Bittersweet Halloween

Happy Halloween!  It’s kind of an anticlimactic day here in Sofia.  I was out and about today and I saw a couple of teenagers kind of dressed up–one wearing a mask and the other a black pointy witch’s hat.  And frankly, this was more than I expected seeing as this is a country that doesn’t [...]

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Open letter to Barack & Co.

Dear Barack,
I want you to win the upcoming election.  Yesterday I got three different emails from you and your staff–one for last minute fund raising, another for Washington State and the third from & for women.
The email that really got me thinking was titled “Have you done everything you can for Barack?”  Really, do you [...]

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Found: Awesome Things

Okay, this isn’t going to be a very long post but I went out this afternoon to buy a notebook and came home with these awesome things:

an orange notebook with purple lined paper (it’s French!),
a copy of Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” (a book I think all English majors should have read and I never [...]

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Life and politics

I’ve been to this great little town Koprivshtitsa twice: once in August with my language school and then I went again this month with the Fulbright. It was great. Both times. The town is known for a series of historic homes from the Bulgarian National Revival period.  The village has been well preserved because it [...]

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A Throwback to Other Days…

This weekend I went to see a film with one of my new Bulgarian friends.  We went to coffee last weekended and decided to see a movie this weekend.  After some back and forth–do you want to see this movie?–oh you’ve seen it already–how about this one?–well what about this? and finally we settled on [...]

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Amateur Economics

I am not an economist.  In fact, I’ve never even taken a course on micro or macro-economics.  I am an avid reader, a coffee connoisseur, occasionally a cultural critic–my background, for pete’s sake, is in British and American literature.  This probably means that I shouldn’t be writing on the economy but I am going to [...]

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Atwood on Life and Debt

Margaret Atwood has long been one of my favorite writers.  She has a great imagination, a keen sense of what drives people to make the decisions that they do and she’s got a serious way with words.  She writes with power, sincerity and cuts to the heart of things.
The first book of hers that I [...]

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High School: Phew!

Oh my god, high school is hard work. Every Wednesday, after a full day of teaching–given the Bulgarian schedule–I come home, eat lunch and then fall asleep on the couch for a couple of hours.  Then I peal myself off the couch and wonder how it is that first, I made the conscious choice to [...]

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I Heart Barack Obama

It’s official.  I got my first piece of mail in Bulgaria yesterday and it was my US ballot.  It was good to know that I can actually receive mail here.  I was beginning to wonder if I would ever get my absentee ballot.  So when I finally got my first piece of mail, it seems [...]

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New Bulgaria: The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner

I went with a friend and saw an amazing Bulgarian film last night at the Mall of Sofia.  I was a little worried about sitting through a movie that was nearly 2 hours long in Bulgarian but it was well worth it.  We saw this film which in English is called “The World is Big [...]

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