Listening: Air’s Album, Talkie Walkie
Reading: What is Good?
Yay: Halloween Party
Boo: Cold Again
So this weekend was the big, Halloween party in Veliko Turnovo, my favorite city in the whole of Bulgaria. I love VT. It’s simply one of the most beautiful places on Earth. I can’t imagine how much more amazing it would be if they actually had decent architecture there instead of having all those damned bloc apartments mixed in with the otherwise amazing landscape and the buildings of the old city. Bulgaria was the third capital city of ancient Bulgaria (after the government was moved there from Veliki Preslav) and home to the Bulgarian exarchate for some time. Accordingly there is an ancient fortress there called Tsaravets, which is the largest complex of its kind I’ve ever seen. This thing is huge. They basically took a large hill, surrounded it with a huge wall, and then built a town inside. It’s amazing to walk through it all, and it takes a few hours to do so. The only real shame is that the whole complex isn’t labeled as well as it could be. For one thing none of the signs that do exist have English, just German, Russian, and, or course, Bulgarian. Secondly, they only have signs at the most major points of interest, which are almost always highlighted in the little booklet you can buy anyway. So the whole time you’re walking through and seeing all these ancient foundations to building, remnants of walls, and current archaeological digs, you never have any clue what you’re looking at aside from something “really old.” That’s just the way it is here, I guess, but they really aught to label things clearly and give some background information so that people can understand what they’re seeing. However, regardless of how little I understood about what specific thing I was looking at at any given moment, the whole experience of walking around an old fortress during a beautiful, sunny, warm, fall day with a couple of close friends was great. I mentioned to Carey that I kind of wished I was about 12 years old and was playing pretend for the day. Hell, let’s face it, I was playing pretend anyway.
Before heading to Tsaravets we had actually gone through the old town in VT, mostly to visit little tourist and kitch shops, but also just to enjoy the day, see some Bulgarian revival period architecture. It’s an interesting style that is distinct to this area of the world. It’s somewhat similar to the half-timber homes one sees in Bavaria, but unique and different. I don’t have the architecture vocabulary to describe these things, but there will be pictures of this whole weekend up on the gallery before too long (though doubtfully until the mid of November, as I am departing for Sofia in a day’s time and then it’s on to Greece). While walking through the old town we visited a lot of kitch and antique shops where we all bought something, including some gifts for family members for Christmas.
This all happened on Saturday day, but the weekend really started on Friday. I travelled to VT via a connection in Razgrad, which is where I had lunch with John, Alana, and Greg, volunteers from the area. After lunch I went to VT and got dinner at “the nice restaurant in VT.” This place is one of the favorites of PCVs all over Bulgaria. It’s got great pizzas, pastas, and salads, which are things that most Italian restaurants in Bulgaria do well, but this place has really good atmosphere and service to boot. The really cool thing though, is the view. If you’re lucky enough to get a table in the back of the dining area there a large wall of glass that looks into the valley and down upon the river. VT is built entirely into hillsides, and so is completely terrace. Walking around in VT is as much walking on sidewalks as it is climbing stairs. One volunteer compared it to the fortress city of Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings, which is constructed in a series of rings up and down a mountain. Anyway, so this restaurant is built, of course, on a hillside and so the back looks straight out with nothing to impede it’s view of the river and the opposing hill. It’s gorgeous.
After dinner we all went back to the Blue House, which is guest house that we PCVs rent out every year in order to host the Halloween party. It’s a pretty sweet deal. We pay 1000 Leva (about $650) and get 21 beds, no limit on how many people are allowed to sleep there (thus many folks are in sleeping bags on the floor), all the beer we can drink, and a catered dinner on Saturday night during the party. It’s a decent place too, very comfortable by PCV standards. Anyway, so we go back to the Blue House after dinner to hang out with each other and catch up and play some games until the wee hours of the morning. The next day we all got up late and some of us headed out into town, which brings us back to my first two paragraphs about VT itself.
That night (Saturday) was the official Halloween party. More people had been showing up throughout the day while we were out walking, and it’s estimated we had about 40 guests all together. Everyone got in their costumes by the time dinner was over, so I started the music and got folks dancing. Upstairs was reserved for hanging out and playing games.
Sunday (yesterday) the group from our region took a train back to Shumen. I ended up staying at Ben’s place that night. After so much parties we were ready for a relaxing evening of watching movies and playing Scrabble, which was great. That pretty much brings us to now. I’m currently in a cafe in the park just beside the Shumen bus and train stations waiting for my next bus to Razgrad so I can get a connection to Zavet. The next bus is only an hour away at this point, and I should get a connection quickly. I’ll definitely make it back in time to get to my kids right after they’re out of their daily classes, though it’s getting a bit to cold to take them outside and play now. Today in Shumen it is VERY windy. Matt, another guest of Ben’s last night, wears a fedora, and upon exiting the apartment building it quickly flew off and Matt had to dash across the street in order to save it. My baseball cap nearly suffered the same fate. Last week we had a respite from the cold and it was warm and sunny. It was only Saturday night that it got cold again. I fear that we will have snow soon. Last year we got it about mid-November, so it will be right on time if I’m right.
Which is why I’m so pumped to be heading southward soon! In four days I will travel to Greece to go run my marathon in the sun! Tuesday night (tomorrow) I will be taking a night train to Sofia in order to make a dentist appointment the next day. Then on Friday I take a plane to Athens and on Sunday (only six days from now!) I will be running the marathon. It’s really exciting, and I’m VERY happy that it means that my training will be over. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in the best shape of my life, have lost a lot of weight, and feel better than ever, but running distances of 10, 15, even 20 miles is for the birds. Give me two or three five mile runs a week, but I’ll pass on a weekly ten miler on Sunday afternoons. I’m hoping to take a trip to Delphi while in Greece, so I’ll have that to look forward to as well. Of course spending time in Athens will be pretty amazing too. Hopefully I’ll be able to meet some of the Greeks I met in Macedonia the first time while there for a beer or a coffee, and then they can show me around to some of the non-tourist areas. That would be a lot of fun and interesting as well. I hear Athens is a great city, especially now that they’ve reformed their transit and tourist industries for the Olympics they held.
So I’ll be pretty busy for the next week and a half. I’ll probably fall of the face of the internet world for that time and most of you won’t hear from me outside of the occasional Facebook or email activity. My schedule only slows down for a little while, though, because there is an ATIP (Anti-Trafficking in Persons) conference in VT later in the month that I’m attending, and then after that I’ll be hosting a Thanksgiving dinner for quite a few volunteers in the area. It should be a lot of fun. Annie is going to make a traditional roast Turkey, while I will be doing a repeat of my Duck and Goose Gumbo. There will of course be lots of other contributions of sides, salads and desserts, but I’m just really excited to know that we’re going to have a big gathering and be feeling like family. I’m thinking about asking one of the local restaurants to let us host it there, since I’m pretty comfortable with the owners of both of the ones I go to, but I’m sure that we’ll be able to make do just sitting on the floor at my place for the most part.
So that’s pretty much what’s going on in my life. Winter is coming so work will probably switch from being outside and playing to figuring out how to keep my kids having fun inside. I’ll probably spend a bit of time in the computer lab and working with them there, but I’d also like to play some indoor sports in our indoor gym on days that the sun is out and it’s not too bitterly cold in the unheated gym. I’ll probably try to start doing formal English lessons with some of them again. I had minimal success with them during warmer weather, but with fewer distractions available to my kids outside I think I can get a greater share of their attention for instruction.
In other news, Bulgaria recently re-elected their president. The current president is a socialist who is supported by a number of small parties and thus claims none as his own, but he’s clearly one of the old communist cadre and not very supportive of the liberalizing of Bulgaria’s economy and society. Amazingly enough, this is not the most worrying result of the election. In Bulgaria, if you don’t have 50% of eligible voters participating in the first, general election, even if a clear majority winner is declared, a runoff between him and the runner-up is required. So, while the president won 60% of the vote the first time around, he and the next guy down had to go into a run off. Well, the next guy down was the presidential candidate for Ataka, an ultra-nationalist party of bigoted anti-Semites who want nothing more than to erase the Roma (Gypsies) from the face of the planet, kick out the Turks and Jews from Bulgaria, renege of the deal that lets America use Bulgarian military bases as short-term training facilities, and “renegotiate” Bulgaria’s coming membership to the EU (read completely pull out of the deal all together). They seem to feel that making Bulgaria a completely isolationist state and kicking out all non-ethnic Bulgarians is the way to solve their problems. Anyway, the guy that this party put up for President won 20% of the vote in the first go around. I haven’t had internet access yet to be able to tell how much he got the second time around, but I’m betting he got at least 30% of the vote in the run-off. Frightening. Happy Halloween indeed.
World affairs have been pretty interesting lately too. I’ve decided there are three countries in the world that scare me more than any others. North Korea, Iran, and Russia. Probably in that order. Surprised Iraq wasn’t in there? That’s because I have a feeling we’re going to pull out of there before too much longer (three years tops), and it’s just going to turn into another Balkan war, just in the dessert and not in the woods. But man, North Korea with and the thought of Iran with nukes scares me. In the meanwhile, Russia is just insane. It’s so amazingly corrupt, the president is a de-facto dictator who has dissenters and competitors killed, and no one seems to care to even attempt to stop him, so dependent are we and the rest of the world on his oil and gas reserves. We watched Syriana last night, and while I realize that it presents a very dark vview of America’s tendency to let oil interest dictate policy, it got me thinking about that whole issue again, and it really did make me take a second glance at Iraq, Iran, and Russia. Man I can’t wait for hydrogen cars.
Anyway, it’s now 10:03am and I need to pay for my sammich and juice before packing up and heading out, so I’ll finish this blog entry. I’ll post it when I get back and I’ll attempt to sort out some of the best pictures from the weekend to upload to the gallery, though my internet connection has been unreliable lately, so who knows? Please leave a comment about any part of this entry. I love to hear feedback from readers, and I love starting discussions on these issues with other smart people.
Peace.
