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".)