I made a Fulbright application in September 2007 to Bulgaria, in late January I found out that my application had been forwarded to country and finally in April after lots of worrying and waiting the envelope came–I’d won a Fulbright fellowship. I had spent the previous two weeks coming home from work or the gym and thinking to myself: maybe tonight is the night a win a Fulbright. I’d walk into the group house I was living in and look in my mailbox and then everyone else’s mailboxes as well just in case one of my roommates had misplaced the envelope.
Then one night I walked in the front door sweaty and out of breath after an hour at the gym. I could hear that the tv was on and I didn’t see anything in my mailbox. I hollered hello to whoever was watching tv and one of my roommates jumped up and bound around the couch with a half-envelope in hand. I looked at the return address and the weight of the envelope and thought: I won a Fulbright.
The letter explained to me that: as a Fulbrighter, you will join the ranks of distinguished alumni of the program. Fulbright alumni have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, CEOs, university presidents, journalists, professors and teachers. They have been awarded thirty-seven Nobel Prizes. And for a moment the thought passed through my mind: what if they’ve made a mistake and this was followed directly by: well its about time. While all of these crazy thoughts are racing though my head, my roommate hovered over my shoulder reading the letter and enclosed materials with much more zeal than I did. I called my parents and sent a slew of text messages to friends. I had won. I was moving to Bulgaria. And I was in shock–nothing about it was real to me. The winning was real. I had a letter in my hand to prove it. But the fact that I was going to pair all of my belongings down into two suitcases and a carry on, move to a country where I couldn’t read the alphabet let alone speak the language and knew no one hadn’t sunk in.
And then it happened–at some point in all of this mania–I realized that I knew next to nothing about Bulgaria. That is unless you can count what I read obsessively online at Wikipedia, travel sites, the NYT and the Washington Post, oh, and the Bulgarian-American Fulbright Commission website. Okay, looking at that list, it actually seems like a fair amount but I didn’t think that I knew much substantively. So, I did what academics do and read everything I could get my hands on. The result of which is that I am now obsessed with Bulgaria–an obsession which has actually been very easy to indulge. It is here at the intersection of Bulgaria, my life and the Fulbright that my blog now picks up.
