The Year in Review, Part 2: The Places

Part 2 in a 3-part retrospective of the year I've spent in Bulgaria. 

It is that absolutely idyllic point in a hot, dry day when the air is in the process of cooling and it has reached that temperature when one cannot feel the presence of heat or cold on the skin. It's like being in a swimming pool that has similarly reached that perfect temperature in which one simply floats, feeling nothing to indicate that there were anything surrounding them. It is abhorrent to me, around this time of day, to jog or hurry or do anything at any pace other than relaxed, a hint of sleepiness just on the periphery of my consciousness.

Sofia is gorgeous in the early summer sun, especially around 5 or 6. For some reason, I usually hate this time of day (Douglas Adams having once perfectly labeled it the Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul), but when the weather is upliftingly, soul-affirmingly warm like it has been for the last few weeks and the shadows play their way over the ground, it's actually one of the nicest times in this city.

Sofia really is lovely, despite all of its shortcomings. It's a city that seems shaped--in my mind, at least--by its dual identities as a European city in a poor country. It is laid out in a circle, with points conveniently radiating outward from the center, and it is, in every way, designed to be lived in, contrasting with some other cities I've visited that seem to be lived in despite the difficulties presented by doing so. It has a system of public transportation that seems extensive compared to most cities in the States, but pales in comparison to some of its richer European counterparts (a host of German cities comes to mind). It is a city of 1 million plus, but the area that this population occupies seems quite small. Its distinct neighborhood-level divisions and its concentration of public spaces and eateries result in a small-town feel in more than a few places, which I really like.

I may be spoiled, having lived where I did up until two days ago, when I bid adieu to my penthouse suite studio. I lived in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city, and it was central to a great many things. Sofia University, the Institute of Art Studies, Orlov Most, the Borisova Gradina, a wealth of bars, shops, and coffeehouses, Zaymov Park, Alexander Nevski Cathedral, and everything I needed to live were within an easy, short walk of my apartment, and the more time I spent out among these things, the more I enjoyed the nature and culture of the city. 

Once I got outside it, however, was when my eyes began to be opened to the greater nature of Bulgaria. Living in the largest and richest city in a country will teach you some things about that country, but it can also create a bubble through which it may be hard for other facets of the place to penetrate. Sofia really has been lovely, this year--though I am not certain, were I to stay indefinitely, how long I would continue to feel this way--and I can't really imagine a better place in Bulgaria to have been, considering my affinity for urban culture and the accessibility of certain things that come with it. But to really get to know a place, you have to experience as many of its locales as you can.

The first time I left Sofia and came back--the last weekend in August, when Greg, Fred, and I went to Burgas for the weekend--I had a minor revelatory moment when, after gliding through endless kilometers of hills and fields, our train suddenly emerged in the veritable center of the city. Having spent most of my entire life in the States, where urban sprawl has transformed the outskirts of many cities into endless tracts of houses, it had never occurred to me that there were cities without suburbs, into which one could simply emerge as suddenly as one looked back out the window. Sofia, at least, is one such place, where the country starts as soon as one has passed its last industrial plant.

This fact led to what was perhaps my biggest eye-opening moment of the entire year. On Lazarovden, I went out to the village of Gorni Bogrov to observe the ritual of the Lazartsi in whatever form it still existed. When I got there, I was floored by what I found - a rural Bulgarian village with narrow roads that one could walk across in 10 minutes. To be sure, the houses were somewhat modern, and the roads were paved, but there, smack dab in the middle of an endless plain with mountains rising in the background, was a small cluster of houses whose limit was defined by a one-lane road running around its periphery. Each house had a garden, some had horses, and once you stepped across this road, you were definitively out of the village. Quite frankly, I had not expected to find something like this in 2012 in a member of the European Union. My conception was that the rural village had died, but, as it turns out, it was just a few kilometers away the whole time.

Of course, I've gone to a host of other really cool places in the time I've been here. I've spent this weekend, in fact, in the seaside town of Burgas hanging out with some fellow Fulbrighters for our last collective weekend in Bulgaria. Burgas--and its coastal neighbors that I've visited, Byala and Varna--are extremely pleasant this time of year, as is to be expected. The Black Sea coast is, in a lot of ways, nicer than what we have in the States; though the culture is decidedly different, it offers most of what one might find at the Jersey Shore or in the beach cities of the South Bay, only with finer sands and (in general, at least) less trash. The weekend we spent in Byala was obscenely pleasant--though that was due in large part to the company--and the time I've spent in Burgas has been much the same. I was never much of a beach person, but I'm beginning to enjoy the setting more and more.

One of Bulgaria's biggest draws is its geography, which is on full display during the 400-kilometer journeys from Sofia to the coast. The country is bisected latitudinally by the Stara Planina (literally, "Old Mountains"), the Balkan Mountains, which are stunning in and of themselves; one of my big regrets from this year is not having made time to explore them. In the eastern half of the country, they form the northern boundary of the Thracian Plain. Much of the land to their north is uneven, forming endless foothills to the range until these run up against the Danube Valley. To the south, in the west of Bulgaria, several other mountain ranges rise to meet the Balkans, forming much of the terrain that has shaped the culture of shopski kray.

When we all first arrived in Bulgaria for FISI at the beginning of August, we were immediately swept off to the skiing town of Bansko, nestled in the Rila Mountains (in the summer, it had functioned as mountain resort for the rich and well-connected). The landscape was, of course, gorgeous, and it was a rather idyllic setting for us to gain our first exposure to this place. Mt. Vitosha, which looms over Sofia like a watchful protector, is one of the symbols of Bulgaria, and is an important peak in the Balkan Range. Sofia, which lies on an elevated plain between the Balkans and Rilas, is, one forgets, a mountain city, and there is a lot of good, accessible hiking to be had. I was fortunate to have had a day, in the beginning of the year, to hike Mt. Vitosha, though I wish I had done it more than once.

There are also a lot of cool things to see and do within plausible day-trip distance of Sofia. Plovdiv, another of the largest cities in Bulgaria, is a 2-hour drive/bus ride from the city, and its Old Town offers a lot of very cool things to see, historical and otherwise, which many of us did back in October. A few weeks after that, I took a short trip to the nearby city of Pernik for St. Ivan Rilksi Day, which was a much better time than I expected, and in December, Greg, his family, and I took another such trip to Belogradchik, about a 3-hour drive from Sofia, to visit the Magura Cave, which was awesome in every way.

Perhaps the thing that has made so many great things possible this year has been Bulgaria's relatively small size. The furthest point in the country from Sofia is 7 hours away, and bus tickets are extremely cheap compared to what we're accustomed to in the US (Chinatown buses notwithstanding), so really, the sky's the limit. The biggest limitation to my traveling this year has been the constraints of time I've been under. But as far as the plausibility of internal travel is concerned, Bulgaria is a place that is about as good as it gets. There are a lot of fascinating and wonderful things, all much different from each other, and all within a not-obscene distance from each other, either. I'm glad that I've taken the advantage of it that I have.

On Wednesday, we will conclude this 3-part retrospective, as the year draws to its inevitable close, with a look back at the veritable host of things that I have come to love about his place and that I will surely miss in the coming years. Onward ho to the bitter end, and thanks for being here, y'all.

An American in Vienna, An Apocalypse in Bulgaria

Part 1: Travels

The thing I have probably enjoyed most about this year has been the degree of mobility afforded me by living in a part of the world with such small countries. In the States, you travel for a while, and you may or may not even be in a different state; the people still speak English; you can still walk down the road and get a pizza; your money is still green (or blue or orange or any of the other myriad colors in which legal tender in the US now comes). Traveling is just simpler, cheaper, and more accessible in the Balkans, where a completely alien culture is just a bus or plane ride away.

So to put the finishing touches on my œuvre of warmup travels that has presaged the biggest trip of my life, coming up next month (!), I took a long weekend to Austria to visit fellow Los Angeles Fulbrighter Andrea and to see Laura for a few days. Last month, I had the opportunity to be whisked through Vienna for an apocopated two-hour tour of the city (never mind that more than half of that time was spent on the U-bahn), but, that short time hardly having counted, I wanted another chance to visit for reals. So on Thursday, I made a little jump over a couple mountains and some other quasi-important stuff to go stay for a few days.

After meeting my two governesses at the airport, we scampered off to get some of the best ice cream known to man. No, seriously, hyperbole has no place in this blog, and my word here is bond. Finishing this nirvanic treat off well before we reached the safety of Andrea's apartment, we took the long S-bahn, U-bahn, and Strassenbahn ride to catch up a little and take in the Viennese scenery. Upon getting home, it being nearly 6 (my original flight having been cancelled, pushing my arrival back), we made some dinner, got settled in, and opted to chill out for the night.

The next day, us having crashed far earlier than the usual post-PM times to which I've grown accustomed, began bright and early, but with the added bonus of a decent night's sleep under our belts. We had a rather pleasant, leisurely breakfast (replete with tea and toast), and then headed out to be obnoxious American good little tourists about Vienna.

Our first stop was Schönbrunn, the summer home of the Habsburgs during their extravagant reign. To paint the most simplistic picture I can of the place: It is large, and the courtyard is huge, and it's got a lot of ornate stuff in it. Just look:

The fountain and gloriette up the hill

Looking back down, Vienna in the background

After reveling in this opulence for a few sunny hours, we made a brief foray through Karlsplatz, which included reflective, digital counters of all sorts of interesting items, like this one that was counting worldwide "armaments expenditures," AKA defense spending, since January 1st (in Euros):

€ 512 billion = A lot of money.

This being merely a transit point between where we had been and where we were going, we declined to linger, and made straightaway for Vienna's 1st District. In our jolly hours wandering around this, the city's oldest and most central part, we happened upon a large collection of Really Neat Stuff, including the Burgtheater, Vienna's most prestigious theater, the Rathaus--Vienna's city hall, all decked out for the imminent Life Ball, at which Bill Clinton was to give an address--the Austrian Parliament, the Volksgarten, and Hofburg Palace.

Burgtheater

Rathaus

Parliament, which begs the question of why our government buildings don't have stuff like this in attendance.

Hofburg Palace

While we were ogling these Old World wonders, having seen a great many cool things that day, evening fell and we moseyed back to Andrea's apartment, from which she scurried off to rehearsal, while Laura and I made dinner.

Exhausted from another long day, we feel asleep rather early that night, and awoke not-late-ish on Saturday, first to go to Yamm--a vegetarian pay-by-weight buffet that was nothing short of damned delicious--and then to go to Vienna's huge, historic cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof. As it spans more than 2 square kilometers, we didn't nearly have enough time to see all of it, but we did hit some of the more important parts. First up was the composers' section:

Beethoven

Monument to Mozart

Schubert

Johann Strauss

Brahms, in all his perplexed glory

Wolf

After that, we wandered over to what was nominally the "President's Section," though it mostly contained non-presidential, though otherwise notable, people:

Julius Raab - actually a president of Austria

Arnold Schönberg - not a president of Austria

Zemlinsky - also not a president, but cool anyway

Finally, we headed over to the Jewish section, which, to my surprise and sadness, was overgrown and in disrepair. Having somehow escaped the destruction that befell so many Jewish cemeteries during the Holocaust, it has clearly not been maintained, either by virtue of the interreds' families having permanently fled the former Reich, and so being unable to pay for maintenance of the graves, or simply through negligence on the part of the caretakers of the cemetery. Whatever the case, it was a sad and telling reminder of the recent history of the country.

Overgrown

Broken down

Needing to get home, as Andrea had a performance of Die Schöpfung to get to, we left this sobering site and took the Strassenbahn and U-Bahn back to Schwedenplatz, where, before heading home, we chilled out with some good drinks and casually overlooked the Danube.

Pretty

Andrea went running off, as had become her wont over the course of this trip (busy singer that she is and will continue to be), and Laura and I made dinner, as had become ours, and watched FC Bayern's heartbreaking loss play out to Chelsea FC on penalty kicks in the Champions' League finals.

The next day would be our last in Vienna, and while Andrea was at church, Laura and I went spazieren gehen in the Augarten, which happens, conveniently, to lie in the shadow of Andrea's apartment. It was a warm, pleasant Sunday morning, the idyllic setting of the park being broken only by the bizarre specters of antiaircraft towers, built by Hitler in the waning days of World War II, looming over the entire place.

Bizarre, ominous

After Andrea returned, we three went out for a last tour around Vienna before it was time to go, including a trip to a little outdoor restaurant where I got my first taste of Kalbbratwurst (it was delicious). I got back to Sofia late Sunday night, a different person from all that had transpired on the trip, but there was no time to ruminate on it; as Ben Folds almost said in what is undoubtedly one of the greatest songs ever written, life was calling, and wouldn't hold.

Part 2: The End of the World

I arrived back in Sofia to the welcome of fellow Fulbrighter Michael waiting at my apartment, as he had been staying the weekend in my absence. Going to bed far too late on Sunday night--the result of our lengthy discussion of my trip--we woke up Monday morning, I organized some notes, and just like that, with no time to pause and catch my breath, it was time to venture out into the world again and continue with my daily slog to fulfill the raison d'être for my continued presence here, the writing of my rapidly-ballooning thesis. So Monday passed in a whirlwind of writing and editing (Michael similarly being occupied, in his case by LSAT preparations), ukulele playing, and running.

Friend of the Fulbright Program Chris showed up in time for dinner, and after all was said and done for the evening, we three occupied my kitchen until the wee hours of the morning, me finally giving up on my work for the day as the conversation about the state of the American economy and worldwide financial policy became too interesting for me to resist. We continued in our heretofore fashion well past the hours when all but the most ardent of night-owls would be abed when the unexpected happened.

At first, I thought it was the vibration from the nearby elevator shaking the floor, but when it lasted far longer than a second, I knew this couldn't be the case. And as I nearly lost my balance from the lateral back-and-forth of my apartment up on the top floor of my Gd-be-praised-structurally-sound apartment building, ukulele still in hand, Tupac lyrics still hanging on my lips, I knew: We were having an earthquake, a big one.

My first instinct being to bolt for the doorway (the wisdom of which, as it turns out, is not entirely based on fact), I shouted, "Door!" and the other two followed me, huddling inside the doorjamb for what were 30 seconds of the 5 scariest cumulative minutes of my entire life. Finally, the shaking subsided, and we were left to slow our racing hearts and sort out what had just happened.

I came to Bulgaria fresh off of 5 years of living in Los Angeles, and I somehow managed to be out of town for both of the substantial earthquakes that struck during that period. I felt a couple of smaller ones when I was there, maybe 3.5's or 4's--just large enough to rattle some windows and shake some things around--but never before had I experienced any seismic activity as strong or lasting for quite as long as that which struck at 3 AM that morning. The official word coming out of Bulgaria's geological service is that it was a 5.6 quake, followed by two aftershocks at 4.6 and 4.3, both of which we felt and somewhat-less-fearfully reacted to.

We took it as a sign that our night should probably have ended, so we went to bed, waking the next morning to repeat our routine of LSAT preparation (Chris and Michael being identically occupied) and thesis writing. While out at the coffee shop into which we had settled, the apocalyptic phenomena continued to hound our lovely city of Sofia when large hail began to fall, leaving us to stare out the plate glass windows and wonder just what was going on and what it could mean. It made sense to me, in that moment, why ancient societies, without the benefit of scientific knowledge and skepticism, sometimes went so crazy over phenomena like these--ones that we now know to be unrelated and caused by natural forces--and assigned them supernatural, cosmic meaning. It was an interesting perspective-generating moment.

Today, on this rainy Wednesday, I've had much to do, and accomplished nearly all of it, so while I go to finish the rest, I'll leave you all to enjoy your lives, hopefully enriched by this, the tale of one of the more bizarre pages out of my own. Until next week, when we'll talk about a few visitors I'll be having this weekend, as well as the continuation of this less-fun-by-the-day process of academic pontification I find myself in the midst of, be happy and fulfilled.

Thessaloniki, Passover, Lazaruvden, Tsvetnitsa

I apologize for the fact that this is two days late in coming (my endeavor being to publish over weekends), but in my defense, it was kind of an eventful week, and my normal three-day window for starting, developing, and finishing these well-copy-edited, insightful articles was pushed back. But instead of rambling on with another tired excuse, let's just cut right to the chase.

Chapter 1: Thessaloniki

One recent seminar already under my belt (read about it here), the Fulbright Commissions That Be saw fit to send me off to another one, balancing my trip up to the frozen wastelands of Northern Europe with one to Greece, the quintessence of Mediterranean life.

Leaving my packing, in typical fashion, for the morning of our departure, I hastily threw together the necessary items, caught a cab to Jamie's apartment, and he, Fred, and I set off on our 5 hour, 20 minute road trip to Thessaloniki. In spite of a couple of (very) wrong turns, we made it mostly without incident, and were welcomed that night with a reception in the art studio of the Thessalonian artist Soros. Much like Berlin's, this welcoming event served as our first contact with the other Fulbrighters in attendance, though instead of being charged with the Herculean task of meeting 500-odd people, we had simply to meet 30 or so, this conference comprising only that miniscule amount of wide-eyed wanderers.

The next day, with a good night's sleep under my belt (beginning to sound familiar?), I--much more happily than on the previous day--partook in the Seminar's festivities. These included presentations from 8 of the other Fulbrighters, which were both engaging and gave me some ideas about my own work, the author of a forthcoming book on Thessaloniki sharing excerpts therefrom, lunch in the swanky dining room of the hotel, and an after-dinner trip down to the White Tower, where I and my companions made merry--in the medieval sense--and furthered ourselves in the cause of meeting everyone else.

The next day's activities began at the Museum of Byzantine Culture, and the morning progressed in much the same fashion as the the previous day, comprising project presentations and the offering of another speaker--this time Athens' Deputy Mayor for Finance--who spoke to us about the current debt crisis. After a tour of the museum and a small lunch, we got to go on a bus tour of Thessaloniki, which contained some extraordinarily cool things. But instead of tell you about everything we saw, be it that the thing I leave you with from this fly-by of history is that I saw my first blooming tree of the Spring, so--poof!--there went my martenitsa.

Tying it to the branch

This would be the natural place to share any and all of the gorgeous pictures I took, but I, in my sometimes-staggering boneheadedness, neglected to bring my camera along for this tour, thereby relegating the spectacular views I witnessed to virtually certain forgottenness. Later, though, I would atone--at least with my own self--by venturing out, along with some new friends, on an ultimately-rewarding quest for gyros, which I found to contain, to my immensely pleasurable surprise, thick, American-style fries, which, when complimented with thick, American-style ketchup, transported me, in my mind, back to many a happy day under the Los Angeles sun.

As Wednesday dawned, we had come to our Last Day. After gorging myself on another large breakfast (I have really come to appreciate hotel breakfast buffets in the last 3 weeks, both German and Greek), I and the rest of my compatriots boarded a bus to visit the dubious purported tomb of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. Before we did that, however--and after one wrong turn dropped us right into the middle of a convent--we ended up at a little monastery nestled in the Greek mountains, which we toured, to the accompanying explanations of the abbot, Father Panteleimon. Check it out:

The view from the monastery. Seriously.

Inside

Leaving the monastery behind to a now-steady drizzle, we continued our journey to the Vergina Tumulus, whose curators insist contain the tomb of Philip II, though thorough scholarship makes a strong case against this possibility. Nonetheless, there is some very cool stuff housed therein, including, but not limited to, several relatively-intact tombs from the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, which made for an interesting, if a tad too-long, excursion.

It was nearly 3 by the time lunch rolled around, and we were all exhausted, resulting in the collective lucidity and order of said meal being reduced by half, give or take. Returning to the hotel, and eschewing the proposed walking tour--which would have had to take place in the rain--we instead rested up before our final communal dinner. Some food and several bottles of wine later, we were transformed into a band ready to head out for one final night in Greece, which many of us did, and deep into the night, at that. While less of a raging affair than was our final night in Berlin, it was still fun, and to be sure, the next morning arrived far too early.

After breakfast, Jamie and I--Fred having departed late on Tuesday night--loaded up the car, and headed back the way we had come. Or so we thought. Making a wrong turn outside Thessaloniki, we ended up traveling more than halfway to Kavala before we realized that we were headed in the wrong direction. But, as with many wrong turns in this serendipitous universe of ours, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

After stopping at a roadside service station to get a map and figure out where the hell we were, we decided that the best course of action was to continue in the direction we had been headed so that we could pick up the highway that would lead us back to the E79, the freeway that would take us back to Sofia. And, as we made our way down the highway, passing from small town to small town, the Greek countryside opened up as I had always envisioned, but never got to witness; rolling hills and vineyards splayed before us like something out of a made-for-TV-movie on BBC. After 4 days in Greece, we were finally seeing what we--or, at least, I--had come with the expectation to see.

Stretching into the distance

Mountains

And this was only the beginning. Crossing the border back into Bulgaria, those fields and vineyards turned into the types of mountains I never expected to see in this part of the world, so much like the beautiful, rocky, sparsely vegetated hills I had grown to love in Southern California they were. The air was warm; the colors stark. Spring had reared its gorgeous head once again.

At the border

Seriously, Topanga?

The Pirins

Finally arriving at my apartment many hours after we had departed (with a good in-car nap to my benefit), I was feeling better, and ready to take on the next challenge: preparing a Passover seder in 24 hours.

Chapter 2:  Passover

Mere minutes after returning to my house, I threw open the windows (this day offering sun, warm air, and a light breeze), put on some music, and began to clean. Winter dies hard in this stalwart of the former Eastern Bloc, and 6 months of having the windows shut against the snow and wind will allow quite a bit of dust to accumulate. The time for Spring Cleaning had come.

So I vacuumed the floors and washed the walls, cleaned the bathroom and mopped the kitchen, moved furniture around, and put my winter blanket away. The sheer exuberance of a warm April day notwithstanding, I also had company coming in short order.

Every year, my family gets together on the first (convenient) night of Passover for a seder, something I haven't been able to be a part of since 2006. This year, being abroad, I wanted to try my hand at hosting one, hence all the cleaning. The cleaning ended up being just the beginning, though.

After doing an initial round on Thursday night (while listening to the first game of the Phillies' 2012 season on the radio, a textbook 1-0 victory), I woke up early-ish the next day to finish what I had started. Emerging from my now-pristine apartment around 1 PM on Friday, I headed out to buy the assortment of vegetables, fruits, wines, and matzah that would constitute the ingredients for my share of the Passover cooking. Arriving back at my apartment, I spent the next couple hours whipping up matzah-ball soup, potato kugel, xaroset, and the various other accoutrements of the seder plate.

And people came, and food, and wine, and pretty soon, 11 of us were seated around the periphery of my kitchen/dining room, reading from the Haggadah and singing the songs, making one of probably four seders in the whole country. It was an immensely nice experience, especially being so far from my family this year, and successful to a detail. Exhausting, but totally rewarding and gratifying.

Chapter 3: Lazaruvden/Tsvetnitsa, or, The Bus that Wouldn't Come

Lacking the opportunity to sleep in this past weekend, I arose on Saturday to go out into the field for my research for the first time since I narrowed my focus specifically to Shopski dvuglas. And though, in most places in the world, it should have been relatively straightforward to get to where I was going, it was anything but.

After calling up Alex, an American law student living in Sofia this semester, to accompany me--with getting lost a near certainty--we made our way down to Петте Кьошета (The 5 Corners) to catch the #17 мартрушка, the mini-bus that, I was told, runs to Gorni Bogrov, the village I needed to get to. Pulling up in my own bus just in time to meet her and clamber aboard the martrushka, I paid for our tickets and asked the driver to tell me when we had gotten to Gorni Bogrov. He replied that his route didn't include a stop in Gorni Bogrov. Thinking I had misheard him, I asked again, and annoyed, he replied that we needed bus 118.

Hopping off at the nearest convenient point, we then proceeded to mosey our way down a street that looked as though it ran in the right direction. After being supplied with fresh information in the shadow of the crumbling apartment blocks by another local, we hopped a passing bus and took it the four stops to where she had said to go. As this was the end of the line, we again hopped off and found ourselves in the middle of nowhere.

Trudging to the main road, we happened upon yet another bus stop and asked an overly friendly teenaged girl how to get to where we were going. She told us to head back to the stop where we had gotten off and take bus 14. This we did, when it finally came around, but to our chagrin, the end of its own line was a mere 2 stops hence. This stop, at least, was populated, and fortuitously replete with a scheme of Sofia's public transportation. It appeared to us as though we could get to the stop where we could finally board bus 118 via one final connecting bus, so before we boarded that, we bought day passes for ourselves, unsure of how many more trials we would have to go through before we reached our day's land of milk and honey.

Hopping on the appropriate bus for 2 more stops, it dumped us off at a remote terminal past which we could make out the tracks of a tram line. Upon further inspection, we discovered that it was tram 22, which happens to run directly in front of my apartment. 5 stops away. We had made a large circle.

Refusing to despair, however, we trekked up the road to a bus stop that looked like it could have been the right one. Instead of the promised 118 line, however, it showed only that bus 90 ran there. I was on the verge of giving up, when, perusing the list of stops along the line, I caught sight of the most blessed words I had ever seen in my life. Село Горни Богров - Village Gorni Bogrov. We had found our bus.

From there, it was simply a matter of waiting for it to show up, passing the time en route chatting with a rather nice fellow whose rudimentary command English was the result of many hours spent playing Starcraft with "millions of Americans," and getting off at the appropriate stop. Once we did that, though, the day became eye-opening.

I had come to think of the concept of the small Bulgarian village, tucked away in a remote corner of the landscape, as extinct, or, at least, so far removed from the bustling metropolis of Sofia as to be effectively out of reach to me. But ah!--such is the wonder and mystery of living overseas--how one is constantly surprised by any new culture amongst which one lives. 

One of the extraordinarily refreshing things I have recently discovered about Bulgaria is that there are no suburbs here, in stark contrast to the urban sprawl that has become the common plague of the American city. The city here literally fades away to countryside in a matter of meters. So there we were, less than 20 kilometers from the city center, surrounded on all sides by fields and small, ramshackle houses.

And it was beautiful. Before sharing the pictures I took, let me just note that the thing that really got me about this village was the juxtaposition of ancient and modern here. For starters, consider that we were standing, in the year 2012, in the midst of a tiny village that had probably been there for hundreds of years, with a European capital a few kilometers away. And within the city itself, the combinations of old and new were striking. To be sure, we found no mud-brick huts, but we found more than our fair share of old houses, and standing neatly next to them was a row of--there is no other word for them--mansions that would have fit in perfectly along the back streets of West LA. Most houses here, instead of a lawn, had a garden, neatly plowed, some with sprouts emerging from their soil, and I imagined that this was their modern-day adaptation of the subsistence farming paradigm that has been the hallmark of agrarian Western Bulgarian society for centuries.

Let me waste no more words on the subject:

Gardens

Note the secure fencing on the left and the tumbledown houses on the right

Alex and I just wandered around the village for a while, taking it all in. After a few minutes, though, we remembered the purpose of our, or, at least, my journey: to capture the performance of the Lazarus Day customs. And if the first half of our day had been marked by wrong turns, bad luck, and getting progressively more lost, the Great Forces of Equalization decided to make up for it during the afternoon hours, as we rounded a corner and stumbled onto the village's singing troupe.

We followed them for about half an hour as they went house to house, singing songs specific to the day and collecting food, hard-boiled eggs (traditional for this holiday), and money. When it was time for us to part, they cheerfully replied that I could take their picture.

The keepers of the tradition

Not quite having gotten my fill of the rural landscape, though, I wanted a few more pictures before we departed.

Mt. Vitosha across the plain

The old section of town

A shepherd with his flock

It ended up being a very interesting day.

The next day served much the same purpose, but with far fewer complications and far less drama. Heading out to the village of Jelyava--in the same direction as Gorni Bogrov, but further out--I went, alone this time, to attend the celebrations put together by the chitalishte, the community center, for Tsvetnitsa, or Palm Sunday.

After my trip on what must have been the oldest and slowest bus in existence, I finally arrived, 30 minutes late, to the village, and proceeded up the winding road to the chitalishte. When I got there, I found, instead of folklore, a junior cheerleading squad doing a dance routine to a techno remix of the Popcorn Song. Though initially a bit confused, my patience was ultimately rewarded by 10 minutes of authentic dvuglas from a sextet of babi, though to my annoyance, the crowd apparently did not find it engaging enough to give them their attention, talking loudly over their performance.

Thus went these particular praznitsi - vestiges of tradition mixed with the modern. It seemed to be a microcosm for how Bulgarian society has appropriated tradition today--by diluting it, with an amount, that I have yet to ascertain, of disregard for it, with the modern--but this will be the subject of its own post at some point in the future, as it is a crucial and interesting point of this culture, so I won't get into it now.

After making my way around the inexplicably cold village (believe me when I say that winter dies hard here) to take some more pictures, the bus mercifully came around again, and I went home.

It was quite a jam-packed week, and it contained a lot of new things for me to assimilate. I'm still working through them, but ultimately, I think it will prove to be one of those weeks that help to crystallize my experience here. So there's a good chance I may be revisiting it in the coming months.

That's about all for me this week, and with good reason, as I'm catching a flight to Vienna in a few hours to visit Austrian Fulbrighter and friend from home Andrea. From there I will hop to Munich for a couple of days before returning to the friendly confines of my adopted home. So until the weekend, stay happy, stay healthy.

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.