Forging Ahead, Comfort Zones, Changes

It's been another one of those weeks.

It all started on Thursday. Since getting back from Berlin, I had been watching videos of some of the groups that performed at the 2010 Koprivshtitsa Folklore Festival as part of my research. The idea is that by watching performances of the pertinent types of music, I can get a feel (and make objective qualifications) of the state of folklore today, which is, of course, essential to the comparative analysis I'm doing. So, I spent the beginning of another week sitting in the library at BAN, watching videos, making transcriptions, and taking notes.

But there was only enough material to last a couple of days, so I finally made my way, along with my adviser, over to the archives of the Institute of Art Studies, where I first had to get set up. Which meant having to explain myself and ask for help. Not typically a problem for me anymore, except:

My adviser understands English fairly well, but is uncomfortable speaking it, which is more or less the same relationship I have with Bulgarian, except I think that her understanding of my mother tongue is better than mine of hers. So our conversations tend to be in Bulgarian - simple Bulgarian, unable as I am to understand or articulate anything complex. These conversations tend to make me nervous, as I will admit to being a bit intimidated by trying to keep up semi-academic discussions in a language not my own. 

However, we've hit on more or less an ideal solution. We typically communicate by email, as both of us are entirely competent readers of each other's languages, provided academic or overly floral registers have been avoided. She writes me in Bulgarian, I respond in English, and we understand each other satisfactorily. This works just fine, unless there are occasions when face-to-face contact is a necessity.

Like Thursday. As we went to the archives to get set up, I was my typically nervous self, straining to make out enough words per sentence to put together its basic meaning. I gamely struggled through for close to an hour, and when we got there, we met the ladies who would be setting me up with my materials. To my sinking realization, they possessed the same knowledge of English as my adviser, so I was forced to continue straining for comprehension--not having had a chance to release the cumulative weight of the previous hour--as we all sat in the listening room and discussed a bit of this and a bit of that. 

I will confess to becoming more and more stressed out by the minute. It's exhausting, and nerve-wracking, trying to prove that you aren't a simpleton to three completely-at-ease speakers within an environment that's entirely comfortable for them, speaking their native language. In a moment of self-awareness, I caught myself huddled up against my chair, making myself as invisible as possible, trying to disappear from the room, and I realized I was more on edge than I had thought.

But something changed when my adviser and one of the assistants left the room and it came down to me speaking one-on-one with the other. As we chatted about life and ourselves--and the pace of the conversation slowed--I relaxed, and to my surprise, found myself understanding more and searching for words less. It made me realize, though it may seem self-evident, that the further inside your comfort zone you are, the better you tend to think. In this case, that meant being able to speak a language with far more ease.

It was a trying experience, but ultimately a valuable one. For most of the year, the lingua franca between myself and the Bulgarian interlocutors with whom I've had extended conversations has usually been English, as in most cases, their English has been better than my Bulgarian. It has certainly been that way as I've spoken to the younger generation of Bulgarians, as knowledge of English is near-universal in schoolchildren in this largest and richest of cities in this country. 

But it was rewarding to have the roles finally be reversed, for the others to have to depend upon my knowledge of their tongue. And it was instructive to see how being within or without one's comfort zone can directly affect one's ability to--broadly--recall information and--specifically--to speak a foreign language. It's now more apparent to me than ever that the best thing I can do for myself is simply to speak this language with others as much as I can in order to expand that particular comfort zone.

To that end, I went today to Sofia's weekly conversation swap, which was a great chance to work my Bulgarian out with people who are there for express purpose of helping foreigners like me work their Bulgarian out, clause by halting clause. And it actually went pretty well, warmed up as I had been from two previous days of racking my brains for the right words to say. The part I was most pleasantly surprised by was my ability to listen and to comprehend meaning. Today was the most successful day I've had in that regard, I think, so it's something to build on.

Today happened to be a fairly representative sample of my week, actually - though I didn't do any research, I spent time speaking Bulgarian, getting things together at home, and going out to the Sofia University metro station--like I've been doing every day this week--and busking with my ukulele, mostly just for the sheer fun of it. I've been playing songs like this, this, this, and this. It's really been quite fun, and while I wouldn't go so far as to call it lucrative, I have managed to put away a (very) little traveling cash.

The only thing diminishing the fun of these jocular one-man jam sessions has been the weather. Yes, sadly, after a semi-pleasant week, capped off by a glorious Thursday, winter, in its death throes, has returned to strike one final blow at the collective morale of the residents of this fine city. If the forecasts are to be believed, it's actually going to snow tomorrow--a fine April Fool's prank if there ever was one--before the climate finally relents for good and Spring begins in earnest. But if it has to happen, it couldn't come at a better time, because:

Fresh off of one international Fulbright conference, I'm headed to another tomorrow, this one in Thessaloniki, Greece. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited, as this will be my first time in Greece, a country which necessitates no reminders of its awesomeness. This conference, well placed in the Springtime, before tourist season picks up, will have me spending 5 days--along with my Bulgarian Fulbright companions Fred and Jamie--in a city with more history than any I've ever been in. Ridiculous? A bit. Fortunate? I am.

So I'll be back in a week with pictures of Greece. Get excited. Until then, Stay Classy.

Breakfast in Berlin

Things I have done in the last three days in defiance of the fact that it's still March:

• Hung my laundry on my outdoors clothesline
• Wore my flip-flops when I went out
• Went for my first outdoor run of the year
• Busked in the metro station for money (and made 12 лева!)
• Smiled at everyone and everything, because it was 21° (70°F) (!)

It's Springtime in Bulgaria. The calendar says it, the martenitsi say it, and, best of all, the weather says it. Color me exuberant.

I should preemptively apologize, at this point, for my near-certain preoccupation with the weather over the course of the next several weeks. As I mentioned before, I hate the cold, so the couple of weeks in March when it starts to get warm again and everything comes alive is one of my favorite times of year. I can get a little obsessed. So please excuse all future references to the weather from here on out.

Let's talk about my awesome trip to Berlin, though, ja?

This past Sunday to Thursday was the annual conference in Berlin of a selected sample of European Fulbrighters. For four days, this miniscule club of 600 was tasked with sitting through rather a lot of presentations and making the effort to meet every single other member of said club. In retrospect, I think we did surprisingly well.

Very early on Sunday morning, Fred and I caught a flight to Berlin by way of Munich. Arriving at Berlin's Tegel Airport around 10:20, we caught a bus that conveniently delivered us directly to Alexanderplatz, where our hotel was located. As we checked in, I found Laura--who had ventured up from Munich the previous day--waiting for me in the lobby, and we crashed for a couple of hours (as I, having awoken at 4:45 AM, was experiencing something akin to the sleep deprivation that might befall a survivor of the Apocalypse) before setting off, with several hundred of the other Fulbrighters, on a tour of the city.

Designed to be a survey tour rather than a detailed one, the bus took us to a lot of the sites important to the history of Berlin's role in the Cold War, and, of course, showed us much of the path where the Berlin Wall stood. Starting at Alexanderplatz, we soon found ourselves at the East Side Gallery, a section of the Wall that has been painted over extensively by muralists and graffiti artists alike.

The East Side Gallery

Driving past this section of the Wall for a while, we then crossed the Oberbaumbrücke into West Berlin. Driving through some of the more "artistic" neighborhoods on this side of the city, we ended up at Checkpoint Charlie, which was not, I was surprised to learn, a metaphorical character symbolic of the division between East and West, but rather an actual border crossing at the former site of the Wall.

Anonymous Soviet Soldier is watching you

After a fascinating trip through the museum that accompanies this landmark, we headed off again through Potsdamerplatz, past what I believe was the seat of the European Trade Commission and the former headquarters of Radio In the American Sector, and found ourselves at another section of the Wall that has survived, largely unaltered, since it was constructed.

Here stood the Wall

The Iron Curtain epitomized

Following this, we began to make our way back toward the hotel, along the way passing several musea, Humboldt Universität, the Berliner Staatsoper, and the Berliner Dom (pictures of that to come later) before finding ourselves back at Alexanderplatz. Our tour ended, we filtered back up into the hotel.

Resting up a bit more before dinner, I met my roommate for the week, Arthur, and we went back downstairs for the pre-meal ceremonies. Dinner itself was a raucous (and delicious) affair, with the introduction of good beer and wine almost certainly a move motivated by the desire to facilitate networking. Well, it worked. Three hours later, having met a large share of the students flung afield throughout Europe, I left the dining room to meet Laura before she had to catch a midnight ride back to Munich.

Having somehow survived this long day, I fell into bed that night and awoke the next morning with a good night's sleep under my belt, and feeling all the better for it. Monday would set the tone for the rest of the conference, as it featured several long "mini-conferences" (speeches, panels, and the like), several more "networking meals," and on Monday night, a long opening ceremony at the Federal Foreign Office featuring several speeches auf Deutsch (perhaps defeating their purpose for the non-Germanophone members of the audience), after which there was a reception filled with supremely delicious German delicacies. Said reception also featured my reconnection with a couple of old classmates at USC, neither of whom I knew were in Europe on Fulbrights. It was a Small World Moment.

Tuesday, though filled with different content, contained many similar events. The morning session featured another spate of speeches at the Berliner Rathaus (City Hall) and a Q&A session with Björn Böhning, the head of Berlin's State Chancellery. (The Rathaus also contains a very imposing and very cool painting of the Congress of 1878--which I couldn't help staring at every few moments--at whose center is a towering and dour-looking Otto von Bismarck.) After lunch, I decided to make my way around our section of Berlin to see some of the cool stuff we hadn't had the chance to see on Sunday.

Within a few meters of the hotel are Berlin's TV tower and the Marienkirche. The TV tower is rather large.

Seriously.

Just down the road are the Rathaus and its awesome (and mildly famous, I've heard) fountain.

Poseidon with the Marienkirche in the background

Another few meters down from these magnificent wonders (there really is a lot of cool stuff in this neighborhood packed into not very much room) is a Platz bounded by the Berlin Cathedral and the Altes Museum, with the Humboldt Box just off to the side. None of the following pictures will really give you an accurate impression, but one of the reasons this area is so fixating is because these structures are gigantic with a capital HUGE. Seriously. They are beautiful, and old, and large.

Altes Museum

The Cathedral, with the TV Tower in the background

Tearing myself away from this concentrated display of Old World architecture after taking 98265898356 pictures thereof, I continued my journey along the River Spree, only stopping to witness an impromptu performance by a couple of Marktsackpfeife players accompanied by a drummer.

Super cool

My next stop was the Neue Synagoge, which was built in 1866, set on fire during Kristallnacht in 1938, and destroyed by bombing in 1943. It was rebuilt after the war, and dedicated in 1966 on its 100th anniversary.

Like few synagogues you've ever seen

After that, I headed back south to the Spree and continued to follow it west. After crossing over it on the Friedrichstrasse bridge, I headed toward the penultimate stop on my mini-tour: the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament.

Approaching it from the river

BAM

After stopping to marvel--again--at how grotesquely large yet another important piece of architecture was in this city, I walked the last hundred meters to the final destination of my tour, the Brandenburg Gate, made famous, perhaps, by this photo:

Hopping the Wall in 1989

Here's what it looks like 22 years later:

With Victoria and her horses looking on

Having seen nearly everything I had set out to see, and running short on time before dinner, I made my way straight back to the hotel down Unter den Linden. After stuffing my face for the millionth time on this trip, it was time for the Music Gala, an extensive concert put on by some of the current Fulbright music students. Though I was expecting it to be good, it turned out to be really good, and it made me miss the days when I used to go to concerts all the time. (But those days are coming again soon!) After returning to the hotel, I went out to a local Brauhaus to grab a beer with several members of the Spanish contingent, plus some others, thus ending another long day.

And just like that, when I awoke the next morning, it was the last day of the conference. It was a good one, too; the morning featured the project presentations of 9 current Fulbrighters as well as a panel of 8 others who shared their experiences with such exotic locations as Finland, Hungary, and Sweden. After a lunch of some surprisingly good Chinese food (prepared by a Korean woman on the streets of Berlin - I love Europe), we had another panel regarding the future of the EU with several officials thereof. It was a great chance to learn about the dynamics currently working themselves out within the economies of Europe, ask some questions about them, and speculate about where everything was heading.

After dinner, we were all bussed to the Kulturbrauerei, a club/bar-like situation, where we hung out, danced, and got the last of our "networking" out before we had to depart. It made me realize how much fun I had had at the conference, and that it actually had its intended effect - I now know people living all over Europe, which will be awesome come this summer (more to come on that in a few months).

But alas, even after staying out until 2:something AM, breakfast the next day refused to postpone itself to a decent hour, so I dragged myself out of bed, forced myself downstairs, and had a long, groggy breakfast, mostly spent rehashing the details of the night before. After checking out, I went to lunch with Joe, one of my aforementioned USC compatriots, and then set off to see a couple more things before my 5 PM flight. The most important of these was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located just to the south of Brandenburg Gate.

The Field of Stelae

From inside

After spending an hour and change absorbing all of it, I was out of time, and caught a bus back to TXL. Fred and I got back to Sofia at 9:30, and just like that, our trip was over.

It was fun. I really like Berlin.

Now it's back to reality, and I have a mountain of work to do this week before it's off to another conference in Thessaloniki. Stay tuned for more.

Springtime for Borisov

After five long, dark months of biting cold--and nearly as long a period of snowfall--spring has descended upon Sofia. Cue The Producers, Carmina Burana, and The Beatles.

I wouldn't go so far as to say we're into the warm part of Spring yet - give that another couple weeks. But when I walked out of the library yesterday, it was windbreaker weather, and the sun stayed out until nearly 7. And today was, for the sheer fact of Sofia's previously dismal temperatures, glorious. It got up to the 60's, and, for a few liberating moments, I walked around in my T-shirt, which felt just plain nice. And soon, mid-March will give way to April, and we'll really be talking.

I think I've coped reasonably well with my first prolonged winter in six years, but I'll be the first to admit that it's gotten me a little down, and I'm immensely happy that its last traces will soon be swept away. Sunny days will soon be here to stay, as evidenced today by the uplifting sight of a park full of happy, playing children. I even caught a few of their more gastronomically exuberant parents eating ice cream. All will soon be right with the world.

Yesterday, I finished the book I've been slogging through for the last couple of months, something else I'm overjoyed to be rid of. And today, Xristo and I pored over the last of my reading in Bulgarian. It didn't go so easily, as these last two articles were in the infuriatingly academic mold that goes out of its way to reiterate something in as many different ways as possible, deliberately taking several pages to impart knowledge that could be passed on in a paragraph. But finally, we finished with them, which leaves me one more paper to analyze before I move onto the next phase of my research in the archives. That insane, manic schedule I laid out in my previous post? One week down, and so far, so good.

Tomorrow, I will indulge in the awesome experience of visiting Berlin for the first time. Fellow Fulbright Compatriot Fred and I have a very early flight out, and we'll spend 4 days there, conferencing with other Fulbrighters from around Europe. It should be a scintillating time, as every account I've heard of Berlin has been of a ridiculously cool city, and getting to meet with Fulbrighters from other countries is guaranteed to be enjoyable. Laura will join me for the day, and we will bask in what promises to be a gorgeous weekend.

Tales from Berlin to follow. Thanks for reading!

Here Comes Crunch Time

Things are starting to get real.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm down to my last 3 ½ months here, as unbelievable as that is. One of the many things that means is that the time I have left to finish my research and write my thesis is dwindling, and I still have a long trek ahead of me to finish up. 

Still to go on the reading front is my current book, in addition to 3 other long-ish articles, 2 of which are in Bulgarian. After that, I'll be camping out at BAN's audio and video archives, transcribing and analyzing the recordings of the folk songs they contain. Following that will be a fairly intensive week of fieldwork during Holy Week, as I'm hoping to watch celebrations on Лазарувден (Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday in the Orthodox Churches), Palm Sunday, and Easter Sunday. Somewhere, in this whirlwind of academic interest, I will also be interviewing Kremena Stancheva, one of the prominent members of the Filip Kutev Ensemble, and then meeting with a few people who are helping me out with other, mainly ethnographic, niches of my research. 

Destination? May 4.

Things are going to be made slightly more difficult by my absences from the country. This Sunday, I'm heading to Berlin for five days, and then two weeks later, I'm going to Thessaloniki (which trip I am looking forward to with an extraordinary amount of anticipation) for another five days. The icing on the fluffy Travel Cake will be my trip back to the States on April 20th for my brother's wedding.

But: If I can somehow adhere to this condensed, somewhat manic schedule, I will be in great shape heading into the "writing leg" of my grant. I had in mind a budget of two months to churn out around a 50-page thesis, and this schedule will give me that. We'll see how well that goes.

I've had my doubts about how well it was going to go because for the last couple of weeks, to be honest with you, I think I've started to mentally check out. I'm going to the school of my dreams next year, and nothing else really seems to matter at this point. I've had a one helluva classic case of senioritis. But the realization that this veritable mountain of work, the very justification for my time here, remains to be done snapped me out of it. Today, at least. We'll see about tomorrow.

But despite my less-than-100%-applied approach the last week or so, I haven't been totally excreting my time away. Renewing my efforts to learn more of this idiosyncratic South Slavic language, I've begun working in my old textbook again, and on Saturday, I went to my first conversation swap. 

It was an interesting affair, multifarious and disorganized, but I managed to find my way to a table where I got some practice speaking Bulgarian (and, inadvertently, a little German) with some indulgent native speakers and a few fellow learners. It was good, much-needed practice.

All the time I've spent in the library deciphering dense, Communist-era texts has done wonders for my reading and comprehension. I got to the point, after I got going today, where I read an entire page on which I could identify most of the words and figure out their meanings by context and etymology; I typically only have to look up about 10% of the words in these texts now. 

This method of learning has presented two problems, however: The vocabulary I've assimilated, made up largely of terms specific to Bulgarian folk singing and ethnomusicology in general, is in a maddeningly academic, ennui-inspiring register, and therefore of little help to me in everyday conversation, and, of course, it hasn't improved my verbal skills at all. My ear, through repeated bombardment, has gotten marginally better, and if I think and speak slowly enough, I can eventually--to the patience-testing chagrin of my listener--articulate my thoughts back thereto. But what I really need, at this point, is regular conversation on a wider range of topics, so the conversation swap was a welcome test of my skills.

So the theme of the week and, I fear, for the rest of my time here, has been and will be forced productivity. We'll see how long I can keep that up. Til next time -

In Which I Come Crawling Back from the Wars

Hello again.

Nothing I could possibly say herein would serve as ample justification for a month-and-a-half-long absence. But, if it please the court, I'll tell you my story and let history be my judge.

What seems like an eternity ago (the date actually being November 1st), I got back from a trip to Romania and began in earnest the process of applying to grad schools. I was nervous, but--perhaps in greater measure--tragically overworked in completing what would seem to be the simple tasks of filling out electronic applications, writing and editing résumés and personal statements, selecting and editing footage of myself conducting, and jumping through the hoops requisite to making it all official. These tasks, however, proved to be not-quite-so-simple, and I worked, with ever-increasing degrees of desperation, right up until my deadlines, most of which fell on December 1st.

Having accomplished these surprisingly Herculean tasks--in quintuplicate--I was pretty exhausted, but, having partially neglected my responsibilities to my country grant to get them done, I worked more or less feverishly over the course of the next two weeks to make up the lost ground and finish the calendar year strongly. Luckily, I did, and had a nice two-week break to recuperate, grad school applications having receded, more or less, from my consciousness.

Then, I returned to Bulgaria and Real Life caught up with me. I learned about auditions at Westminster Choir College and Yale in quick succession, and was treated to the first Sinking Feeling In My Stomach in a while when I realized that they were scheduled for the same day, February 27th. Working as best I could to resolve the conflict, I got Westminster to reschedule me to February 3rd, but by the time that particular flurry of correspondence resolved the situation, it was January 18th, leaving me two weeks to prepare two movements of Brahms' Requiem, coax my dormant knowledge of music theory and my aural skills out of their deep hibernation, learn to play piano, study up on said work, and book a flight back to the States. But all of these I did as I continued to put in my hours at the library.

Given this cornucopia of Things To Be Done, I didn't have time to breathe, let alone sleep. Those two weeks were among the most manic of my life, but, somehow, some way, I managed to cram an amount of productivity into them that would make the heads of the staunchest proponents of the Big Bang Theory spin. And just like that, without a single chance to pause and decide if what I was doing was just mostly or completely nuts, I was off on a plane back to the States.

One of the things I've been debating as I've been planning out this humblest of returns to you, my indulgent and forgiving readership, is how much to actually say about my time back in the States. This is a travel blog, after all, and it, as sure as Barbra Streisand is both a Grammy Award-winning music goddess and a #1 club hit, isn't named An American in America. That would be gratuitous and silly.

So forgive me, should you find it necessary to do so, for choosing the Middle Way of going about this: I'll leave you with just enough detail to give you an idea of how my month went, but, as I've already rehashed nearly every moment of every day of it, either to myself or to others, I'll avoid doing so here. If you're really dying for a blow-by-blow, appeal to me via some medium other than this one, and I promise, I'll oblige you.

So...I landed on a Wednesday night; 36 hours later, I was driving to my first audition. (Driving, in and of itself, was strange. It took the end of my six-month vacation from driving a car to realize how incredibly pleasant it has been not to have been concerned with the operation, maintenance, or--most of all--costs thereof.) The Westminster audition would turn out to be a semi-grueling, all-day affair, one which tested my level of preparation. But despite the short amount of time I had had to prepare for it, it went mostly well, and I came away feeling good about what I had done, all things considered.

If you thought I was in panic mode following my abrupt decision to fly home and audition two weeks hence, imagine my state of mind, five days after that particular decision, when I found out I had also secured an audition at the University of North Texas. The kicker in this scenario? This audition was scheduled for three days after the one at Westminster, though I managed to stretch that three to five after supplications to the head of their program. But the inadequate amount of time I had to prepare for my first audition forced me to put off preparing for the second until the first was finished. So when that day had come and gone, I switched gears to spend the next three days cramming every bit of knowledge and music into my head that I could.

For those of you who aren't conductors, two weeks--let alone three days--is a woefully inadequate amount of time to prepare the amount of music that these fine institutions required of their auditioners. Without going too much into the process, it takes a while to internalize said amount to the point where one can hear errors in its rendition, and as dedicated as I was in feverishly trying to do so, I came in feeling moderately underprepared for the first audition and horrifically underprepared for the second.

The day before my audition at UNT, I flew to Dallas, and I stayed with some friends of my mom, who, fortuitously, live quite close to its campus. When they dropped me off the morning of the audition, I had no idea what to expect. As it would turn out, the process there was much lower-impact than the one at Westminster had been: I sat in on a lesson, had a relatively brief interview, went out to lunch, sat in on choir rehearsal, and rehearsed the choir through my two quite-underprepared pieces. That was that, and, another audition down, I celebrated that night with my buddy Adam, whom I hadn't seen in more than a year.

I flew back to Philadelphia the next day, and the day after that, I began preparing for the big one - Yale.

Yale happened to be Choice Numero Uno on my list, and, fittingly, presented the most extensive and challenging audition. In addition to the usual litany of tests--theory and aural skills, sight-reading, and the like--we had to dictate a Bach chorale, identify unmarked scores, sight-read an open-score four-part Bach chorale in c-clefs, conduct a movement of Carmina Burana, and prepare six movements of Messiah. With two and a half weeks to prepare, I had my work cut out for me.

But Yale boasts by far the best reputation and the highest-quality education of the bunch, and, perhaps even more desirable, a guaranteed full scholarship to all music students, so it had been my primary target from Day One of this process. With great tribulation comes great reward, and boy, was I in for some tribulation.

I spent nearly every day of those two and a half weeks locked inside one practice room or another (as well as living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, hotel rooms, libraries, and even, once, a car), feverishly preparing music, practicing my score reading, scribbling notes onto manuscript paper, reading up on the history of Messiah, settling on bowings and marking them into my score, and all the other hurried actions of an aspiring conductor with a less-than-adequate amount of time to prepare for the biggest audition of his life.

I can honestly say I have never worked on something so hard.

But all that disciplined work, borne out of a greater hunger--a greater desire to achieve--than any I had ever experienced, changed me, much in the same way that spending this year abroad has, and continues to, change me. Somewhere along the way, I was transformed--through the work itself--into something I have always desired to be - disciplined; a winner; the type of person you see on ESPN who, out of sheer will to win and drive to succeed, puts themself through all kinds of hell to get what they want.

I have never been that. I have never been the most disciplined or the hardest worker. But the last month, and especially those two and a half weeks leading up to the Yale audition, turned me, out of sheer necessity, into the hungry striver with the superhuman will to achieve. It was one of the first times in my life that I had wanted so badly to succeed that I made myself miserable in the pursuit. And as I put in the hours, day after day, and began to look back on the body of work to which I had applied myself, I began to feel more strong and capable and successful than I ever had before. I had finally begun proving to myself that I could be focused, and disciplined, and relentless in pursuit of something. I began to feel like I could do anything. It was intoxicating.

So I came to the audition prepared as best I could be, given the sub-preferable amount of time to be so. Things went about as well as could be expected (though made interesting by the spacing of my appointments between 8:30 AM, 4:15 PM, and 9:50 PM, leaving me lots of down time to psyche myself out), I had a great experience talking to the other auditioners and some of the current students, and when it was all over, a huge sense of relief washed over me that--finally!--my whirlwind 4-months-or-so were over.

And so, I returned to Pennsylvania with a huge weight lifted off my shoulder, simultaneously feeling empowered by the sense that comes from climbing a mountain you didn't think possible. And though I flew back to Bulgaria (and to Laura, who was waiting for me at the airport) the next day, a part of my mind lingered on the previous month, decompressing and sifting through everything I hadn't had the time to think about at the time it was happening. And a few days later, I learned that all that miserable, relentless work had paid off.

I got in.

I'm going to Yale in the Fall.

Since being back, I've taken a little time to celebrate, despite being preoccupied by the need to get back to my research. This week, I've been transitioning back into library work, which will soon give way to the next leg of my research - analyzing recorded material in the library's Archives. I'll go into more detail in my next post as the situation develops.

Overall, it has been an exhausting couple of months, but things are beginning to get back to normal here. My goal for my last four months in Bulgaria (can you believe it?) are simply to finish my research and get my thesis written. To accompany that, I'm delving back into my effort to learn this boondoggle of a language, I've gotten back to my workout routine, and here I am, reaching back out to all of you after my heretofore hibernation.

While we're on the subject of Spring Thaws, let me wish everyone a very belated честита Баба Марта (literally, Grandmother March, as this month, with its wild swings in weather and temperament, is personified by a cranky geriatric). The day I flew back, March 1, was the traditional beginning of Spring here in Bulgaria, and to celebrate Nature's rebirth, Bulgarians wear мартеници (martenitsi), little bracelets of red and white, of which I've received two from a couple of friends.

Ever onward; ever upward. My tale thus completed, let me bow respectfully from the room and leave you to contemplate all herein. But I'll see you very soon.