First off, my cat has been located! I am really, really happy about this, of course. Max disappeared two weeks ago, but two of my students found him yesterday and brought him home to me.

My mom told me she couldn't believe I had a cat. Which I understand. I don't really like cats all that much. I much prefer dogs, especially Lucy the Wonder Chihuahua. But one day I was...I don't know, puttering around in my yard, maybe reading on the stoop or something, and I saw this woman on the opposite corner from my house pushing this very small cat away from her with a broom handle. She walked away and I looked at the cat. He was tiny and white with black patches, and he just looked so miserable and forlorn, I went over and picked him up. He started purring immediately and ta da! I had a cat. Anyway, he does seem a little bit confused about his life on the mean streets of PB, but I am so happy to have him back. Having a small purring fuzzball sit in your lap while you read a book is not a bad thing.

Do not plan to begin reading Jon Carroll's Cat Columns anytime soon, though.

I know I promised pictures "soon", but...well, I suck. Here are some, finally. Thanks to my dad for scanning these, and to my friend Jeff for hosting them for me.



Okay, this is Max when I found him, in August. He's bigger now, and I have some more recent pictures, I'll post them soon for people who like cats.



The courtyard at Rila Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Rila is close to Boboshevo, and I went there back when I was in training, what seems like ages ago.



The monastary has all of this intricate mural works of devils pulling people into hell and stuff. I found the artwork to be very interesting.



This mural is under the roof of the foyer. If you look carefully, you'll see the signs of the zodiac around Jesus. And the book he's holding open? Your horoscope today! Ha ha, actually, I have no idea what that says, but this says a lot about Bulgarians and astrology: they looooooove it. Once, when I was in a bad mood, I got in an argument about astrology with a Bulgarian. That was stupid.

My kids are cute.

One of my fourth graders just said to me, very earnestly: "Kyla, you my friend."

Awwwww.

Still, you'll hear no complaints from me that it's Friday AND we have a three day weekend.

P.S. My 4th graders read a postcard from Tucson today. One of them announced that he wants to live there. I pointed to Tucson on the world map and asked if he really wanted to live so far from his parents. He said yes. Haha!

Postcard bonanza.

My mail tends to arrive in clumps. I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the Bulgarian postal service. Today I got so much mail that it was apparently the news of the day...several people were excited about it.

First, I got packages from Brisbane and from Victoria, BC. The Brisbane package came with a 2007 calendar with pictures of Australian wildlife, so I guarantee this will be a hit. Plus, a postcard, of course. The BC package was stuffed with brochures and pictures of Victoria, including two activity books for kids! Really, really cool.

I also got postcards from:

Canada (I know that's vague, but it's what the postcard says and the postmark doesn't help.)
San Jose
Sausalito, CA (a gorgeous picture taken from the Marin Headlands...my counterpart saw it and asked me: "Where is that?")
Victoria, BC (I think it's coincidental that it arrived on the same day as the package from Victoria, I believe they were sent by different people.)

So, wow.

Also received a couple letters, one from my friend Elizabeth that was filled with STICKERS! Super! I can bribe my kids to do absolutely anything for stickers.

Today is okay so far, but it has really gotten cold, fast. I hear we're going to have a warming trend towards the end of the week, though.

I've been in Bulgaria six months as of day. And, lest that sound impressive, I still have 21 more to go.

I learn more about my town.

So, I've taken to going on long walks to look for my still-missing retard cat. This is the only upside to his disappearance. I've learned some stuff about Pavel Banya in the process.

First of all, two things that are common in Bulgaria, but I thought were absent from Pavel Banya due to its small size, are blocks and a mahala. But I was wrong; I just didn't know where they were. Blocks are these hideous cement apartment buildings. At some point, someone somewhere thought this would be an excellently socialist way to live. Is it really awful of me to hope that that person eventually ran afoul of Stalin and spent his life in a gulag? (Yes, I suppose it is. But they're really ugly.) So, that was kind of disappointing, but at first I was surprised that I am not living in the blocks, as most Peace Corps Volunteers are. Until I walked around them a little and realized that the blocks are in a mahala.

I think "mahala" just means neighborhood, but in reality, it always means "Roma neighborhood" (or, to translate more accurately what Bulgarians would actually say, "Gypsy neighborhood"). The PB mahala isn't as bad as some I have seen - the houses appeared to be solid enough for electricity and running water, there weren't any naked children running around in goatshit - but it's definitely the ghetto of Pavel Banya. Or, it would be, if I hadn't walked around a bunch more and found some other rather ghetto-tastic areas.

When I got to PB, I was struck by what a neat and clean town it was. There is an immaculate center area, with cafes and restaurants and shops for the tourists from Sofia. There's a nice big park with carefully tended grass and flowers and benches. You never see goats being herded through the center, and there are paved sidewalks. But the farther you stray from the center, I have realized, the more you remember "Oh right, Bulgaria. Developing country. Many, many problems."

I've spent some amount of time thinking "why on earth does a pleasant little town like PB need a Peace Corps Volunteer?" Now I think "I'm just one person. What can I do?"

Postcards & the Max

Postcards have recently arrived from:

Albany, NY
Mesa County, CO
Tucson (2!)
Hamburg
Harrisburg, PA (2!)
Eugene, OR

The total is up to 58, I think, from seven countries so far. I've not been able to work them into class lessons quite as much as I would like, but yesterday my 7th and 8th graders read and translated into Bulgarian cards from Toronto and Munich. And then I had the new arrivals in my back pocket when I was talking to some kids after school, so I took them out and they were very interested in the cacti on the Tucson cards.

In other news, my kitten Max has gone wandering off. He disappeared the other day and I miss him a lot. I brought in a couple photos of him to school and asked my kids to look out for him. Several of them told me they'd seen him in the last couple days, so I'm pretty sure he's wandering around my neighborhood. (In case you missed it, Pavel Banya is really tiny; maybe 3,000 people live here, so I now have a pretty effective force of cat hunters.) After school today, I was having my "konsultatzia" (drop-in English tutoring) when a couple of my students dashed in to say that they'd seen the Max in my neighbor's yard. We all ran off to find him, but he was gone. Damn. Later, another group of three students intercepted me while I was grocery shopping and told me they were hunting for the Max. They had borrowed one of my photographs and were showing it to people. And then, one of my third graders came by my house to show me her puppy, who was completely adorable and I was cheered up.

That's life in the BG today.

Oh! One cute story: one of my neighbors walked by when I was talking to my students, and she said to one of them, "Isabella, kak si?" ("how are you?") and Isabella responded: "GOOD!" In English! My neighbor looked at her like she was crazy and I just laughed and said, "Isabella, bulgarski e dobre sishto." ("Bulgarian is okay too".)

Postcards & school

Postcards have arrived recently from:

Melbourne
Houston
Tel Aviv
Springfield, MA
Vancouver
Ottawa
Amsterdam
London
Yakima, WA

And probably others I can't think of. The total is now up to 52. Great!

In not so great news, my counterpart is out of town for a couple days, so I had every class today and will again tomorrow. The kids seem to see me as the "fun" teacher who lets them get away with screwing around and I'm having a really hard time getting anything done. Frustrating. I really hate yelling at them, but the Bulgarian school system doesn't have much going for it in the way of consequences for bad behavior.

Today we had a "Europe on Wheels" tour come through town. It was just a van filled with goodies about the European Union. Amusingly (to me, anyway), I inititally translated this to myself as "Europe on Bicycles", because the Bulgarian word for wheel and bike is the same. I was envisioning some kind of bicycle drill team. Anyway, our school folk dancing troupe performed and they were fabulous. Bulgarian folk dancing is a well-loved art, everyone learns it in school and if you go to a party, people will start to horo as soon as the music comes on. But in general, it's more the adults who dance, the kids stand around in the corner horrified by their embarrassing parents. However, here in Pavel Banya, the school troupe is very popular, so folk dancing is the in thing to do. Which I think is just great. I've seen the kids dance before, in the summer, but now that I know them better, I enjoyed it more. Plus, my little kids got to dance today, which I have not seen before, and they were ridiculously cute.

Pictures soon.

Nodding for no.

So, despite this blog's subtitle, I still find it jarring and unnatural whenever someone nods for no. Shaking for yes, okay. In fact, I can do it when I think of it. Lots of Volunteers pick this up right away, so when we go to meetings and conferences and someone says something everyone agrees with, half the people shake their heads furiously, while the other half - who refuse to accept that they're living in Bizarro World, apparently - nod agreeably.

What do I do when I want to make a gesture of no, then? I shake my head. That's right, I'm now shaking my head for both yes and no. Fortunately, I have got the Bulgarian words for yes and no down. Can't trip me up there!

The one wacky Bulgarianism I picked up immediately and without effort was saying "opa" for "oops". I underwent a little transformation. Oops --> opes --> ope --> opa.

Opa! I accidentally shut my cat in the fridge!

School stuff.

Every class between 2nd and 8th grade takes English, although not every student takes it. (German and Russian are also available, although I think English is the most popular foreign language.) My counterpart and I have split the classes down the middle, although she comes to all of my classes, and I do not go to hers. I appreciate her presence, as she can translate for me when I get stuck and the students are definitely more intimitated by her than they are me. It doesn't help that there is basically no way for me to discipline the kids: the concepts of detention and suspension are unknown here. So teachers just scream at the kids to be quiet and hope that they obey.

Anyway, things are going okay so far. Oddly, the fourth graders seem to be the most "fluent" in English. Of course, they aren't fluent at all, but if I ask them "how are you today?" I'll get back "I am fine! How are you?" as opposed to the blank looks I would get from my seventh graders.

My counterpart teachers almost entirely in Bulgarian, rote from the textbook. I know why she does this and I can't really blame her: her English isn't really good enough to make stuff up on the fly. I try to diverge from the text sometimes and make things a little more interactive, but my counterpart sometimes intervenes. She's told me that the book stuff is what the kids need to learn to pass certain exams, and that's why we teach from the book. My point is that the book is rather dull and if I teach them actually how to speak English, they'll do well on the exams anyway. I mean, no one taught me to speak English from a book (well, unless Good Night Moon and the Sesame Street Dictionary qualify), but I'm pretty sure I would pass the exams.

I'm trying to set up some elective classes for conversation, as well as an after school tutoring program, where the kids can come in and get help with homework maybe once a week. We'll see. This is not the easiest job in the world.

Postcard haul du...yesterday. I don't know how to say yesterday in French.

Okay, I actually forget how many postcards I got yesterday, and now they're mixed in with everything else. At least three from Ohio, one from California, one from Auckland, one from Munich, one from Florida, a couple from London, a couple from Mississippi, a couple from Maryland. I think that's it.

So far, I've had postcards from 6 countries:
the US
Canada
the UK
New Zealand
Australia
Germany

All in all, I now have 41 cards.

Teaching with the cards has proven to be harder than I thought...I overestimated my younger kids' English skillz, and am going to use them more with the 7th and 8th graders. Some are too tough even for those kids and I will hang on to them until I have my elective class for the high school students in swing. The younger kids do like the pictures, though, and it will be great when I have them all up on the wall.

If you want to send a postcard, here are the rules:

1. Please write in English.
2. Make it fairly simple English, okay?
3. Please PRINT (no cursive) and write NEATLY. Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic, so the kids aren't just learning a new language, they're learning a new alphabet.
4. Please use a postcard that actually has a picture of your town, area, whatever.
5. If English isn't the main language of your area, perhaps you could mention how and when you do use it, and how it comes in handy. If you yourself learned English in school, it would be GREAT to mention that.

Email me at nodforno@gmail.com for the address.

As for general school stuff...I'll get back to you later. I gotta run to class right now. 7th graders...joy!

Postcards du jour

Today's postcard haul:

New Zealand
New York
Maryland
Ohio (2)
Texas
Toronto (2)
Montreal (2)

Excellent!