Back to Work

Dissertations. Emails. Articles. Festivals. Bolging. Bulgarian. Working out. College apps. Rakia.

May the dark tone this blog has assumed in the past few entries be forever banished. Every one of the above (and many more) had been coming to a violent and bitter head before my Birthday/Thanksgiving break, but now, refreshed and ready to face the next onslaught, I'm back down to work as of today. My game plan for the next three weeks looks something like this:

Finish up first college apps. Obtain piano and start practicing for auditions. Apply for financial aid. Apply to second wave of schools. Read Tim Rice's dissertation. Read a half-dozen smaller sources (на Български). Meet with an ethnographer I've gotten in contact with. Prepare a presentation to the Fulbright Committee on my findings so far. Get back in shape before Christmas, when I am sure to re-regain the 5 pounds I lost earlier this month.

The break I just indulged in was as welcome as it was pleasant. Laura flew in on Tuesday, straight from a wedding in LA, and we celebrated my birthday in jet-lagged fashion. I received gifts of an altogether-much-too-high quality (including my first DSLR camera, a Nikon D3100, so expect the quality of the pictures posted here to improve by quite a bit), and generally had a nice day. It's strange to think that I'm 24 - the mid-20's have always seemed to me like an abstraction, and it's just weird to actually be here. 

Thursday was, of course, Thanksgiving, and many of the other Fulbrighters and I celebrated by going to a reception at the house of one of the employees of the Embassy. I met an interesting assortment of people over hors d'oeuvres and even met a guy who had studied composition at Penn with George Crumb. The Fulbrighters and I (and a few others) came back to my apartment for the afterparty, after which, exhausted from a long day, I was done.

Friday played host to an assortment of interesting things such as shopping on Vitosha, buying my first scarf ever (Don't laugh - it's COLD here), Chinese food of a quality comparable to that of any of a number of small-town-Pennsylvania dives, the best gelato probably anywhere outside of Italy, and a rare early-to-bed night, as I was starting to come down with some sort of nefarious disease. 

Saturday was full of the same sorts of things, including a big test-run of my new camera and partying with some of the Fellows of the American Research Center. Also, homemade lentil soup AND Funfetti Cake Mix pancakes. Nom? Nom. Sunday I had to take Laura back to the airport, and I spent the rest of the day wallowing in self-pity, laundry, and taking some experimental photos (some of which will follow soon, Scout's Honor).

It was a nice few days, and I needed it. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or not, but the timing of these breaks (not just this year, but when I was in school, as well) has always seemed to coincide with overwhelming amounts of work. Now, having rested a bit, I have three more weeks to do my Duty to the World, and then comes Christmas, with all its attendant festivities, lights, and fatty, sugary foods. Hence, my window to shed a couple of pounds begins now and ends with the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

One more thing: When I said it has been cold here, I meant it has been cold here. Today was warmer (I believe it got into the 40's), but woe has betided me every time in the last few weeks I've ventured out after dark. And lest you think the temperature has been the only source of unpleasantness, let me tell you that it has been coupled with a not-entirely-unhellish wind.

And it's only November. It's going to be a long, cold, lonely winter.

Obligatory philosophical paragraph(s): Sofia has come to be moderately familiar to me now. Within the parts of it I've traveled on a regular basis (those parts being, more or less, the eastern half of the Center from the National Palace of Culture up to the Central Station, and over to Madrid St.), I more or less know what is where and how to get around. I feel as though I've gotten lazy, though, and become complacent in my erstwhile knowledge of this, my home for the year. I started thinking about this when we took the bus down to the Boyana section on Thursday, and realized I had never really been west of Vitosha.

One of the things I have been trying to be conscious of has been seeing as many things here as I can. After all, that's more or less the whole point of my time here - to have as many experiences and absorb as much culture as possible. I have been moderately successful in doing this on an international scale--having already visited Germany and Romania, with travels to many more countries planned (including somewhere else before Christmas)--but I have grown familiar with but one part of this city in which I'm living. It will be on me to keep working, this entire year, towards expanding my knowledge of this still-exotic society amidst which I find myself.

/End philosophical paragraph(s)

I'll post the first pictures taken with my spiffy new camera on Wednesday. Some of them are cool. Some of them are lame. Some of them are weird and experimental. But you get to see them anyway. Lucky you!

A Long Time Coming

There are no words to express the deep regret with which I address you today. I have failed you. I have failed in my mission. I have failed America.

The length of time since I last posted is inexcusable. It shall forever besmirch the record of My Life, and I shall carry it, hunched over in shame, for the remaining length of my days.

But it is my birthday, so I'm cutting myself a little slack. And, luckily enough, the entirety of my activity over the course of the past two weeks can be described in a very few paragraphs (not something I had hoped would ever come to pass).

Upon returning from Romania, the calendar had flipped to the month of November, which meant a host of things, the most pertinent to the present topic of discussion among them was that my grad school applications were due a month hence. I diligently got down to work, and a good thing, too, because there was a lot more to do than I had hoped.

The first week went something like this: Applications, research, working out, hanging out with some of the non-Americans I've met here. No big deal, low key, time for everything. My normal routine existed, intact, albeit a little additionally burdened.

The second week brought revelations of mistaken deadlines, meaning that I was, form that point forward, behind the proverbial 8-ball. I proceeded to hole myself up in my apartment for the next two weeks, working day and night, filling out biographical information, writing and editing personal statements, and my favorite of these scourges tasks, watching videos, quite self-consciously, of myself conducting, searching among the inimitable rubble for a precious rare tidbit that would impress a screening committee.

The past week has been particularly rough, as I have worked up to this day of my self-imposed deadline - in the last eight days, I have left my apartment six times. Quite pathetic. But, I am happy to report, I am nearly done: All that remains between me and utter freedom is the final revision of three statements, which I am waiting to get back from my gracious editors. With the coming of the Blessed Day of their submission, I will sink, blissful and utterly clear-headed, into a nice long break, over which I plan to have a pleasant birthday AND Thanksgiving.

Last night, I finished reading the last of the dissertation I've been working on for the past month, and when I come back from my self-imposed rest, I will have a few more research-related things to do before Christmas. But before I get ahead of myself, let me just pause and be thankful, in these days leading up to the Best Holiday of the Year, for all that I have and all that I will (hopefully quite soon) put behind me. Christmas can wait; it is time to bask and revel in the glow of a bounty of company, food, drink, and football. Or so I plan.

But it is my birthday, and I feel...old. I turn 24 today, launching that phase of my life where I can no longer hold onto the already tenuous connection between me and college. It is profoundly sad, in a way, but it is also a chance to appreciate that I am now in a position to move on to Points Forward. This year might not be so bad. (Please knock on some wood for me, wherever you happen to be sitting.)

Now I must go to pick Laura up from the airport, the best birthday present I will receive today. So until the next criminally distant date in the future upon which I deign to grace this digital page - Stay warm, stay safe, stay thankful.

Keeping up with the Kirilovs

Since returning from Romania on Tuesday last, I have been thrown headlong back into my vicious schedule of researching, working on grad school applications, and other minor annoyances tasks of great import. Tuesday began the one-month countdown to the biggest share of my application deadlines, so I have, unfortunately, been forced to prioritize this most unsavory part of my life.

It wouldn't be quite so bad were I applying to a normal program, like Geology or Classics or Rocket Science. To apply to these kinds of programs, you fill in your information, write a statement or two, send your transcripts, and voilà: Four months later you get your rejection letter, and that's that. But applying to seven different Choral Conducting programs requires writing thirteen personal statements, uploading four different versions of your résumé, lists of works conducted, and lists of works studied, submitting videos of yourself conducting (cut to seven different lengths), and sending a bottle of expensive wine to seven different admissions offices to ensure they don't lose any or all of these items. Woof.

Be that as it may, I have no choice. All of these things I must do in the next two weeks or be forever ridden with guilt that I never gave myself a chance. 

Why two weeks? Glad you asked. Because, it is now confirmed, I will be happily incapacitated the last week of the month. The 22nd marks my unofficial transition to Old Age with my ascendance to mid-20's-dom, and Laura is flying in (most assuredly road-weary and hung over, fresh from a wedding in Los Angeles) for the week. The 24th is Thanksgiving, (see this post for my overly exuberant treatment of Thanksgiving), and there have been talks of a Belgrade trip the 25th-26th. It will be a good week.

But, as seems to be the case with any plans for mini-vacations, there is much to be done before they can happen. Grad school applications aside, I have a lot of research to do before I can take a holiday even remotely unencumbered by guilt or nagging worries. The good news is that I finished Tim Rice's book May it Fill Your Soul on Friday, and I have since been focusing Maria Denkova's dissertation, which I will need to finish by this prospective holiday. If I can get a few other short pieces of literature read and analyzed by then, I should be in satisfactory shape and will consider myself deserving of a decadent break.

...

Go-go-gadget non-sequitur: 

This past weekend was fairly interesting. Thursday night I went to Locàl, a bar close to my apartment that plays host to an "International Night" every Thursday. This was my second trip there, and I'm thinking I may go quite a bit more often, as it has so far afforded me the opportunity to meet interesting people from Spain, Italy, Denmark, Korea, and, of course, Bulgaria. Thursday night, I met my friend Agi (whom I had, in fact, met at International Night a few weeks ago) there, as well as two of her friends who were in town for the weekend from Denmark. I would see them all again Saturday night, and meet a couple of others, all of which were very cool, to boot.

Saturday night, incidentally, Greg, his family, and I had dinner at Чевермето, a supposedly "authentic" Bulgarian folk restaurant, replete with music and dancing, at the National Palace of Culture. As it happened, it wasn't terribly authentic, but was nevertheless a good time, even when the dancers made me get up and join them. No pictures of this heinous insult to Bulgarian culture (and by that I mean my dancing, not the restaurant) will be forthcoming.

This week will feature more of our featured material: Research, grad school apps, and, on Friday, snow. Stay tuned.

Vampire Weekend: Halloween in Transylvania

We did it. Not completely according to plan, and with more than a few bumps along the way, but we did it, and it was awesome. Let's cut right to the chase:

Thursday night: I went to meet Caitlin at the bus station in Sofia. She came in from Haskovo at 9, and we proceeded to buy our tickets for the 12:30 AM bus to Bucharest. We headed back to my apartment, where I did my last-minute packing for the trip, and we set off again. Once on the bus, it didn't take long for rather large, undeodorized Bulgarian man sitting next to/marginally on top of me to begin to reek of BO, so as a defensive measure, I went promptly to sleep. I would be periodically awakened by our bus swerving to avoid guardrails, our driver jamming on the brakes, a protracted stop at the border, and the flatulence of said very (very) large man. But, somehow someway, I scraped together five hours of sleep by the time we arrived in a very chilly Bucharest at 8 AM on Friday morning.

Once there, we proceeded to get very lost, though not without some serendipitous discoveries. After walking down a hill without knowing which direction we were headed, making a few turns, and walking back up a long, winding pathway, we stumbled onto the Patriarchal Cathedral, which was mobbed, as the relics of St. Andrew were being displayed there for the week. Working our way back down the hill on the other side, we found ourselves still lost, and proceeded to try to find our way for the next two hours, finally making it to the hotel where the third member of our party, Laura, was staying.

This mercifully afforded me the opportunity to take a shower, and after doing so, the three of us went on a walking tour of Bucharest. It is a beautiful city, to be sure, and we took lots of pictures (somehow, most of them ended up being of churches), like these:

Beautiful Orthodox church next to the Academy of Medicine

Another beautiful Orthodox church

Of note in the city: Sex shops (as abundant as the churches) and bad drivers (more abundant than the churches). Interesting to me was the mixture of Orthodox and Catholic churches, some of them right next to each other. After a long day of walking around and seeing other interesting things like this,

Fountains in Piaţa Unirii

 this,

Parliamentary Palace

and this,

Bucharest Opera

we had some dinner at a rather nice, not-too-pricey German restaurant and headed back to the hotel. I threw my things together and headed down to Piaţa Unirii to meet my host for the night, Dor, a fellow CouchSurfer. We met, and he whisked me away to an underground (not just in the sense that is was alternative; it was actually underground) metal bar where the Romanian Death Metal band Truda was playing. Keeping in mind the absurdity of the situation, I actually enjoyed myself quite thoroughly.

So much metal

I have a strict 2-hour limit when it comes to Romanian Death Metal, though, so we headed back to his tiny apartment, every inch of the free space of which was taken up by the air mattress he had prepared for my arrival. Tremendously grateful for a place to sleep, I slept.

Waking up entirely too early for a Saturday morning, I got back to Piaţa Romana to meet Caitlin and Laura at 9. After eating perhaps the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in my life, we took the metro to a desolate corner of town we thought was by the airport, where we were supposed to pick up our rental car. Upon closer inspection of the map, though, we realized that we weren't really anywhere close to where we were supposed to be, so after a bit of quick thinking, we got back on the metro, transferred lines, and took it as far as it would go in the right direction. Upon reaching the surface outside of the stop, and with only the glimmer of a clue as to where we should go, I, without much choice (and commanding not a single word of Romanian) approached a man who looked like he was waiting at the bus stop. 

Christian, as it turned out, was fluent in German. Lobet den Herrn! Though mine was rusty, I managed to get directions to the airport, and our friend was nice enough to accompany us on the bus and tell us where to get off. Here our troubles began.

We had rented a car from Dollar Rental, and let me tell you, it could not have been a bigger mistake. After thinking we had gotten something wrong, we walked around Baneasa Airport for an hour trying to find the Dollar office. Finally, a nice gentleman from a competing agency told us that their nearest office was in Bucharest's other airport. Never mind that we had made the reservation for this airport. 

Luckily, the other airport was in the same direction and only 10 km further outside of the city. Taking a taxi there, we explored the area and still couldn't find where we were supposed to pick up the car. Finally, heading to the arrivals terminal, we found their counter, where we were informed that not only were we supposed to have been at the meeting place at 5 AM (not what we reserved), the car was gone, and so was our money. Having no other choice (though I have been in contact with "authorities"), we rented a car on the spot from Avis. Finally, three hours and €190 later, we were on the road.

Our first stop was Snagov Monestary, reputed home of the tomb of Dracula. But in order to get there, we had to find it, first. Which proved a rather difficult task (sensing a pattern?). Our crucial mistake lay in the assumption that Snagov Monastery was in the town of Snagov. As it was actually in the neighboring town of Silistea, we drove around, lost again, for a full two hours before finding our way with the aid of a magical GPS that arbitrarily decided to start and stop working at points unanticipated and the worried aid of my dad, whom I raised by phone from the other side of the world to get him to help us using Google Maps (Thanks, Google Maps! And Dad!) The experience wasn't totally awful, though - we saw some of the most gorgeous scenery ever, hidden in rural (think farming village rural) Romania.

But we finally arrived. And it was cool. Have a few pictures to see what I mean:

Island in the middle of Lake Snagov

The Monastery

Getting closer

Behold the tomb of Dracula

Having spent the lion's share of our day lost and confused, we had to rethink our schedule a bit, so we decided to head right to Braşov and see our intended stops along the way later. The drive was, like so many of our other scenic experiences, gorgeous, and we did make one stop, right before sundown, at a most incredible looking cemetery nestled high in the mountains.

After spending a few minutes in this little place, we finally made it Braşov, and after spending a little more time being lost, we finally found the guest house that Laura and Caitlin had reserved, and had agreed to let me stay at, my own host never having materialized. We got settled in, headed out to a late dinner, and came home, ready to put the day, and ourselves, to bed.

Sunday was a day made for sightseeing, despite the fact that my camera died upon taking the first picture of the day, and I subsequently had to rely on my phone's camera (pardon, therefore, the poor quality). So sightsee we did. After a delicious breakfast cooked by our hostess (seriously, she made us scrambled eggs and toast), we headed out into the brisk air. Our first destination was the Braşov Citadel, an old Renaissance fortress sitting atop the highest hill/mountain in the city.

Looking east

Looking south

After that, we headed down the hill to the center of the Old City, where we walked past some beautiful churches, street peddlers, McDonald's (even here, in one of the most picturesque cities I've ever seen, there was no escape from the Hideous Monstrosity), and fantastically cosmopolitan coffee shops to the Schwarzekirche, the Black Church - so named I don't know why, but super cool nonetheless.

One side

The other

After briefly heading back to the guest house, we again hit the road. Our first stop was Bran Castle, which was not Dracula's castle, but still cool, and packed with tourists (Irony!). After spending some time there, we stopped at Râşnov Citadel, which, to my mind, was even cooler.

Bran Castle

Râşnov Citadel

That's cool

So is that

After the length of this day, we were fairly tired, so we headed back to Braşov, had dinner at another German restaurant (where saw traditional Transylvanian folk dancing!), and headed back to the guest house to get to bed early.

No lederhosen, I'm afraid

It was a good thing we did, because 7 AM = wakin' up in the mornin'. We hit the road at 8, and at 9:30, after another half hour of searching, we found the utterly unmarked, hidden, and unadvertised Peleş Castle. As it was, we didn't have time to go inside, though we did get some super cool shots of the place. Like this, for example:

Peleş Castle

And so, having accomplished everything we had wanted to, we headed back to Bucharest satisfied, returned the car five minutes before it was due, and caught a taxi to the bus station with three hours to go before our bus left for Sofia. Perfect, you say? Hardly.

What no one told us was that Bucharest actually has six bus stations (Apparently, the idea of centralization hasn't swept Romania just yet). And so, we spent the next three hours walking and illegally riding the trams, weeping asking person after person if they knew where we were supposed to catch the bus to Sofia. No one did. Finally, defeated, we headed to the train station to see when we could catch a train. Not until midnight, apparently, and for 120 lei (about $40). Nearly at the end of our rope, we did the unthinkable and patronized a McDonald's, which, it just so happened, had Wi-Fi. Around 4:15, I stumbled across a website with the information on where to catch the bus to Sofia.

That boat having sailed (That bus having left?), we camped out in that McDonald's, wallowing in our sorrow and self-pity (or that could have just been me). Finally, we decided to head out to dinner to try to salvage a bit of pleasantry from the evening. I had a bottle of wine with me that had been intended as a gift for the host that never materialized, so I brought it, but was informed that we couldn't drink it in the restaurant. Rough day.

After heading back to the train station, we camped out some more until our train arrived, and at midnight on Tuesday morning, we boarded. I escaped our scorchingly warm car and made for the next one, which was thankfully empty, and fell asleep. When I woke up, we were at the border, and when I woke up again, it was morning in Bulgaria.

When we pulled into the station, I was again surrounded by Bulgarian, and what struck me was how comforted I was by it after a weekend of hearing a language (Romanian) of which I didn't understand one word (not that I didn't pretend otherwise). Strange as this may sound, it was my first "Bulgaria-as-home" moment. In my absence from it, I found myself wanting to return to it. It was cool.

There are two more things I want to consider here. The first: Though we spent a lot of time on this trip lost, that time was actually, once we got over the uneasiness of not knowing where we were going, a lot of fun. After all, we were exploring an utterly unknown place. And we saw some of the most incredible things as a result.

The second: As tongue-in-cheek as Douglas Adams intended his advice on hitchhiking, and by extension, traveling, to be, there is actually quite a lot of real-world value to it. That advice? Rule #1: Don't panic. Rule #2: Always know where your towel is. These things saved me, to greater and lesser extents, throughout this trip.

Halloween in Transylvania? Check. Here's to many more harrowing, delightful, scenic, trying, rewarding experiences like this one.