A month and a half or so ago I bought two T-Max 400 black & white photography films, one for myself and one for Daphne. The idea was to use them together and develop them together as well. We did exactly that three days before I left for Sofia. I had the dumb idea to use the ergaleiaki to record the process in the darkness of my bathroom in Nea Smyrni, which ended up very very very dimly illuminating the whole affair with its red little recording confirmation LED. We knew we had made a mistake but we didn’t turn back. Thankfully it didn’t ruin the rolls.
We used T-Max developer which had expired a year or so before. Tip: don’t trust expiration dates – neither for developer nor for food. Use common sense.
All in all I’m very satisfied with this roll and so decided to upload pretty much all of it. Enjoy. Thanks go to my trusty OM2-n (40 years and still going – can you say that about your DSLR?), my scanner and of course Rapsooneli.
Dimitris from Greece; Maria from Denmark; Vicente from Spain and Zanda from Latvia. The four of us are the fresh batch of EVSers for the Sofia City Library. Our project started in the second week of January 2014 and will end in October of the same year. That’s right: we’ll be living in Sofia together for a full nine months – in fact it’s already been two weeks we’ve lived together. This blog will serve as our medium of communication with the world, our platform for sharing all that we do here in Bulgaria, our work at the library, our experiences as EVS volunteers and lots more. We’re picking it up from where the previous volunteers left it off. Thank you Jose Manuel, Agne, Sarah and Ricardo; we promise we’ll make you guys proud.
Left to right: Ricardo (the veteran), Zanda, Maria, Vicente, Dimitris.Picture by Valentina.
And for those of you just dying to know a little more about us, fear not: we wrote little texts for introducing ourselves, exclusively for this post – for your eyes only!
Zanda:
This is a very special place I want to tell you about. A place where the cows are blue and skys are orange. In this place lives a grandmother with white hair who is called Baltic Sea. If you listen carefully you can hear how she whispers old stories about Baltic countries. This place is made from grass, rivers, forests, trees and flowers. In this place live people, who don’t talk, but they are singing. Their flesh is the earth and their blood is the water. This place is LATVIA.
In Lavia there is a girl with messy hair and mind full of birds. She loves books, music, dancing, colors and she also likes meeting people from different cultures. This girl is me – ZANDA PILATE.
Vicente:
Let’s talk about me. 29 year old unemployed Spanish male. That sounds like very average. Let’s be more personal. I am a daydreamer who is always making other plans while life happens, like Lennon said. I would like to have time to live in dozens of countries at the same time, and this is the first time I’m living abroad. When I was younger I wanted to be a great journalist, help to save the world working as a war correspondent of the BBC or something like that. Then life happened. I was working in a rutinary job for almost five years. Now is the first time that I am in the place that I want to be in a long period and that makes me very happy.
I come to Sofia, a city called like my Grandma, to live with Dimitrios, who is called like my Grandpa. Feels good to be grounded by cultural junks like me, something that never happened to me even when I studied journalism.
As a Spanish I don’t see myself as a regular countrymen, not the type of “Como España en ningún lao”. Even if it has some good points I feel very disappointed with it, and another thing that makes me happy about staying in Bulgaria is that I’m not working for a shitty payment, not consuming there, not paying taxes to the traitors in the government who put the payment of the debt constitutionally before public healthcare.
My family is very conventional, so for me is always a shock to know other costumes, living with vegetarians, for example. My mother is probably checking my weight when I come back to Spain.
I’m writing this with my fingers burned by a fucking frying pan so I expect that Dimitri appreciates my sacrifice.
Dimitris:
Soon I will be celebrating the completion of my 25th revolution around our Host Star, forever travelling together with the Pale Blue Dot, on the Pale Blue Dot, like a flea on a dog chasing its tail. Most of this time I had lived in the region of this Pale Blue Dot called Greece, where I was also born; a place famed by others of my species for its history, culture, good food and fantastic weather, “a cozy little spot”, as I imagine Douglas Adams would call it. However, something beckoned me to move for a while a little bit to the North to this neighbouring region called Bulgaria. Putting that “something” into words is very difficult, so I suppose just saying “it felt like the best next step” should do nicely. Would the word “serendipity” sound too pretentious?
I have these second thoughts a lot, you know: one of my typical characteristics is second-guessing and analysing everything I feel, think and do, in order to follow more closely my ethical compass, a weird, imaginary but perfectly mundane object that would look like what you would get if you put together timeless growth, soundless laughter and mindless wonder, and clicked “reconcile” on your 3D printer that somehow ran on yogurt – preferably vegan (yes, there exists such a thing! Crazy, isn’t it?!) I’d be a textbook INFP, if such a thing as a typology textbook existed (it does in my secret world, where the above Dimitrian object is a platonic ideal).
In case you hadn’t realised by now, I greatly enjoy writing (not talking) about myself. I also tend to unnecessarily convolute things. To spare you with the nonsense, as I’m sure you want to learn more about me and not just read things I somehow believe look clever on a screen, I’m interested in media, the natural world, (alternate) human culture, history and languages, and, even though my writing style obviously doesn’t show it, I believe in and value simplicity. I studied Cultural Technology media and culture and I think this project at the Sofia City Library, as well as the whole philosophy of informal education behind EVS and YiA programs, suits my current professional and personal ambitions like a glove. Would it be too cheesy if I put another “serendipity” here?
Maria:
I’m Maria from Denmark, Mimi the Baby at the Sofia City Library and the glitter loving DustyFairy at tumblr.
I’m the baby of the project because I’m 21 and the youngest, even though I’m the most responsible and Zanda thinks I’m acting like a mother. I’m only doing this as a cover for whom I really am, and I learnt from the very best; Wendy. She was the greatest mother Peter and the boys could ever have wished for even though she made me a bit jealous when she gave Peter the “thimble”.
I am a creative, glitter loving, crazy fairy.. Oh! I mean person, of course! A creative but responsible young girl who is a passionate complainer about everything and nothing, and who in the end still hasn’t figured out how the thing about being a grown-up is done correctly. I have, for some time been looking for my pot with “adultness” and I have started to wonder if I might have forgotten it at home, next to my fairy dust, when I was visiting princess Tiger Lily, Peter and the Boys in Neverland, the Netherlands I mean, last month before I got here.
Hmm.. Anything I forgot to tell…? Oh yes!
My biggest weakness is my fear towards onions. They are evil! They make you cry for no reason and when they do, they infect you with “The Onion Syndrome”, which, for me personally, means that I act even crazier than normal and that I even get a little mean. I’m convinced that some onions deep down in some of their inner most layers are nice onions and that they make us, fairies, ehh humans, cry because they are forced to by Captain Hook and his pirates that threaten them to walk the plank if they should ever consider stopping their cooperation. It is easier for Hook and his pirates to catch and kidnap us when our eyes are too swollen from crying and it also makes us more convince-able under the influence of “The Onion Syndrome” to cooperate.
There is so much to tell!! But I have got to go now.. Mitco is destroying things in the kitchen.. AGAIN!
Have a continued sparkling day!
Ήδη είμαι μόνο 10 μέρες μακριά της και μου λείπει, οπότε το παραπάνω επεισόδιο είναι αφιερωμένο εξαιρετικά. Είναι από τον γυρισμό μας από την τελευταία επίσκεψη στα Λουτρά γεμάτο μαλακίες που λέει κανείς ενώ οδηγεί οι οποίες όμως αποδεικνύονται εξαιρετικά in the flow, οπότε προειδοποιώ: έχει βουητό αυτοκινήτου!
Η πλάκα είναι ότι αρχικά ηχογραφήσαμε μια συζήτηση μας σχετικά με Civilization η οποία όμως αποδείχτηκε πολύ βαρετή και λέγαμε πράγματα που μόνο εμείς θα καταλαβαίναμε. Άντε και ένας-δυο ακόμα εκεί έξω που θα διαβάσουν αυτό που ξέρουν από Civ. Αυτό το δεύτερο μέρος είναι όμως σίγουρα καλύτερο. Η Δάφνη άρχισε να ηχογραφεί γιατί ήθελε να δει αν κι εκείνη, όπως λέει ότι κάνω εγώ, έχει διαφορετική φωνή όταν μιλάει στο εργαλειάκι… Εγώ δεν ακούω τη διαφορά για να είμαι ειλικρινής.
Daphne had been insisting that I leave the inn in HabitRPG I had so cozily settled in the past few weeks; thatTrapper Santa boss would certainly not kill itself! I actually did, but actually I hadn’t. By some mistake I didn’t really click on the button which makes you leave the inn (or the flipping site/my laptop/our internet was being unresponsive) and thus missed my opportunity to join the party and fight the boss. This made me very angry indeed. I started fidgeting around the site trying to find a way to undo this when I clicked on “Challenges“.
While the author is plugging himself in more ways I considered possible, it’s a very encouraging and thorough read for someone like me whose ambition is to become a polyglot, but it could be just as useful for anyone aiming to learn a foreign language . You’re probably going to get information overload from that one but it’s worth a try and anyway it’s a valuable resource. Even I had no idea all these sites existed dedicated to all these different kinds of language practice. I had probably just never looked hard enough for them, subconsciously following some of those 32 excuses myself…
Carlos Castaneda is certainly considered required reading for any person even slightly interested in the occult, ancient practices, magic, dreams, altered states of existence or completely different planes thereof. This one was the first book by him I finished, if you exclude The Teachings of Don Juan which I began reading in Spanish but never finished because my Spanish just isn’t as good as I’d like it to be yet.
Contrary to other of his works, this one he wrote many years after the events he describes therein had come to pass: apparently they had been buried into his subconscious because of the altered state, the second attention, he had (mostly) been in at the time. Only almost 20 years after his apprenticeship into understanding and navigating the world of dreams by Don Juan was he able to bring what he learned to the forefront of his consciousness and then put it on paper.
I liked The Art of Dreaming, especially the first half. I read that when I was in the coach from Athens to Sofia and it helped make the journey much more dreamy; it made me feel that it was a passage in more ways than one: in the physical sense -travelling from one point of the Balkans to another- but also in this transcendental sense, this thing you get when you learn about the details of a profound truth. I came into The Art of Dreaming expecting something practical -Castaneda’s “Lucid Dreaming for Dummies” handbook- especially after learning that it was he who popularised the technique of looking at your hands as a reality check, something I picked up and have used successfully numerous times. The beginning of the book was entirely like that: it was him learning about the different methods of dreaming consciously and going through the “gates of dreaming”, as well as finding out about the complicated intricacies of the assemblage point and its manipulation. That link is a good summary of the book’s most interesting “academic” part.
But, like Castaneda himself in the book, or at least the person Castaneda wrote himself to be, I too need my objectivity, for that’s the way I was taught to perceive the world, as Don Juan would have said. Therefore, as the book became weirder and weirder and Castaneda strayed farther and farther away from what my dream reality -even in my most successful endeavours in lucidity- has looked like and started going into the dimension of inorganic beings, alien energy scouts and the like, I started losing my point of reference and ultimately my interest. By the end of the book his narrative had become so convoluted that I couldn’t figure out any part of what was happening – perhaps an apt representation of Castaneda’s own recollection of his strange experiences.
What however made things more interesting for me was this article I came across shortly before finishing the book which uncovers Castaneda as a complete fraud. Apparently after the success of his first few books, which, it is implied, were also figments of his imagination, Castaneda became a sort of cult-leader figure; when he was exposed he disappeared from public view by secluding himself in a villa together with three of his female companion sorcerers. The story is complicated in many levels; I can only say that the narrative of his books and what happened in real life is difficult to tell apart. In fact I’m sure that even if Castaneda proved to be okay after all (a possibility we still can’t discount since, from where I’m standing, the revelation of the hoax can be a hoax as much as the supposed hoax itself) the automatic reaction from a scientific and rationalist status quo seeking to disprove just to confirm its dominance would have been no different.
At this point several possibilities and parallel narratives have arisen: the story of the book itself; the real events which inspired Castaneda if we are to accept that his books are only adaptations of what really transpired; the reality of his life undescribed in the books – what we would see in a Castaneda behind-the-scenes; and the dirt that has come out that Castaneda was a complete hoax, which is 100% in line with “skeptic” views. All these interpretations exist simultaneously in a sort of entangled limbo: any one of them could be true and the fact wouldn’t negate the veracity of the other versions – they could all be true simultaneously. Additionally, on a meta level each one of these stories has something different to tell: about the human willingness to believe and the power of belief itself, about the unfathomability of the universe, about the dogmatism of contemporary intellect, about how powerful your fictional story can be to be able to ultimately convince even yourself that it’s the truth – especially if millions of others already believe it to be so.
In another interpretation, you could see how these are all just different layers of meaning, just like Don Juan described reality as an onion consisting of layers of universes. The hoax coexists with the book’s story and it’s only a matter of intent, a matter of the position of your assemblage point what it is that you’ll end up keeping from the whole affair.
Even if Castaneda hallucinated everything he ever wrote about, this book has made me think in ways I’m sure were not intentional but have arisen anyway as part of the complexity of being a thinking but chiefly intuitive feeling person alive in 2014. If this book is a valuable collection of techniques that -as far as I can tell- really work and a story of them being put to use, where does the fiction begin?
A lot and not so much has changed in the 96 hours since my last post from the EVS front. Vicente and then Zanda arrived and joined the party and my first impressions of them are quite positive. For our first night together, which was two nights ago, I made some risotto with mushrooms but it wasn’t very good because I threw in too much rosemary. The Greek salad wasn’t very good either because the tomatoes I bought were (obviously) out of season and for that reason they were pretty bland. Maria made some pancakes for dessert and those came out great – turns out you can even eat them right out of the fridge just fine!
Can you spot the 2L beer bottle in the background? That one cost 2,45 leva or ~1,2€. Let me repeat that for you: 1,2€I promise next time it’ll be better guys!
Tonight Zanda made some absolutely delicious cheese soup with mushrooms and vegetables.
Soon I’ll take a proper video for presenting the guys and the flat. This is just a… taste.
But enough with the food. Yesterday the fog finally crept away and the sun at long last flooded the sky and land.
Sveta Nedelya – Αγία Κυριακή in Greek
We met some other EVSers in the library from a different project and went for tea together in a very cozy place somewhere in Sofia (I suppose saying “in the centre” won’t help you find it…) Tomorrow we’re having our first Bulgarian class all in the same group and I’m super-excited: another new language and more new people!
It was also a few days ago that Vicente, Maria and I tried riding the tram to the library for the first time just for a change. We thought that the metro ticket, which is valid for one hour, would also be valid for the entire mass transit network of Sofia as is the case e.g. in Athens. Well, the conductors who appeared out of nowhere didn’t think so. We failed to present the yellow paper we suddenly noticed that everybody else around us was holding, and the conductors took us off the tram where we were welcomed by a fine of 20 leva (10€) for each one of us. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised; older encounters with conductors out to kill in Athens had proved much more painful to my wallet than this. Of course, I wasn’t happy we were stopped like that but eh, lesson learned, no pain no gain! And, at any rate, later that day we went with Boryana to have our cards issued. Take that, conductors!
Dimitrios Hall
The very same day I used my freshly printed card to go to Zapaden Park for a run, the closest piece of open land to our apartment – about 15-20 minutes by metro or tram. It’s one of the biggest parks I’ve ever been to; in fact it’s more like a forest! Unfortunately, the winter browns and grays don’t allow it to be as beautiful as I imagine it to be in the warmer seasons but still the sight of the winter forest and Sofians of all ages out to enjoy it makes my heart a little brighter and keeps me company while I’m out for my run. Can’t wait to see the park turn blinding white, which will hopefully happen sooner rather than later.
Our last tidbit for today: yesterday we went to the cinema; we live very close to the Mall of Sofia, which includes a multiplex. Even for a Saturday it was super cheap, only 9 leva (4,5€), and on Thursdays it’s down to 6! The movie we watched was The Wolf of Wall St; three-hour film and I didn’t want it to end, so entertaining and well-made was it. It had, most probably, the best depiction of an overdose I’ve ever seen on film (okay now I have to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas just to check). Leonardo Di Caprio has come a long way… Needless to say, this will most definitely not be the last time we go to the cinema while we’re living here in Sofia!
Gotta go to bed now or I’ll be like a Greek zombie (ζόμπι; νεκροζωντανός;) at the lesson tomorrow. Leka nosht!
Departure time for Tourist Service’s bus from Athens to Sofia was 8:00 in the morning sharp. I caught it after a full day of melancholy of leaving behind things, situations and, most importantly, people that I love (the long-needed party at my place the day before with all the lovely faces didn’t help). You know who you are, I hope.
I get these very short but intense feelings of regret and of not having appreciated everything and everyone enough before and during every big journey of mine. Does everyone get these same feelings? I wonder about this a lot. Sometimes I think that everyone’s like me, but it is much more often that I feel I’m alone in too many things to count. It is a dangerous and untrustworthy feeling.
Athens to Sofia was an 11-and-a-half-hour ride. It wasn’t so tiring for me: I’m used to these long trips owing to my experience of catching ships to and from Mytilini and waiting for hours in European airports for frugality’s sake. I began reading Carlos Castaneda’s The Art of Dreaming which Daphne lovingly gifted to me before I left. It’s a great book and it made for a more… dreamy journey. Closer to the destination I started watching Skyfall but we arrived before I could finish it.
The first I saw of Sofia, I didn’t really see much of it. It’s been almost completely covered in fog since yesterday. I would expect that to be a normal thing for this city (it feels like the right kind of city to be foggy as a natural state, you know?) but even the locals were taken by surprise.
View from the window on that first foggy night in Sofia
I was welcomed and taken to the flat by the very friendly Valentina, an employee of the Sofia City Library. The flat is on the 4th floor and guess what? There’s no elevator (or lift, if you’re American!), which might sound like a problem, but it’s in situations like this that a running schedule really comes in handy! Of my three fellow volunteers, only one had arrived yesterday and that’s Maria, the Danish girl. The other two will be coming tomorrow and the day after. This is the last fateful night I’ll have the boys’ room for my own. I shudder at the idea of having to share it for nine months! Let’s hope everything turns out alright and I don’t find sharing my private space for so long a little bit too overbearing!
I didn’t see much of Sofia today apart from the area close to the library, but I already find it an interesting city. It might look gloomy and run down in a lot of places (nothing I didn’t expect before I came here) but I can sense a history and character waiting for me to discover.
The library itself has a similar air: it’s an old building in obvious need of repairs and renovation, but the people working in it, such as Valentina and Boryana who are involved with the EVS project, but also the rest of the employees that we got to meet today, are full of life and joy. To give you an example, every Wednesday they have an English speaking group practice session for every library employee willing to join, and today they invited us newcomers as well. Everybody was delighted to meet us and Valentina also brought a bottle of fine red wine to welcome us with. I sense we’re going to work very well together and that they’ll take good care of us – they already do.
Not only that: their selection of books makes me want to just stay in the library and never leave – it doesn’t help that there are whole sections and rooms dedicated to books in languages that I’ve been meaning to practice on (German and Spanish) and many many books in English to choose from. Who knows what other treasures I might find in the meantime!
A funny little episode from today: I went to Billa to shop for some pasta (got some by Stella; surprisingly many Greek brands here) and stuff to make a Greek salad with, plus beers and a strange Bulgarian beverage I haven’t tried yet. I took everything to the cashier and it all amounted to exactly 10,00 leva – a little more than 5€. I thought this was amusing and so did the cashier. For some reason I don’t like speaking English when I’m in a foreign country; it feels uncomfortable, like I should know the language otherwise I’m little more than a product of globalisation and cultural domination. Like “what the fuck is a Greek and a Bulgarian doing speaking English in the Balkans?!” There I was though, having a fun little moment with a Bulgarian cashier – in English.
Sometimes I feel really messed up with my strange self-limiting ideals.
Anyhow, the salad and the pasta were delicious and today was a great day in general. Here’s to a good start of our 9-month EVS project, and here’s a link to the library’s existing blog that we’re going to be taking over soon.
Ulitsa Shar Planina no. 55 – the entrance to our apartment building
Listened to this in audiobook format read by the superb Martin Jarvis. I kind of regretted it because the book is rich with detailed descriptions a lot of which I missed because I’d sometimes get distracted while listening. Maybe I’m not accustomed to audiobooks with more difficult language, or perhaps it’s just that I need to train my concentration skills.
All that said, I liked the book but, you know, not that much. I wonder whether its message is absolutely pro-civilization; if it’s really saying what it seems to be saying, that if you remove civilized society from humanity, all that’s left is savagery. I don’t like this take and would like to have more knowledge of anthropology to back my feelings with research that humans are better than that.
Then again, there’s this… Rather, I hold true that neither the “noble savage” nor the “civilization über alles!” tropes are absolute truths and that a whole lot of varying parameters will influence whether a community will destroy itself or flourish to form a different culture.
As a final note, I think reading this properly could get it to 3.5 stars. Its subtle, sometimes tender descriptions sat well with me.
