Leading up to Christmas

About a month ago I was feeling a little down because the Christmas season was fast approaching and I was knew this was going to be my first Christmas away from home. I never really need to look very deep for a reason to miss home, and I often do my best to keep myself away from thinking about home. The Christmas season on the other hand makes it hard to think of anything but home. At least that is how I saw it at the beginning of December but, even thought I do miss home and the people there I can safely say that I am so happy being here. The last few weeks in particular have just been so wonderful that I can hardly believe that I was lucky enough to be apart of them.

Biscochitos: Made in Bulgaria

Where to begin to explain..... last weekend I went to a Holiday party for the town's (as well as other near by town's) Horo dance group (Horo being the traditional Bulgarian style of dance). I always love going to these events, aside from the dancing factor they are always a lot of fun. For this time in particular though, I noticed how dramatic these dances and dancers are. I mean to say that watching a large group of people all dancing the same way with so much joy, so much life, and so much history behind every single step is something powerful to behold. Dancing inside this group is even more of a moving experience and is intoxicating for the soul, it makes me feel like I am a part of something much greater than me.

My walk home

Needless to say I was feeling great heading into a busy week of school but the last before the Winter break. I woke up Monday morning to snowy day and excited about the planned events for the week, which included several Christmas parties and to seeing the completion of some projects my students had been working on. The first project was my 8th grade class' performance of "A Christmas Carol" all in English for their parents. All 29 students had speaking parts and I can't even begin to explain how proud of them I was. But this isn't exclusive to the 8th, every single on of the students I have the pleasure of teaching NEVER fails to impress me in every which way. My 10th graders made two very impressive fake News Programs that they wrote, filmed, and produced all on their own. They are all so smart and such a pleasure to teach and did such a great job that even a week later my heart is still so full of excitement because of what they did with very little time and resources and most importantly how much fun they had even though it was school related.

My Christmas Tree

The next night was the largest of my projects. I decided to bring a little bit of my own culture here to Bulgaria in the form of Luminarias (many small paper bags with a candles inside of them). In New Mexico we use these to celebrate Christmas eve by arranging them and lighting them in mass quantities. I am lucky because when I brought up this idea to the people at my school and to the city hall they were excited and very willing to help me by aiding in locating the needed materials. I was also lucky because the snow from Monday had melted and even more amazing was over 20 students came to help me set them up and light them and clean them up afterward. I am very sure that the locals really enjoyed them. I was thanked by many people for being something beautiful, different, and interesting to their town. I've already received many requests for making more next year. It is such a nice feeling knowing that you created something that people really enjoyed and I am so happy that I had this opportunity to share something that is distinctly from New Mexico.

Part of the 400 Luminarias in the town center

The very next day it snowed A LOT, when I woke up there was a thick white blanket over Parvomai and when I got to school there was a lot of students outside playing in the snow, of course I had to join in. Once some of the kids noticed that Mr. B, Jake, or the American (they have many names for me) was playing with them I shortly found myself being the only target for all their snowballs, some of the older boys even tried to tackle me in the snow. All in all I had so much fun, I not only felt like a kid again but that the kids are comfortable enough with me that they are willing to throw snowballs at me or tackle me into snow.

Kids playing outside school (view from my classroom)

And now it is Christmas eve and even though I am dearly missing my home I am excited to celebrate Christmas here in the glow of an amazing past week, the curiosity in a new way of celebrating a familiar holiday, and most importantly in the humbleness that this experience is creating inside of me.

Here is some of my 10th graders and I with a message:

 
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to everybody

Winter Winds

Winter Fog in Parvomay

I would like to think that I have a full and complete understanding of where I am and what I signed up for when I came to Bulgaria, but sometimes I stop and look around me and see where I am and what I am doing, and it is during these moments that I am not only filled with a sense of purpose but also with an overwhelming feeling that I have left everything I knew and everybody who is dear to me, because I had a greater calling.
 If we are take what is around us as meanings more than their face value than I'll say this. Last night my town was covered in a dense fog and this evening the winds blew it away leaving a starkly clear sky. This evening I stood on my balcony in the freezing cold wind and watched the sun set over the mountains and thought, wow I am really here and this isn't some fantasy or dream that I am in, that the people below me going about their daily activities are real people, walking on a real street, speaking a real language, in a real town underneath an unbelievably real sky and mostly importantly that I am apart of it. Is it possible to be this lucky? To be experiencing this experience that is too good to be true because life is never this wonderful. Life never lets you see your purpose so easily, or the things you need to cherish over the things you don't. Or perhaps this is simply my reflection in the clarity of a foreign sky in a foreign place. Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't end anytime soon

Thanksgiving

I was worried how Thanksgiving would be living in a country that doesn't celebrate it, but it turned out to be one of the best weeks of my life. Not only did I have three Thanksgiving dinners, but each was with a wonderful group of people in a beautiful locations. My first Thanksgiving meal was the Sunday before actually day and it was in Plovdiv with 15 other amazing people from my group of volunteers. My second was in a tiny Muslim village high in the mountains in Southern Bulgaria, and the 3rd was with a group of volunteers who extended their service for a 3rd year. I am so lucky to be friends with all of these wonderful people who have become my family while I am away from my real family.

Thanksgiving Dinner #1

Autumn

My School

The Church in Town

But in tradition of the Thanksgiving Holiday I want to Thank everybody who is in my life. Thank you for all your support and love. It makes being away from home much easier than it is. 

Novemeber Photos

I know that I have had trouble keeping up with my blog but I had the idea of maybe posting more photos here so months at a time don't pass before I add something new. Here are a few pictures I have taken in the last month or so 

Cold November night on the Streets of Parvomay

 

Train station in Parvomay

 

Aleksandar Nevski Church in Sofia

 

October Afternoon in Veliko Tarnovo

The Village of Koprivshtitsa

The Last Two Months

I feel bad that I have not paid much attention to my blog the last two months, to be honest I have been very busy, but also it is because I have been so content with my life here in Bulgaria that I have not found the need to vent about how miserable I am or how hard my life is here.
The truth is, my life here is not at all miserable nor is it difficult. I love being here and working in the school I do. My student are great and not once have I dreaded walking to school to teach a lesson or any group of students, instead I feel the opposite, I look forward to seeing my students and teaching my lessons. So I know I made the right decision coming here. It is hard missing my the most important day in my best friend's life and it will be hard missing Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family but it was a trade off I have, and will have to make for being here and doing what I do but I don't regret and won't regret these choices.

Left or Right, Forward or Backwards, Stay or Go and other decisions

Somebody once told me that life is a collection of decisions that you make. Most of them are minor but sometimes we come across decisions that are so large that they define the direction we take our lives. In the last two weeks I witnessed the profound agony of having to make one of these large decisions and then I had to make one of my own. Two of my dearest friends here in Bulgaria decided that they had had enough of this place and resolved to return home to their old lives. Upon hearing the news of both of these decisions (each a week apart) I was shocked, then sad, and then I left jealous. Jealous because they would soon be returning to their old lives, to the old world, back to the way things were before they came to Bulgaria, a place I have thought a lot about lately. I started thinking about my life before I joined the Peace Corps, my friends, my family, and just how easy living was. Back to a place where I understood everything everybody said, a place where if I could eat more than one variety of food, and most of all a place where I could never feel as lonely as I do now.... But then I realized that the reasons I chose to join the Peace Corps and come to Bulgarian are far stronger than the sum of everything I left behind. I am resolved to no longer be at the mercy of nostalgia

Wonderful Bridges

Recently I had a chance to go on a camping trip with my Bulgarian counterpart (the Bulgarian teacher who I will be working with the most during my Peace Corps service). We went into the Rhodope Mountains to a place called Wonderful Bridges. Wonderful Bridges are naturally made rock bridges carved from stone by a mountain stream. It truly was a beautiful place and even though it was a cold foggy and rainy day, somehow the weather only ended up only adding to the magic of this place. We slept at a small inn next to bridges. My counterpart’s family and I ate Bulgarian food and drank Bulgarian rakia in the common room of this inn with the owner and his family. While I was sitting there eating I could not help but reflect on how beautiful this simple moment of eating a meal in an inn next to this amazing site was. I often have moments like this, where I sit back and think about how lucky I am to be experience them and how I wish that everybody else I know could somehow experience it too because there is no way to describe it

The next morning we prepared for a daylong hike along an old Roman road that has since been used as hiking trail. It is called the Roman Road and it is an actual cobblestone road through the mountains. Even though a lot of the road is in disrepair a great deal of it was still perfectly intact and while I hiked along it I started to wonder about the people who built this road and about all the people who traveled on. I wondered about what their stories were, about what their life was like and if they ever stopped in the same place I did and look across the mountains in front of them and wonder what was beyond them like I was doing at that very moment.

Once we got back to the car and headed back to Parvomay I sat back and stared at the world pass by and realized how lucky I am too have such a great counterpart. I hear a lot of other volunteers talking about how unhappy they with their counterparts or how they have a rough time with them, but mine welcomed me into her family and made me feel at home which has really helped in alleviating the pain of missing my old home and most of all, my family.  

Writers Block

I have not forgotten about my blog, I am just not sure what to write. Every time I sit down and try to write an entry I grow flustered because I don't know what to say. My life has grown so complicated and packed full of events or things I want to talk about, but for some reason I just not been able to pull them out of my head and pour out onto my computer. Just know that I am doing well here in this beautiful country. I am meeting amazing people everyday who both inspire me to do for my fellow human being as well as remind me how lucky I am to have what I have back home in the U.S.. So without mentioning one particular event I see my experience thus far like having always lived in a valley overlooked by tall mountains. Even though the valley is beautiful it grows familiar and ordinary, so slowly, the splendor loses it's effect and thus taken for granted. Until one day I leave the valley to climb the near by mountain. After struggling through the difficult climb and finally reaching the top, I am able to see the valley from a very different and very dramatic angle. With this new view the magnificence of the place I have lived my whole life comes back to life for me but I can also see other places of equal beauty and figure why stop now, my valley will always been there to return to so I set off to discover new things keeping in mind that my home will be there waiting for me, if or when I run out of places to come across.

First three months in Bulgaria

Road between Vrastsa and Pleven

 

Pleven

 Rila Monastery

 Rila Monastery

 Vrastsa

 Vrastsa

 Vrastsa

 Dimitrovgrad

Roman ruins in Plovdiv

Roman ruins in Plovdiv

 

Old City in Plovdiv

 Waterfall near Lovech

Where the water flows out of a cave

From a gloomy day in April to a gloomy day in June Pre-Service Training was a time when I was constantly tested on my commitment to live in Bulgaria for the next two years. Between intense schedules of Bulgarian language and teaching English, and living in a new country with a Bulgarian host family I had a pretty interesting 12 weeks. But they are over, I made it and now I am a full fledged Peace Corps volunteer. Congratulations to those who have endured this before me and to everybody who endured it with me. Now the real work beings