With Minister of Education Daniel Vulchev in a Meadow Above Rila Monastery, 5/11/2007

The Road To Dorkovo May 5, 2007

Jake Brammer, Rest In Peace

You will be missed.

Plowing the Fields Outside of Rakitovo, April 30, 2007

Peace Corps Volunteers Being Dorks, Bankya, 30.03.2007

Lamps, Spice Bazaar, Istanbul Turkey August 2006

Roma Boys Outside Plovdiv International Technology Fair, 9/30/05

Me and the Cosmonaut

Alexander Alexandrov during a visit to our school on March 27

Road to Rila Monastery, September 2006

The Best of Bulgaria

From now until COS I'm going to post the best photos I've taken here, or the ones I like the most. Keeping with the theme of this blog. The theme being silence is usually the best option.



Children rehearsing for the school concert, 5/4/2006

Happy Holidays Everybody!

And some more Bulgarian folk music, this time by Bulgarka, an acappella group.

Народна Песен от Драгиново

Short clip from the opening of our school's JA company with music from students from Draginovo.

Richard Dawkins vs. Liberty U



Q & A session featuring renowned atheist Dawkins and some students from Jerry Falwell's University.

екскурзии (school trips)

10-А клас извън палеонтологически музея в Асеновград.

10 A class outside of the paleontological museum in Asenovgrad.



скелетa на гигантски мамут, в музея.

Skeleton of wooly mammoth, in museum.




С Мария Кутрианска, Руми Бояджиева, Даниела Груева, и Диана Кунчева в двора на Бачковски Манастир.

With Maria Kutrianska, Rumi Boydjieva and other teachers in the courtyard of Bachkovski Monastery.

още се захващам с снимките (still catching up on pictures)

Моята ученичка Николина работи на станцията на нашото учелище в случката за 15 юбилей на Корпус на Мира, в София, през септември.

My student Nikolina working at our school's booth at the 15th Anniversary of Peace Corps Bulgaria event in Sofia, during September.



Нашя директор, Г-н Моллов, отвари ботилка шампанско в коктейла да празнуваме завършването на проект на ремонт за запазването на енергия в училището.

Our director, Mr. Mollov, opens a bottle of champagne to celebrate the completion of the project for energy conservation in the school.



Асенова крепост, извън Асеновград, обитaтелен отначало през времето на Тракската империя.

Asen's Fortress, outside of Asenovgrad, first occupied during the Thracian Empire.

Повече снимки (More Photos)

Алесандър Невски Катедрал, София, през изгреб слънцето.

Alexander Nevski Cathedral, Sofia, at sunrise.



Видео клип на Мориси в стаята на хотела в София, на последня ден на Анна в България

Morrissey video on TV in hotel room in Sofia, Anna's last morning in Bulgaria



Колегите се събират около новата учебна програма, преди официялното откриване на училището

Colleagues gather around the class schedule before the offical opening of the school.



Учениците в откриването на новата учебна година.

Students at the opening ceremony of the new school year.

You Sing With a Certain Dramatic Flair

There are nestled in this country on the tourist highway well-travelled bits, a museum town here, a ruined fortress teetering on a gorge there. They are primped and on display for us, menus in English, fluent hostel staff, spools of veins and wire laying across the town the mosques, a ball of electricity rises above her skull keeping her balanced.

We are all American, in the end.



I marvel at the clear air, even in the heat, the light show over the fortress, the merchants selling bottles of water and t-shirts, the surly waitresses, the rubble reconstructed to what everyone thinks is its original form, the archaeologists drunk and hitting on their graduate students, the tally of bones that have accumulated here over the years. We pay to take photographs inside the little chapel on the crest of the hill.



The christ-figure is always recognizable in this context, and he is the greatest subject of art, cathedrals and tourist-photographs ever invented. Remove the head from the beast and the beast will roll on its back to show you its ribs, its hunger. Slip a few leva to a tour guide and she will tell you about the history of man in the starlight.



But it would all be nothing without the influence of the greatest artist of the 20th century, Walt Disney dreamed of lasers and talking animals and now this is what we've become, feeling more human packed in the darkness, the ancient fortress is now a space opera and our hearts are in our throats in ecstacy.

Collapsing on the Edge of Summer

Her prayers were answered by the sun god, breaking the colonists' backs on the shores of the James River, the goldhunters, the horror-writers. Her breath filled the world.

On the brightest, most crowded Bulgarian Black Sea beaches there are rusted post-communist playgrounds, rusted post-communist children hurling plastic bottles into the water, squatting on stretches of sand like Japanese secretaries staking out corporate plots of land for cherry-blossom viewing.

The weather descended on us as hot and lazy as a sweating ghost - an Englishman and two Americans, it surprised us and kept us up at night. I listened to the banal chatter in the cafe, the one not smoking taking the floor, the rest clutching their cigarettes.

A Summer Wasting

As you might have noticed, I like titling my blog posts after

a. Belle and Sebastian songs

b. Pomak villages in the Rhodope mountains

c. Bitter "meta-blog" titles that indicate that I am, indeed, too cool for blogging

d. Pavement/Silver Jews lyrics (the more obscure the better, beeotches!)

So now that I'm spending my days happily editing my little SPA proposal and waiting for students to show up at school for English lessons and waiting for packages to arrive from Japan and feeling the gently wafting breeze and watching the cherries ripen, etc. I guess it's time for me to deal with my antipathy towards blogging once and for all.



Man there's a lot of bad writing on the internet. What would you say is the ratio of bad writing to good writing on the internet? Like, 99.99999999999% bad? And I don't feel great about contibuting to this surfeit of bad writing, trust me.

This is why my blog posts can seem somewhat, um, harshly perfunctory. The main purpose of this blog is to prove to my former coworkers at Browdy and Neimark (hi Maureen!) that I am indeed in Bulgaria and I didn't make up the Peace Corps thing as a way to honorably quit before "going postal".

Avramovo

Spent Friday night on a na gosti in Avramovo with my friend Halil.

Here's a picture of the town and mosque.



The main crop up in the mountains is potatoes, and the farmers make makeshift scarecrows - things that reflect light and make noise - to scare of the wild boars that feed on the potatoes. In the subtropical forests of Okinawa, you could find old stone walls built up to keep wild pigs away from their sweet potato patches.



All of the hay for feed is threshed by hand.



Finally, Avramovo has the honor of having the train station with the highest elevation in the entire Balkan Peninsula.