Oh right, school!

I am a teacher, right? Here's an update:

2nd graders - totally adorable, but still working on the whole "school" concept. And the idea that not everyone in the world speaks Bulgarian is kind of new to them as well.

3rd graders - pretty rambunctious, but I have some real gems in this class.

4th graders - I love these kids! I have several students in this class I hope end up going to a language school (magnet school for accelerated language study). They're very good kids and just adorable.

5th graders - will be the death of me. They're good kids but, well, let's just say that we've had two tests so far and one student has passed one of them. I've instituted extra study on the one day of the week they don't have regular class.

6th graders - good kids, last time they had a test, two students got 49/50. Which is great after grading a whole set of failing tests from my 5th graders. (Maybe I'm not the world's worst teacher after all!)

7th graders - terribly rambunctious, but smart and enthusiastic. I've acquired for them penpals (students studying English with a PCV in Romania) and they're really into it. Last time we wrote letters, several of them included their Skype names. I am really hoping they actually end up chatting with their penpals, that would be such great practice!

8th graders - oy. They think they're too cool for school, I'll just say that much.

That's what's going on.

Power Outage.

Last night, I was sitting around, watching TV*, pretty dull. And then, suddenly, the power went out and I was left in complete darkness. After a few moments of hoping the power would just come back on, I got up and fumbled around for my cell phone, which has a flashlight in it. (Isn't that the best phone feature ever? I totally bought it for the flashlight.) With the help of my phone light, I went outside, to see if it was just me, or if it was everyone.

It wasn't just me.

Pavel Banya is by far the smallest place I've ever lived. (Except Boboshevo, anyway.) By American standards, Petaluma is a small town, but it's still almost twenty times bigger than Pavel Banya. Even when the lights are on, there are more stars visible than there are in Petaluma, let alone Chicago, where the lights of ten million people blot out almost everything in the sky. I can see the Milky Way almost every night. But I have never seen anything like this in my life.

This, I realized, was what the ancient Greeks saw when they looked at the sky (almost literally, considering how close to Greece I live), and for the first time, I knew why they saw constellations in the stars. It was almost impossible not to pick out pictures and designs in that multitude. In ten minutes, I saw four falling stars. I could see M42, the nebula in Orion's sword beautifully. I think I saw Andromeda, but only out of the corner of my eye. Every time I tried to look at it directly it disappeared.

After ten minutes, the lights came back on.

I wish I could have taken a picture to show you all.

*I know, I bought a TV! Me! Can you believe it? I don't have cable yet, so I only get one channel, and that's with the rabbit ears. Max distrusts the thing and occasionally attacks the rabbit ears and the people on the screen.