fistpumped on one knee. i will trade in my mandarin oranges for a hot sun any day.

i am going to use one post only to describe winter in bulgaria because, really, that is all that is deserves. i

have lived in cold weather climates all of my life. i grew up in minnesota, went to college in montreal, and then somehow ended up in peacecorps bulgaria. when i received my invitation letter to join the peace corps in bulgaria my dad passingly suggested that there was something wrong with my decision making skills. i kindly reminded him that bulgaria was not my choice, shaking my fist at the peacecorps gods, but the peace corps. initially i wasn't thrilled with the idea of going to bulgaria. but i reconciled my thoughts with the notion that at least i knew what winter was about and how to survive it. i mean it could be worse, i thought, i could have been sent to bulgaria from texas. so, i thought i was prepared. i was already well stocked with warm clothing, had my winter gameface packed away and ready to use, and knew how fill my belly with hot chocolate and 'smores. i thought i was ready to conquer this unknown eastern european winter. i thought.

it started off slow. october, november, and december came and went with fairly mild weather. i would frequently ask the villagers when the snow was going to arrive, partially because i was curious but mostly because it was one thing that i knew i was saying correctly in bulgarian. they always laughed and said chaki, chaki, wait, wait. then january and february came and i began to dream of peacecorps madagascar, senegal, bolivia, st. vincent's, anywhere but the winter camp i called home. when winter arrived so did a new routine: dressing in multiple layers became compulsory, potatoes were delivered to my door, in many forms, on a daily basis, and people started to ask if i knew how to light a fire instead of greeting me when we passed each other in the street. the sun started to set at four thirty and my bed time regressed to that of my childhood. i started to eat a lunch/dinner meal around three o'clock because three is the new six when bedtime is eight-thirty. i started to go to bed so early because living in a different culture and speaking a foreign language (especially bulgarian) is extremely tiring but mostly because it became too uncomfortable and unenjoyable to do anything outside of several wool blankets. under my thirty-two pound covers my body was warm but my face felt like the little match girl's. the temperature in my apartment halted any desire to cook, so potatoes and soup from bullion cube made up most of my meals. my alarm would go off at 6:20 in the morning when the sky looked as if it could be midnight and i would hit the snooze button until 6:50, the very last minute i could put coffee on my stone cold burner and have it heat to a reasonable temperature by 7:25. the only light that lit the road to school was the moon. when i made it to school i would breath a sigh of relief that i made it through one more winter morning.

it is not that winters are colder than minnesota's or montreal's, but the source of heat is what makes the thought of surviving another bulgarian winter bring me to tears quite easily. originally the wood burning stove sounded romantic. but six months later i can honestly say that it is not. i have learned that the last thing one is motivated to do when cold is to chop wood. but the only thing one can to do to get warm it to get outside and chop wood. a vicious cycle that lasts four months too long. my hands that could have once been the stars of a dishwashing commercial have aged twenty years, are burned over preexisting burns, and are always covered in soot with a topping of invasive slivers. i do however have to admit that although my commercial dreams have come to end, i have gained a sense of lumberjack accomplishment, one i share with paul bunyan and the babas of my village.

i use the stove, печка in bulgarian, to heat both my apartment and my hot water. the stove is connected to three radiators that send the heat from the stove into different rooms, taking several hours to heat up any space, especially when the inside of your house is below zero. the wood burning stove makes a lot of sense in bulgaria. an abundance of wood and family members living in the same house makes it convenient for someone to always be at home to light the stove, add wood, and stoke the fire. it is not so easy, as a single lady, to keep a fire going when obligations on the outside call. so i did what i had to do and abandoned all fire safety precautions i had learned over the years from smokey the bear and bill the fireman in the name of blood circulation. in between classes i would run home, pray to the vulcuns that the fire was still going, pump the stove full of wood and then head out again. it was the only way to have a cold but not severely cold, apartment to come home to at the end of the day. some days i would come home defeated, seeing my breath before me, inside my apartment, fire out. i never thought fire could make me so happy. i now have the ability to empathize with cavemen, jack london, and survivor participants. i might put that on my resume. in conclusion, winter sucks no matter where you are in the world. it always has and it always will.

sitting at the barlooking out the door i seehorse drawn wagons

we went to polsko kosovo, the village cory calls home for thanksgiving. the train ride was beautiful. the train station in his village was magical. from the outside it looked like a one room school house perched on a hill. on the inside sat a woman hand writing tickets. she told me cory was elegant. i agreed. the thanksgiving food was a bit of a let down. not because my fellow volunteers can't cook (maybe that was the case) but because of the lack of ingredients people can find near their villages/towns. i missed spicy sausage stuffing and fried onions in the green bean dish. despite the lack of authentic turkey day food i still managed to get really full (refer to picture on the right) and drink my fair share of homemade wine. some highlights were ranch dressing (which anna is pouring for round two of dinner), the mystery of the potsticker meat eater who disregarded the dough, cellar bonding, twister, going for a nice long walk in the wee hours, playing on our flutes, santa clauses early arrival, hot cross buns, singing elton john songs about ambroise, anna proclaiming we should all meet back in polsko kosovo in 40 years, and all around b25 love.

every classroom has a wood burning stove like the one on the left. three women are employed at the school to stoke the fires hourly.

this morning i woke to wild winds and rain pounding on my windows. i was not excited to rise at the dark hour of 6 to brush my snarly hair, make some coffee, and walk the three minutes to school. i dressed appropriately: wool tights, wool socks over my wool tights, warm water proof boots, layered long sleeve shirts, a sweater, a rain jacket and a skirt. when i arrived to school the wood burning stoves were fired up. so hot. it felt like an african summer in the third grade classroom. i learned my lesson; bare the cold in my apartment and on the walk to school because no one likes a sweaty, uncomfortable, american, english teacher.

the view from a friend's balcony. the strikingly white minaret is the centerpiece of the village.

bench sitting.

the goats and sheep coming home.

if you squint you can see my village in the top lefthand corner.

tobacco stringing.

* i refer to the place in which i am currently living as 'my village' not because i am greedy and believe that i own it but because i am not allowed, peace corps rules, to say the name of the village for safety reasons. yes mom, they are keeping me safe.

i have lived in my permanent site now for three long months and therefore feel like i have the right to make sweeping judgements and large generalizations about the tiny village i call home. my home exisits in the southeast of bulgaria, high in the mountains but in a mild mediterrian climate, a half hour from greece and about an hour and a half from macedonia ( i don't think in miles or kilometers, just time). both the village and villagers are built into a mountainside overlooking a beautiful river valley in the southern slope of the rhodope mountains which commands a view of the pirin mountain range. beauty.

about 1,000 villagers live here, work here, and drink a lot of coffee here. they mostly subsist on the cultivation of tobacco and the contruction of houses. in the summer time most women and children can be found sitting in large open spaces covered head to toe in sticky tobacco leaves which they string to dry and later sell to big tobacco. the men can be found in the surrounding villages where they specialize in building houses especially those modeled after the traditional style of the bulgarian renaissance period.

both villages on either side of me have been proclaimed national architectural and historical reservation sites which means that any new buildings constucted must be built in the ressisance style of the 17th century. these destinations have recently gained popularity with bulgarian tourists who come from the metropolises to get away and see an older bulgaria that still inhabits grazing goats and shepherds. when they pass through what i have heard been termed the 'worst road in bulgaria', the main and only road through my village, they are shocked to see a traditional pomak, bulgarian muslim, village. cameras come out as they role by in their newly imported cars. it is truely a unique place.

the older women here where the traditional dress which involes a either a white or colorful floral headscarf and the older men of the village don little wool berets which makes them appear even cuter than they already are. most of the elders in the village use ancient walking sticks to get around the cobble stone paths and so they are easily heard coming. the younger generation here tends to watch a lot of music videos, american and bulgarian, smoke a ton of cigarettes, and dress in a distinctive style that can only be summed up as the 80's of america-hits eastern europe-made in china. crimped hair and tight spandex rule the cafes at night. there are also a lot of jeans here which seem to subscribe to the idea that more zippers are better. 13 zippers on one pair of jeans is not absurd.

the houses in the village appear large from the outside but once you are invited in it becomes apparent that multiple familes are occupying few rooms. usually one nuclear family lives in one or two rooms and so on until one house it completely occupied with multiple generations and families. the floor plan of the houses seems to be directly related to staying warm throughout the winter. most rooms are built off a long unheated corridor and include a bed, television, and wood burning stove that is used both to cook on and as a source of heat. the smaller the room the warmer it will be. i could never figure out when i first arrived why all bulgarians slept in their kitchens, then winter arrived, and it all started to make sense. soon i began dreaming about having a bed near a stove where i could just reach over and eat potatoes out of a pot without even having to leave the comfort of my blankets. it is thoughts like these that make me realize that i am truly living in eastern europe.

there is one paved road that winds through the village. it is lined by little food stores and cafes where the young and old gather over espressos to talk for hours. each demographic here has their favorite cafe that they tend to frequent: the constuction men, the young mothers, the hip tweens, the school teachers, the boys in their twenties, and the grandmothers all have what seems to be their home away from home. there is one cafe for the older more conservative muslim men near the end of the village that i was invited to one early morning by my neighbor. when the men walked through the beaded curtain and saw an аmerican female drinking йран (watered down salty yogurt) and watching the bulgarian news it nearly gave them a heart attack. i am still waiting for an invitation back.

in the evenings, everyone comes out from their houses to sit on their wooden benches and watch the happenings of the main road. if i am ever caught walking in the road from the hours of seven to ten i am motioned over to bench sit for a couple of hours. bench sitting, as simple as it sounds, is one of the most magical pastimes in the village. conversation happens as we watch the sunset over the mountains, reprimand children for playing too roughly in the street, listen to the last call to prayer and the voice of the shepherd yelling 'ya ya haide ya' as he brings the cows and goats home for the night. when the street becomes dark, the villagers retreat back to their houses until the next day when they come out and do it all over again.

this is a just a vignette of the village life. but so far, village is life is good.

not only did we survive, on july 24, 2009 we also swore in as offical peace corps volunteers. bigtime. here is a picture of the group before the ceremony. where is kay hannahan?

potato harvest. malinka in the kitchen cooking saturday makitzi. horsecart crossing. our futbol field/street outside my house. team altimir cooking banitza with baba trifunka.

stoop sitting.bulgarian class interrupted by goat grazing.goodbye gathering with pensionary club, nothing like alcohol to start out a saturday morning.

zack's chickens.the futbol squad.

the street outside my house where many games of ball took place

it might appear as though i have already abandoned my blog. this is not true. three months into my bulgarian life has brought several noteworthy stories, enlightening moments, and too many existential crises. however, it seemed as though during pre-service training there was little time to reflect on these happenings much less to record them. when a couple of minutes did exist for myself it seemed more appropriate to drink a lukewarm beer with my fellow volunteers than to blog about my strange bulgarian life. but alas, i am here. алтимир (altimir), the village that i lived in for the first two and a half months of my bulgarian life, was a surreal place. fruit trees grew in the village like dandelions on a minnesota lawn, cow bells were the soundtrack to my long hot days, and overgrown decrepit vacant structures were as abundant as ones that were occupied. i would awake to fruit falling from trees in the middle of the night, watch the sky turn purple and listen to the hardest rainstorms of my life, eat breakfast from the mulberry, plum, peach, and pear trees that lined the dirt road to my bulgarian lessons, and brake from semi-serious games of ball with seven-year-old children for goat and horse cart crossings. looking back on my two and a half months spent in алтимир seems fantastic, something out of a gabriel garcia marquez novel. i lived in алтимир with two other peace corps volunteers: zack yap, a chinese jamaican american who was soley responsible for the introduction of banana chips into the slavic world and tyler kenneth hurley a floridian coloradoan new yorker who resisted the temptation of riding his bulgarian grandfather's motorbike, pictured in the blog title box above, everyday for two and a half months (peace corps rules state no motorcycle, moped, or rusty soviet motorbike riding allowed), no small feat. the three of us, and our language trainer elitza, made up team алтимир.

team алтимир spent three to four hours monday through saturday studying the bulgarian language. this proved to be most challenging at times. bulgarian is a difficult language to learn and most bulgarians will be the first to relay this message. много труден, mnogo truden, very hard, are two of the first words i learned in bulgarian. elitza, would frequently use the phrase 'this concept does not directly translate into english' as a preface to most of our lessons. this was usually my cue to take my books above my head and throw them to the floor. although i never really did have my moment of rage, i imagined it several times a day, more specifically when the temperature hit ninety five degrees and we were without power to oscillate our small fan. fortunately elitza, zack, tyler, and i worked hard to keep the table stocked with enough salty and sweet treats to suppress all tantrums in a true three-year-old fashion. my favorite part of language class were the role playing drills which allowed to me to perfect some of my acting techniques. my favorite prompt starred tyler as a peace corps volunteer trying to buy a train ticket from me, the vendor/train conductor, from sofia to алтимир, where he was obligated to speak to the female mayor of our town, zack about a project he wanted to implement in the future. the play lasted about forty minutes and involved several costume changes and creative prop usage. in the end, i think tyler ended up in siberia, a testament to our novice knowledge of the bulgarian language at the time. outside of language class we occupied our time teaching english in a nearby high school, playing soccer and frisbee with the children, running through wheat fields that became shorter and shorter as the harvest season lapsed, building a futbol field as our community project, and spending a lot of time with our host families drinking coffee and rakia (a moonshine like alcohol made from fermented fruit) and eating ridiculous amounts of salami and white bread.

my host family consisted of malinka, the matriarch, one of about nine people actually employed in the formal sector in the village. she was one of two employees who worked in the small post office in the center of town. the center of town consisted of two magazines (the equivalent of the latin american tienda but with feta-like cheese and sausage instead of tostadas and plantains), the post office, the mayors office, our language training room, and an overgrown concrete area which maybe twenty years ago could have been referred to as a square. yordan, my bulgarian father, because of the lack of jobs in bulgaria, usually found work abroad in fellow european union countries. however, he happened to be home when i was living in алтимир and tended to the enormous garden and to the cows, chickens, pigs, and goats that occupied our backyard. he was a master of rakia making and a quick killer and defeatherer of the chicken. their daughter iva who is 25-years-old is pregnant with her second child that will be born in january. yoanna, her seven-year-old daughter, was the best bulgarian teacher in the northwest of bulgaria. she did not allow any mispronunciation of words to slide. when i stumbled through a word that stacked three consonants together she would repeat it over and over in a painfully slow manner until i understood every single sound each letter made. she would repeat each syllable over and over again until i was able to say the word with the perfect bulgarian accent, which i would then immediately forget. no matter, i still considered every interaction like this a victory because i appeased her at least for the moment at hand. my other favorite move of hers was when she would role her big brown eyes and let out a huge sigh with her entire body, basically saying through body language, 'my god you are so dumb'. she was the best.

my family's garden, like most bulgarian gardens, was very impressive. they grew tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, garlic, green beans, cabbage, zucchini, potatoes, dill, cilantro, and strawberries. we also had apple, pear, plum, and peach trees in our yard interspersed among trellised grape vines that created a natural roof above most of the outdoor patio and hammock. bulgarians do not cultivate a wide variety of vegetables necessarily but they harvest unimaginable amounts of the vegetables they do grow. when i first arrived in bulgaria i wondered how one family could eat so much food. then i saw the cellar, a foodies apothecary. hundreds of jars, each one shaped a little differently, capped with mismatched lids, filled with an assortment of colorful textured goodies stacked the shelves. then i learned that bulgarians grow all their food in the summer and can it for the winter: blueberry juice, strawberry jam, pickled cucumbers, lutenitza (a tomato/red pepper spread), and lots of wine. the wooden wine barrels looked like they were made in ancient thracian times, bigger than my grasp and covered in more cobwebs than an unfinished basement.

although preservice training was exhausting, i look back at my time spent in алтимир as the good life; living with a doting family in a small village with two fellow americans who could communicate in a common language now seems elementary; having a bulgarian language trainer to convey any information lost in translation now seems like an unreal luxury. i have since moved to a small muslim village in the southwest of bulgaria. i will teach english here for the next two years. press start to begin the challenge.

bulgaria isancient bikes on dusty roadslike castro's cuba

"the balkans which means 'mountains' in turkish run roughly from the danube to the dardanelles, from Istria to Istanbul, and is a term for the little lands of Hungary, Rumania, Jugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and part of Turkey, although neither Hungarian nor Greek welcomes inclusion in the label.  It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars.  less imaginative westerners looked down at them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions, and fearing their savage terrorists, Karl Marx called them 'ethnic trash'.  i, as a footloose youngster in my twenties, adored them."   -C.L. Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles

i am going to bulgaria may 19th, 2009.  this shall be my blog, something C.L. Sulzberger did not have in 1932.  please stay tuned.