Earthstepper

This is a photo of me in my family room holding a package that my friend Adam Sitzmann from Chicago sent me. Among the many used items in the box…it also included the nice Milwaukee Brewers t-shirt I’m sporting in the photo.

I had told Adam to write a few religious phrases or quotes from the bible on the box, so to deter the customs agents in the Bulgarian postal system from taking items from the box. The customs agents are notorious for taking items from people’s packages. Well, he ended up taping a huge 8 x 11 print out of Mary floating in clouds with rays of light shooting from her hands. Good job!

Adam is a salesman by nature, so he always under promises and over delivers. Thanks buddy for taking time to send me your used socks, shorts, belts, shirts and shoes…you are the man! I can use all of it. I’ve never owned such comfortable socks and nice shoes before.

This picture was taken at our graduation ceremony in Vratsa, Bulgaria. Jon is the guy in the middle. He’s from Maryland and Joe is the guy on the end, he’s from Colorado. All three of us lived in the same town where we studied the Bulgarian language together and learned about the culture. Here are some links about our graduation ceremony in the local news.

http://tinyurl.com/lnzynl –   http://tinyurl.com/m9zckq -   http://tinyurl.com/m7gtwy

Joe, Jon and I are having some drinks with the owners of a cafe that we frequented during our 9 week  “pre-service training”. Cafe Sumi was located in the city of Vratsa, which was the largest city near the town of Chelopick (where all of us lived with our Bulgarian host family’s). We would have coffee here in the morning on Monday’s and then stop by for some drinks after our training was over for the day. This particular night was pretty wild.

Here is a picture of me with Hristo (the father of the Bulgarian family I lived with) and my friend Joe.  It was our first weekend in the town, so we sat in Hristo’s den and drank ракия (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakia) and spoke the little Bulgarian we knew at the time. The ракия had been brewed by Hristo with grapes from his garden.  We’re saying  наздраве! (pronounced Naz-dra-vey)…or cheers in English.

This is a picture of a rooster that belongs to one of the neighbors by my house. He doubles as an alarm clock; every morning I can hear him and a few others ‘crowing’ away at the break of dawn.

Here is a picture of all five of us with our language trainer…we live in the village together. We study the Bulgarian language in the mornings and sometimes in the afternoons we go on trips to see certain historical areas. (From L to R: Jon, Elizabeth, Erin, Joe, Elena & me)

Here is a picture of the village I live in. The day I took this photo we had traveled up the mountain to celebrate a National Holiday in Bulgaria.

The town of CHELOPAK

View from Bulgaria

Well, I finally got connected to the “grid line”, so I do have access to the Internet (at times it doesn’t work well though). I haven’t had time to really go through my email and reply to emails yet. However, I should have some time this Sunday.

I’m living in a small village outside the city of Vratsa in Northwest Bulgaria (at the base of the Balkan Mountains). I will be living here until the end of July. The village has a population of about 500 people. The weather is around 70-80 degrees (very similiar to the weather in Iowa). One day it hailed, sometimes it rains, other days it gets very windy.

I’ve got to get going though. I’ll begin to post more regularly now. In the next post I’ll tell you more about my living situation and the nice family I live with.