Visitors and Counting Down

Today marks the beginning of my final 30 days in Bulgaria.

There are no words to describe all of the experiences I've had this year, and just how much they've impacted my life and my person, but in the next few weeks, I'm going to give it a try, so stay tuned for that.

The overarching narrative of this past week has again been--you guessed it--the inexorable march towards completing my thesis. Having passed 100 pages and 8 sections completed today, I'm now 2/3 finished with my first draft, and still sort of on schedule, give or take a day. That said, this has been the week it has stopped being fun, and begun, in unpleasant earnest, to be a slog towards the finish line. I have ceased writing; I am now doing battle.

For that, I feel like I owe this place and my experience here an abstract apology of sorts. None of this year was supposed to be killed time or compulsory effort in service of something else, not even the final dregs of it. But, I suppose, this happens quite often during the penultimate stages in the completion of something major; maybe it's just human nature to want the end of something when that end--especially when it's a goal to be achieved--is in sight.

And, in my defense, this has been one of the toughest weeks I've had in a long time, with which the details thereof I'll furnish you should you feel compelled to ask me. To keep things vague and concise, the hour-long episode I experienced of getting caught in a torrential downpour on Sunday night when I was out running for the first time with my new iPod was a fitting metaphor for the content of my life during the last week and a half.

Senioritis--or its equivalent to whatever-role-in-life-it-is-I-am-presently-filling--has been afflicting me for a couple months, but this has been the week that has vaulted me over the final wall of disenchantment separating my consciousness from the desire to just go home already. Not that I want to sound ungrateful, or unhappy, or fed up, because I'm not. Really. I'm still happy where I am, I'm still having a nominal modicum of fun, I'm still so grateful to be here and to be doing this, because this has been, and continues to be, an awesome experience in a whole mess of ways. But the honest, earnest facts are that it is late May, it's been raining here for a month straight, I have been spending the last 3 1/2 weeks sitting on my fat stores typing on this same loathsome machine, and I'm ready for a change of scenery. My only regret is that I'm afraid that all this will prevent me from enjoying this place and honoring this opportunity to the extent that I should be for my final month here. To put it more simply, I'm over this, and I feel bad about that.

But - 

30 days remain here, and no matter what has built up to this moment, the onus is on me to use those days to the fullest extent and to try to squeeze every last remaining drop of significance out of this year that I can. So, though I'm beginning my 30-day countdown, I'm still going to put my fun face on when I put both feet on the floor every morning and just do the best that I can. That's all any of us can do anyway.

All of that said, it's not like my life has been one festering hollow of despair lately. This weekend I had some visitors (as I have had almost non-stop since returning from Vienna), including my very own father, as well as Macedonian Fulbrighter Cassidy, whom I met in Thessaloniki last month.

My dad, who had been in Israel for the week-and-change prior to this past weekend, was supposed to come in late on Friday night, giving him roughly a day and a half to check out the true face and not just the fairytale I had been feeding him of my life here. For reasons stemming from the silly nature of air travel, he ended up having to fly from Tel Aviv to Vienna before coming back down thisaway, and unwisely chose Austrian Airlines to ferry him thus, as I could have advised him against. Lo and behold, this sham of a company delayed his flight out of Tel Aviv, causing him to miss his connection in Vienna, meaning he didn't get into Sofia until noon on Saturday, a mere 20 hours before he had to leave again.

So. We got to spend a little time touring the city (me giving my now-routine Eastern Half Tour) and hanging out, which was nice after going such a long time without us having done so. We played some music, went out to eat, went to the bar, etc. It was too short of a time to spend with him, but I'm going to be home in two months, so there's a silver lining in the inadequacy of that period of time.

While we were out seeing the city on Saturday, the oddest assortment of things kept happening. Cars kept driving by and honking, balloons flying from their antennae, and windows, and, seemingly, every other attachment point possible, people leaning out of those same windows and waving, screaming, and pointing. And at the Cathedral, I saw something I'd never seen before: Hundreds upon hundreds of Bulgarian kids, all decked out in the most ridiculous of dresses, suits, and tuxedos (Click this for a no-BS look at what we were seeing), all yelling, having what appeared to be a rager, bottles and all, in the middle of the day.

What we were witnessing, as it turns out, was graduation season in Bulgaria, these kids all graduating high school students heading to their proms and graduation banquets. As I later heard, it happens every year, and there is nothing else like it, as I will henceforth attest.

On the heels of my dad's exit came the entrance of temporary Skopje resident Cassidy. Her stay here was mostly uneventful, as I--will this sound familiar?--had work to do, though we did meet up with Georgi, who took us to a traditional Bulgarian restaurant, albeit one with questionable service (well, they did give us free brandy at the end of the night to make up for it). And we did get serenaded by a folk band in a manner broadly similar to the experience I had in Istanbul in January. But the next morning, she, too disappeared like a puff of smoke in the wind, and I was left solitary once more.

However, old Friend of the Fulbright Program Sanja, and her boyfriend, Adrian, were in town from Berlin, so last night, I ventured out of the battlefield that my apartment has become to go meet them for coffee and drinks and dinner. It was really terrific to catch up with them - they moved from Sofia a few months ago and I hadn't seen them since. Next year, though, they are moving to the Toronto area, and so are going to have the distinction of being the most local Foreigners I've Met This Year to me next year, presenting some interesting opportunities.

So -

It has not been the most fun week I've ever had, but there have mercifully been things to keep me going. Now it's time for me to go. I've been staring at this screen for--no lie--13 straight hours today, and my eyes hurt. But we'll be back together soon enough. So for now, enjoy everything that life throws you.

Pause

Today, on this meteorologically erratic, rainy-sunny-delugeal-sun-setting-over-peacefully-parting-clouds day, I will make soup with the matzah remaining from Passover, call home, listen to the Phillies game, and take a breath.

It has been a disjointed week. I'm caught in the limbo of the middle ground between trying to finish the fieldwork component of my research, a quick trip to Munich and Vienna, and a trip home to the States on Friday. The week past, and the one coming, are no-man's-land, flexible time whose use I have not yet determined, yet ganz wertvoll; I feel the time I have left in this place, and thus, the time to fulfill my purpose here, inexorably slipping away, grain by grain.

This past week, and this next one, are planless - with much to be done, full of specific tasks to be accomplished, but utterly lacking those sine quibus non of all constructive progress: definitive order, clear organization, engaged motivation to use them to their fullest.

This is what it is to drift.

I could write about the weather which greeted me upon my return to Sofia on Friday, about how the rainy season is here in full force, evidenced by sometimes-torrential downpours and intermittent hailstorms mixed thereinto. I could write about going out for pizza and beer last night with some friends to celebrate the end of Passover and the subsequent reintroduction of leavened breads and wheat products to my diet. I could write about later being swept into a beautiful Easter vigil at an Orthodox church, being given candles, witnessing the entirety of the musical ceremony, congregating with hundreds of other churchgoers as the crucifix was paraded around the church, being subsumed into the thrice-completed procession around the church, and walking home at 1 AM, accompanied on the streets by hundreds of Sofians, all bearing lit candles, keeping them lit the entire way back to their homes.

I could write about my excitement at my impending excursion back to the States to witness my brother get married, see old friends, and be able to enjoy the pleasures of home without the hindrance of a stressful purpose for being there, in contrast to my last trip home. I could write about my anxiousness to finish my research and start writing my thesis, my soon-to-be-frenzied drive to move towards that final step in my work here, the completion of that process being the golden key that will unlock the gateway to what promises to be the best summer of my life. I could write about all the fun things, still prospective, that lie on the horizon, waiting first to be planned, and then realized, over the course of my final two months here.

But today, and for this I sincerely apologize, I simply and utterly lack the inclination to do so. Today I would much rather simply check in with you, my magnanimous readership, tell you that I'm surviving, drop hints about all the exciting things that lie ahead, and call it a day. The internal battle to procure a high-quality, detailed account of this particular episode in my life is one from which I will have to accept a moral victory, in the fact of the realization of this post, alone.

Just know that things are the same as they never were, and that I will see you very soon. Good night.

Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden, und der Tag hat sich geneiget.

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.

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.

Winning

Not this kind of winning.

This kind.

Sorry for that. I can't help but take a brief step back to take a look at how things have been panning out so far, having just passed the 2-month mark in my stay here.

As I alluded to in previous posts, I came here for a variety of purposes beyond simply doing research. I've already discussed my purposes related to Making The World A Better Place, but, as some of you know, I've also had personal reasons for embarking on this venture. /Sharing Moment Alert (To skip this Sharing Moment, scroll down to the paragraph fourth from the bottom):

I applied for this scholarship when I was in a phase of my life where things didn't make very much sense. I had just graduated from college, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, I had no obvious opportunities staring me in the face, I was facing my first year of independence, etc. The time of year was at hand for applying to grad school, but I repeated my decision of the previous year not to apply, as I wasn't 100% committed to a specific path. A very wise ex-professor of mine had suggested going abroad and doing something, anything, not only for the fantastic cultural opportunities it would afford me, but also for the opportunity to get my proverbial excrement together.

And, if we're being honest with each other--for which I see no reason not to be at this juncture with you, my loyal readership--I needed to get it together. With the conspicuous exeunt from my life of college and all the trappings thereof, I had lost quite a few of the things that had kept me going and working and progressing: Externally-imposed structures and the goals that came with them. Easy social opportunities. A regular schedule. Motivation.

They think they do a good job of preparing you for the Real World in college--and give all sorts of flowery speeches to this end--but the one gargantuan thing they forgot to tell me, at least, is that all of the things I just mentioned must suddenly begin to come from one's own person. You blink, you're a graduate, and from that day forth you must be, 100%, the steward of your own life. One day, you're in an environment where you're guided as much as you want to be, and the next, you're out into the open ocean of the Necessity of Self-Direction.

Suddenly finding myself in this ocean, while I took the steps necessary to ensure my survival (I found a job, an apartment, etc.), beyond that minimum threshold, I floundered in a lot of ways. Without anything definite to work toward (aside from the obligations of my unfulfilling, clearly non-career-launching job), I wasted a lot of time not doing much of anything. And so, without, really, anything else to turn or look forward to, I decided to take the not-so-hazardous leap of applying for a scholarship abroad, to see if it would lead me anywhere that might encourage me to get that aforementioned excrement together.

Fast forward exactly a year, and I'm living on my own in a studio apartment in a former Eastern Bloc country whose language I still command rudimentarily, pursuing a completely self-directed program of study. And, though I know this is in direct violation of every principle I've ever had inculcated within me (those being humility, discouragement of self-aggrandizement, self-indulgence, jinxing oneself, and, perhaps most importantly, committing any of these in a public space such as this one), I want to say it: So far, in the new sense of the word that Charlie Sheen has introduced to our lexicon, I'm winning.

Perhaps my biggest flaw that was up for correction was my lack of self-discipline. But I feel myself--albeit slowly and inconsistently--turning into a more disciplined person. I have begun getting into a routine - putting in 8 hours of work a day, just like a real adult, heading to the gym afterwards, using my new language every day in a focused context, using the weekends as a time to relax and meet people and improve my social being. I have made stop-and-start progress, but I have actually set myself a productive, healthy, fulfilling schedule to which I have sometimes managed to adhere. 

In college, there wasn't much of a choice--I had to go to class on a schedule that was more or less set for me, and they gave us so much work that I was forced to be productive or else I would have sunk--but here and now, in what will most likely be the most independent setting of my life, I have had to make all of these things happen for myself. And I'm actually starting to do it, with more and more regularity. I'm getting that proverbial excrement together. This is me starting to win. I have a long way to go, still, but I can feel tangible progress.

Now, to put that all of that self-indulgence masquerading as an uplifting personal anecdote aside, let's talk about the last week. On the business end of things, I have basically spent my research time reading two items. The first is a book by American ethnomusicologist Tim Rice on Bulgarian folk practices. Especially valuable within this volume is the wealth of ethnographic commentary it contains on Bulgarian society from antiquity up through the age of Communism. The second is a just-published dissertation by Galina Denkova on Shopi folk practices, which, of course, is precisely the kind of thing I've been looking for. So I've had a lot to do at the library.

Wednesday was the feast of St. Ivan Rilski, the patron saint of Pernik (via a semi-humorous connection - Pernik is a mining town, and Св. Иван was known for having hidden out in caves for a long portion of his life in order to escape persecution), so my new friend Stefani and I went there for the town festival, which featured about an hour of folk dancing and singing. Pernik is just about at the center of the Shopluk, within the subregion of Graovo, so it was a fine opportunity to witness music that is representative of that area. We got an impromptu tour of their ethnographic museum from a woman who hit the ceiling when she heard I was an American doing research on the Shopi. (Her enthusiasm was kind of astounding. It was nice to be specially accommodated, to be sure, but she was so eager to show us everything that the museum contained. Not that it wasn't appreciated.)

Thursday I was back to the library, had some extraordinarily strong coffee (that it was noteworthy enough to merit inclusion in this blog should tell you just how strong this coffee was), and began cleaning my apartment (a process which lasted until early Friday afternoon) because Laura came on Friday. We went out to a nice dinner Friday night, and Saturday we made a grand tour of Sofia, including, among other things, all of the important buildings and monuments in the eastern half of the Center, качамак from a little soup place that is quickly becoming my favorite, cappuccino at the National Palace of Culture, ridiculous hot chocolate on Цар Освободител, and many other pleasant things to do on a cold day. Sunday we went and had delicious Indian food, the likes of which we hadn't had since a hot July day in Los Angeles, and we gathered a few people for drinks on Sunday night. I had to take her back to the airport early Monday morning, and it has been right back to work for me since.

I am currently in the middle of another busy week that will once again be only four days long, but there will be another post coming Thursday before I leave for the long weekend. To find out where (and it will be cool), read on, dear reader, read on...

Heat!

Things have taken several turns for the awesome over the past few days, but before I talk about the ones that don't involve me being warm, I just need to express my gratitude for perhaps the best thing that has happened to me since I got here.

Heat! I has it!

My landlady, messenger of the Almighty that she is, snagged me as I was coming up the stairs from a long, tired day on Friday, and asked if she could come into my apartment to turn my radiators on. You, of course, know what I said. And just in time, because:

Snow fell on Sofia yesterday. Improbably, beautifully, poetically, the snow was falling when I woke up late Sunday morning, and it pretty much made my day twice as nice. It didn't stick, but I loved it anyway; I love what snow does to the world. Winter is, admittedly, not my favorite season, as I've come to prefer almost anything to the cold. But when it snows, I can overlook the miserable temperatures outside. Snow reminds me of the Christmas season descending upon my old home on the East Coast--don't worry about that fact that it's mid-October--and it means the time for lights and festivity is coming. I hate winter; I love the Holidays.

It wasn't actually snowing that hard, but man, does this picture look epic.

I'm dreaming of a white Halloween.

So, staring out my window for a few minutes while the first flakes of Winter fell--don't worry about the fact that it just turned into Fall three weeks ago--I got all warm and fuzzy inside. It really put me in the mood for cupcakes. 

So, I went and got some. And while I was out, the foolish novel idea struck me to make soup. From scratch. Have I ever done that before? No. But the snow really put me in the mood for that, too. 

And so, while my laundry hung out to dry in the bedroom, I spent two hours committing culinary acts that would make Paula Dean cry in the pursuit of one lousy batch of tomato soup. I won't post a picture because, to be fair, it didn't look appetizing in the least, but it tasted much better than it looked, so while the snow fell, I dined on homemade soup and crackers. Let it never be said that my domesticity won't elevate me to top-notch marriage material someday.

Working backwards: Saturday was another mostly lazy day, though the night was fantastic. I went out to dinner with some interns at the Danish, Norwegian, French, and Belgian Embassies at one of the nicer Greek restaurants in town. Aside from my love of Greek food, it was a great time getting to know still more cool people, and was made the more notable for the fact that the waiters didn't speak Bulgarian; rather, they were Greek, but, thankfully, completely fluent in English. After the restaurant, we headed to a rock and roll bar, where I heard more hard rock in three hours than I had in the past five years. So after an extremely enjoyable night of dancing to Metallica--yes, it can be done--I headed home to my warm (!) apartment.

It was a good weekend. This week will see me do more research, reach out to some people with knowledge on the Shopi, go to Pernik on Wednesday for the folk festival in honor of Sv. Ivan Rilski's Day, clean my apartment, and on Friday, Laura comes to visit for the weekend. Let's get it done. Честит първи сняг!

Problems of Research and Personal Stuff

Today is the Feast of St. Sofia, which meant that the streets were filled today with revelers and citizens of this namesake city.

Today also marks the end of my first "business" week - of research, learning, and establishing myself here. It has been a success, more or less, but it hasn't been 100% vanilla. My research is off to a good start but I may have to revise my methodology and tweak my hypotheses.

Not previously knowing much about this field, I had assumed that it would be as easy as establishing its history, examining records, comparing them with what we know now, and drawing conclusions therefrom. I've realized it's not going to be as simple as that.

The first problem is that there are no written records establishing a history of the Shopi before a certain (very recent, historically speaking) point. This is Big Problem Number 1. All of the history of this people had, until that recent point, been handed down orally, which introduced some problems that go along with exclusively-oral traditions. Thus, there is probably no way of knowing the origins of the Shopi (Are they Bulgars? Thracians? Slavs? Something else entirely?) or their diaphonic singing or certain important specific pieces of information, such as when Christianity was introduced to them.

Perhaps a more daunting problem, which I only encountered yesterday, lies in the fact that nobody can actually seem to define who the Shopi are. By that, I don't mean the question of their origins (see above), but the rather more essential question of exactly who this group encompasses. There is no consensus definition for who is and isn't a Shop, and there seems to be a lack of definitive markers--cultural and ethnic alike--that define the extent of this people. This is Big Problem Number 2.

I have, however, uncovered quite a lot of valuable and essential information. One of my most important discoveries so far has been the connection between religion, custom/ritual, and song. Fairly obvious/self-evident, no? But, of course, it takes me a while to put things together sometimes.

Prof. Naidenova writes about this connection in her book, so it was gratifying for me to see another source discuss, expand upon it, and give examples. The source in question is Martha Forsyth's book, which I have spent the better part of the week examining, about Bistritsa, a small village south of Sofia. In the book, she explains that during the Socialist era, when religious practices were suppressed, the customs that went along with these practices were suspended, and the singing of many songs along with them. When religious freedom was reinstated in 1990 (coinciding with the fall of Socialism), certain practices were resumed, but since many of the songs hadn't been committed to writing, there was often widespread disagreement over words and melodies. (This particular anecdote also seems to substantiate the claim that, out of all the forces at work in Bulgaria over the centuries, Socialism had the biggest effect.)

So, how to go about attacking the questions I laid out in my research proposal? It was clear I had to find different methods. After thinking about it, I came up with this: 

With the knowledge that different villages within the Shopluk have slightly different musical repertoires, comparative analysis seems like a good way to go.  So I now have a tentative plan to compare the bodies of music sung in villages from different regions. Once I establish a history for each of these regions, the influences should become fairly obvious, and voilà - I will hopefully have established a backdoor method for answering my questions.

One thing you should know about me: I love Linguistics. I'm fascinated it. Thus, I had an idea that draws on principles from the field. One of these principles (which I heard many, many times during my course at USC) states that "People who talk to each other tend to talk like each other." (The credit for this accurate and succinct summation of one of the very basic tenets of Linguistics belongs to Prof. Ed Finegan of USC - smart, smart man.) It therefore stands to reason that the same mechanism that drives this linguistic phenomenon should do exactly the same thing on a musical level: Where the region divides into linguistic areas, I would bet nearly anything that it divides into musical areas (based on the conventions in this type of singing) along the exact same lines.

And, though this may constitute a trial of my luck, I could possibly go one step further. Many, if not most, songs are common to several villages within the region, and I would bet that some of the details of these songs have diverged from each other in their separate versions over time, much like daughter languages from a parent language. Perhaps--though I have not yet done any research that would bear this out--it may be possible to reconstruct the "parent" versions of these songs, compare them to the "daughter" versions, and glean even more information that way.

This coming week, I will begin this line of attack, and should the need arise, I will modify my methodology and hypotheses again, following the Scientific Method that they taught us all the way back in 8th grade.

/End research-talk

Other highlights of the week include: My Phillies clinching their fifth straight playoff berth (I will probably do an entire post devoted to the Great Franchise and their Season in the next week or so), continuing Bulgarian lessons with Dr. Angelov, and last night, a FISI reunion party, which was, to be quite painfully honest, a tremendous amount of fun.

L - R: Greg, Xristo, Irena, Atanas

How cute

L - R: Greg, Fred, Dimitra

Greg knows something you don't know

L - R: Xristo, Irena, the Author, Greg, Sanya

One sobering thing - 

My great-great-uncle Morty passed away this week,  just shy of his 99th birthday. He was the last surviving sibling of my great-grandfather Harry, and the only reason we ever found Harry's grave, 80 years after he died. Morty was a veteran of World War II, and got his ear shot off in Italy. He was the toughest guy, refusing care to the very end, always insisting that nobody go out of their way for him, or help him at all. And though he didn't want to be honored or even memorialized in any way, I can't help but give him this tiny tribute. I only met him twice, and he wasn't particularly close to any branch of the family that I'm familiar with, but he was truly a great man. May his memory be a blessing.

Next entry: More on life in Sofia.