Beginnings: Social, Academic, Bulgarian

Another beautiful day in Sofia. Warm air, breeze, good beer (and cheap!). Much nicer than Munich at the moment.

Most everything (i.e., the Principal Reasons Why I'm Here) has kicked off in earnest this week. After meeting with my adviser last week, she sent me a list of resources and other things to help me get started. I visited the BAN (Български Академия на Науките, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) Central Library on Monday and introduced myself to the director; he gave me a few things to look at. Yesterday, Dr. Naidenova led me over to the library for the Institute of Art Studies. There, I met several helpful women who pulled a stack of books for me that I had on a bibliography.

Felicitously, two of these books are in English; this is where I will start. And start I did, as yesterday represented my first day of hard research. It was a success, inasmuch as a day of reading books and taking notes can be a success. Most of the trepidation I had about actually sitting down and poring through mountainous, indecipherable volumes vanished as I actually sat down and did it - the books I'm starting out with are fairly easy reads. The hard part will come when I get around to the ones in Bulgarian.

To that end, I had my first tutoring session today with Dr. Angel Angelov, of Sofia University. Angel was our Bulgarian teacher the first week at FISI, as well as a guitarist and professor of linguistics - I am fairly sure we'll work well together. Today, we worked for an hour and a half, covering some dictation and some other things. My goal is to become fluent in Bulgarian by the end of the year, passing a strong conversational level by New Year's. This will be essential to my research, as well as to integrating myself into the culture here, which is the sine qua non of the spirit of the Fulbright Fellowship.

That's not to say it will be easy. The Slavic language family is only distantly related to the Romantic and Germanic families that are the most familiar to natives of the Western Hemisphere. In the few months since I undertook to learn this language, I have mostly been teaching myself, with an occasional brief conversation and a multitude of embarrassing moments to supplement my study. This is a hard way to learn, and I think having private, twice-weekly sessions will be quite helpful.

There is also the issue of the register of Bulgarian that I learn. This tutoring will hopefully bring me up to a strong conversational level (and beyond), but the prime reason why I'm over here in the first place is to do research, and to do it, at least partially, in Bulgarian. Luckily, a rather large part of the academic lexicon here consists of loanwords from other academic languages--French and English, in particular--so my knowledge of these languages will certainly be a huge help in that respect. But the fact remains that a lot of my learning will, by necessity, take place in a much less academic register of vocabulary than might be ideal for a researcher - so I have a lot of work to do on my own.

Bulgarian, in the abstract, is not nearly as hard--I should say, has not been nearly as hard for me--as some other languages that are out there. Many, if not most, of the concepts at which it diverges from English have parallels in other languages that I've learned, chiefly French. Why this is, and whether this is coincidence, providence, or influence, I couldn't say, at least at this juncture, but it has proven to be a fortuitous feature of the language. The hardest parts about it for me so far have been mastering the different functions of its prepositions and understanding its case/declension system. English, by evolution, has only two (I think?) declensions, whereas Bulgarian has four. And so on. Syntax and grammar are not particularly hard in this language. 

But moving on: The third leg of the Holy Triangle of My Week Of New Beginnings is social. 

I have had plenty of chances to do things since being here - aside from the two weeks of FISI, I have been seeing some of my fellow Fulbrighters in the 3 1/2 weeks I've been in Sofia. One of my goals, though, was to put myself out there, make friends with people who weren't from the same part of the world as I am, and--at the risk of quickly running this platitude into the ground--integrate myself into another culture.

To that end, I joined CouchSurfers a few weeks ago (For those of you who aren't familiar with the organization, it's an online community that connects people around the world who are traveling. It also has a service whereby you can contact someone to lodge you for a few nights while you're passing through a particular city. Membership currently stands at around 3 million), and last night, I went to my first event - a huge gathering in Orlov Most Square. It was really a lot of fun, and I met some cool people from all different places - Bulgaria, mostly, but a few Germans, an Austrian, a Hungarian, and even a guy from Lancaster, Pennsylvania who taught the same DCI corps--the Crossmen--that my brother played in a few years before.

It was a great chance for me to practice meeting and talking to people--world travelers, at that--and while we mostly ended up speaking English (I told you my Bulgarian wasn't quite up to conversational yet), the rapport was very friendly. Tonight, I'm heading down to Xambara for a smaller gathering with a similar group of people. It's only a start, but I'm hoping that it will lead to an entirely new, robust social circle for me to be a part of while I'm here. The only way that will happen is if I continue to put myself out there, but so far, so good.

It has truly been a nice day, but now it is dark. That fall feeling I got a few days ago has receded, and Sofia has plunged back into Indian Summer. I wonder how long it can hold out before it starts getting cooler for good, but it so far shows no signs of letting up. Now I'm off to finish my studying and meet some more people. До скоро...