May 29, 2001

It’s the season of cherries and strawberries in Bulgaria. And while I still have four more weeks of school to go, I think I’m pretty much finished – just like most of my students. Summer time is almost upon us and Kate and I are both getting that feeling that we need to travel somewhere . . . sort of a freeing and longing feeling. It seems all our homesickness from the fall and winter has disappeared or at least turned into nostalgia – and what’s nostalgia good for anyway? We spent last night trying to remember what we were doing last year at this time. We still can’t remember what we did on Memorial Day last year. We talked about all the things that we were doing in the last couple weeks before we left Ohio. I thought sitting in Jacobs’ Field and watching an Indians’ game sounded pretty good . . . but the beer and peanuts are still much cheaper here than in any big-league ballpark in America.

I bought a kilogram of strawberries today for one lev from a man who seemed to have about sixty kilograms stacked up around him. They’re really ripe, sweet, and some of them almost fell apart when I was trying to wash them in our sink. We’ve been munching on handpicked cherries for the past three weeks and I’m sorry to say that their brief season is nearly over – at least in our region. I usually would pick up a kilogram on the way home from school and they would last about two days or so . . . then I’d go pick up another kilogram. That’s sort of the rule – when there’s good food to be eaten, eat it now because tomorrow it probably won’t be there. The darker the cherries were, the sweeter they got. Kate ate one while we were picnicking by the river and the dark red juice squirted all over us.

This weekend is the annual rose festival in Kazanluk. This weekend, in a valley that covers a large part of central Bulgaria, at about 3am, before the sun rises and evaporates the oil, tons of roses will be harvested for their oil. Bulgaria supplies the world with a large portion of the world’s rose oil supply – a main ingredient to many perfumes. Last year, a couple weeks before we left, we heard a report about this very festival on NPR. It was quite a shock to hear little ol’ Bulgaria on the radio – I had rarely heard of it in the news before. And now we’re here – one year later – going to see the very festival that we heard of on the radio while we were driving somewhere on I-71. We’ll let you know what it was like . . .

I’ve got Indigo Girls playing in my ears right now – they’ve been our musical friends, as always, and have kept us company through all the seasons, even in Bulgaria. So when is their Balkan Peninsula Tour going to happen??

I’m teaching about the American presidents to my eighth graders this week. I keep forgetting that I’m a novelty here because I’m American . . . one of my colleagues asked me to teach about it because I have more immediate knowledge of it. Oh yeah, I know about that stuff in a unique way, don’t I? I almost forgot. We talked about how a president gets elected. We talked about the famous presidents – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and so on. I told them their nicknames and one of my students wanted to know if there have ever been negative nicknames for presidents. Sure, I said, every president has his enemies. I soon found myself trying to explain what “Slick Willy” means. They got it. “Dubya” was fun to explain too, though I guess it’s not really a negative one.

We hope life is treating you all well. To our friends and family – you are thought of quite often and we look forward to seeing you when we eventually return.

-Josh