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EVS in Sofia City Library Blog: сняг!

Repost from the EVS in Sofia City Library Blog – I wrote that post about a week ago. More now did come, but now even that has melted. The novelty has worn off, okay, but the thought that we could have more any day still excites me.

Snyag; snow in Bulgarian!

Exactly one week ago we were eating ice cream in Vitosha Blvd and didn’t believe it when Boryana told us that it would be snowing soon. All for the better: the surprise was bigger!

Vicente and I thought that Maria and Zanda would have had enough snow for a lifetime, them being from northern countries and all, but then we realised that that would be like saying that we Mediterranean types have grown bored of our beautiful beaches, after so many summers of enjoying the sea and lying in the sun!

One of the things I like the best about snow is how everything is equalised under its blanket; the paths in the park disappear and the roads have to be cleaned if civilization is to keep doing its thing.Walking in the streets next to our apartment before the snow bulldozers -or whatever their names are- had really gone to work was quite a feeling; this whiteness that literally freezes reality visible, overwhelming, in all directions, including above and below.

I almost didn’t go out for my usual run because of the snow but my sense of duty prevailed in the end and it was a good decision (Vicente remarked that I was very disciplined!) The biggest park near our flat where I usually go to when I don’t want to go too far – Sveta Troitsa – gave me an opportunity to witness how, indeed, regardless of how many times you see snow in your life, every time is almost like the first.

“Gay” some things never change, no matter
in which part of the world you are!

Sofians went to Sveta Troitsa Park to enjoy
the snow with their children.

I miss my sled…

Is an invisible path still a path?

My hands were trembling too much in the cold outside
of the warmth of the gloves for this picture to be any good.

Snow never stays around as much as I’d like it to, however, and today the white stuff of happiness started melting under the winter sun, even though it was still the coldest day we’ve been here by far! By this morning all of the roads were already full of the dirty slush that the snow leaves behind and makes it unpopular to those who see a lot of it every winter. In light of this, our mentor Boris told us of a Bulgarian poet, Smirnenski was his name if I recall correctly, who made the parallel in one of his works between the urbanisation of Bulgaria -the rural families moving to the city to find work- and how the pure, innocent snow quickly becomes dirty in the city streets… I would love to find this poem and post it here actually.

Fortunately we heard that there’s going to be more snow coming in just a few days; the circle of rural innocence which turns to dirty urbanisation will not stop turning! What would the macroscopic, social equivalent of the dirty slush finally evaporating and returning to the sky be, though?

Hispanoamérica

In the Spanish section of the Sofia City Library

there is, as you may be able to see in the left side of the picture above, a map of Hispanoamérica – what we know as Latin America, or, if you prefer, the Americas minus everything to the north of Mexico (or maybe even farther to the North, if we consider the numbers).

I wanted to do my sketch of the day and, inspired by the above (barely depicted) map, decided to make my own version, together with labels unveiling all of my own assumptions, prejudices and the romantic fantasies I have about that continent, that alien, exotic world. To be honest, it wouldn’t be much different in my head if Cortes, Pizarro et al. had conquered Mars or something instead of the other side of the Atlantic; that’s how far away it feels.

This little sketch says a lot more about me than it does about the countries in the map itself, and some of that information I now know is wrong, but if you’re feeling deconstructive enough, maybe I wanted to represent what I thought was true 10 days ago.

EVS in Sofia City Library Blog: Introducing! Second batch of fresh volunteers in Sofia

Repost from the Sofia City Library Blog on which I started posting today.

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!

шар планина 55, софия

Unexciting, unedited and entirely too long presentation of our EVS residence and flat in Sofia.

Zanda, Vicente, Maria and me behind the camera.

120 Hours in Sofia

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! — 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 — 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!

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!

24 Hours in Sofia

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.