One Year Mark
ZAVET – It was a big week for Bulgaria and me.
First, I passed the one-year mark on April 19th. A whole year has gone by since I’ve been away from the good ‘ol USA, and it’s likely I won’t see it for another 15 months or so. Luckily, the time has gone by quickly. With work every day, weekends visiting people and traveling during holidays, there’s not much time to think about where you are or how long you’ve been away. This is exactly the opposite of what I thought it would be like. I thought my life would slow down and there would be times of just sitting. But it seems that there is so much to do and so much to see that I have a hard time sitting down and doing nothing.
Yesterday Bulgaria was accepted into the European Union. It will enter in 2007 and soon will be part of the “upper class” of Europe. When countries like Latvia, Greece and Poland were accepted into the EU there were big celebrations. Not much happened yesterday. School was let out and there was a small gathering in the park, but across the country there was little more than a bland response to something that has the potential to bring Bulgaria out of financial crisis.
I went out with a Bulgarian couple from Varna last weekend. We talked briefly about the situation. “It won’t make much difference. There still are not any jobs here,” they said. It’s fifteen years since communism ended and things aren’t better than they were – at least financially speaking. Wages are low, prices are high and nothing is free like before. The introduction of the Euro will drive the price of products up, but many Bulgarians think that wages won’t rise. The average Bulgarian makes about 125 leva per month. That is very low. The result of this is people are fleeing to other countries to work. I can’t tell you how many children’s parents work and live abroad. This is having a huge impact on Bulgaria’s youth, and it’s not a positive one.
Random thoughts after living in Bulgaria for one year:
Click here to read more… www.bulgariatimes.net
Long Weekend
Not everyone is hurting in Bulgaria. I got the chance to see some of Bulgaria’s rich last weekend when I went to Varna, a city of 300,000 people on the Black Sea Coast. But let me back up a bit. Thursday night I took the 2:30 a.m. bus to Sofia. I arrived in the capital at around 8:30 a.m. It was so cold (4 degrees C) and there was snow in the mountains. I took a cab to the Peace Corps office, but the driver couldn’t find the address. He was nice enough, but still charged me the full rate even though we stopped three times and went in a circle. One thing that was interesting was that he kept wanting me to compare Bulgaria or Sofia with other countries I had been to. What can you say? “Yeah, I really think Greece is a whole lot cleaner and nicer than this pollution-ridden city.”
Anyway, had meetings that took four hours, but probably could have been done in one hour – this is Peace Corps’ standard procedure. Then I saw a movie in an actual multiplex theatre. It was huge. Three different floors, stadium seating, tons of leg room… and you could buy a large popcorn and a beer for 3 leva. You can’t beat that! It started getting late and instead of finding a place at the last moment I jumped on the night bus to Varna with my friends Mary and Michelle. That’s a 7-hour trip all the across the country. I arrived at 7 a.m., ate some Dunkin’ Doughnuts and KFC, found a hotel and slept for five hours, then got up to eat dinner and went to this piano bar.
This piano bar was in the basement of some non-descript building. It was very modern with couches everywhere and a bar with lots of Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels paraphernalia. Michelle and I sat at the piano with Sylvia and Ruman, who are good friends with the pianist. Apparently he’s about to go on tour with one of the Gibbs brothers (Bee Gees) in a month. Anyway, he could play. His counterpart, a gigantic, robust man with long flowing white hair sang tunes ranging from Sinatra to Santana to Russian ballads. He wore a white silk shirt unbuttoned half way down his chest. In between each song he would grab his glass of whiskey, look around and say, “Nasdravey!” which means “Cheers!” After about two hours his face was bright red and he was still saying “nasdravey”. Sitting along side us were Varna’s rich – lawyers, doctors, real estate brokers and probably some mafia. All these men were dressed up nice and smoked big cigars. And each had a stunning girl about half his age. It was ridiculous how gorgeous these women were and how ugly the guys were. They threw out tips of 20 and 30 leva to show off to the women. They yelled and sang. It was quite the scene.
ROMANIA
For spring break I headed north to that mysterious country known as Romania. I say mysterious because no Bulgarian could tell me much about it even though my town is situated just 60 kilometers away. No one knows a word of Romanian, no one knows anyone there, but they all know it’s dirty and there are plenty of thieves. Well, I found Romania to be dirty AND very beautiful, just like Bulgaria. The people were nice even though I didn’t speak a word of their language, which looks like Italian, but sounds much different. On our train ride up from Ruse all I saw was garbage near the tracks. Bucharest was equally as dirty. I kept feeling like I was in some science fiction story. All the buildings looked the same – gigantic apartment towers that stretched for miles. We walked down a main boulevard and found a grand total of three restaurants and one café. We never did find the “happening” place in Bucharest.
We did find the presidential palace, which isn’t hard to miss since it’s the second largest administration building in the world (just smaller than the Pentagon). We took a tour that was OK. There were over 1000 rooms and the building has to take up at least four or five city blocks. What’s more amazing is that the former dictator was able to build this thing while his country starved during the 80s. Of course, they shot him and his wife on public TV.
I’ll give you just the highlights of the trip. We went to Brashov, a city near the Transylvanian Mountains. Ate well, drank well and I met a guy from Corvallis, Ore. who was helping some orphanage. We went to Dracula’s castle, a neat thing to see, but not so neat when there’s no electricity in the town and you can’t withdraw money for a hotel or a bus ticket back. (That actually happened) Ended up in another pretty city called Sinaia, which had mountains and a beautiful old castle where the former king of Romania once lived.
The most bizarre incident had to be the old woman in the Dracula Castle. Now, bear in mind that this isn’t the real Dracula Castle. There was no Dracula from Transylvania. There was a king who drank blood, but he has another castle. But this castle is scary-looking and inspired the Dracula movies. Anyway, there was this nice woman who worked there. We were on the second floor and she told us to wait for the English-speaking guide. The woman only spoke Italian and Romanian, but she motioned for us to follow her. She took us into this small room, closed the door behind us and locked it. We were a bit confused, but thought maybe there was something interesting in here for the “cool” tourists. She rifled through this cabinet and took out something round and yellow. She took it out of the bag and stuck it in my face. “Kashkaval!” she said, which means cheese. It was some kind of smoked cheese. This was getting weird. I thought maybe it was a gift, and then she spoke her first English “30 Euro”. We looked at each other and wondered what to do. We didn’t need it, or want it, but the woman kept talking and she had the door locked. So, we said what the hell and bought it for 300,000 lei. We joked afterward about it, but it wasn’t so funny when it looked like we were stranded in this tiny town for the night. But like my good friend Jerrad Klumph, a native from Tillamook, Oregon, would have said, “At least we have cheese.”
Easter and other things
I went to the church last night at midnight for the Easter tradition thing. Everybody (well, about 100 people) met at the church and lit candles and said prayers in the church. At midnight they all walked around the church three times. The pope said some prayers and they sang. All this took place outside. Then people dispersed and went to have parties. Today there was a dancing concert and many families got together like we do. People traded colored eggs for health. You’re supposed to crack your egg with someone else and then eat it.
Other news: I’m very close to completing a project to renovate a classroom. The final estimate is done and paperwork should be sent out this week. I will let you know more if you would like to donate money to it.