LG's Excellent PC Adventure

We started the week with a Cluster Group meeting in Panagyrishte. This is a meeting of four or five satellite groups and is held in place of a full Hub Meeting, which is a gathering of all the clans and is held in Pazardjik. Now pay attention, there will be a short quiz. During the Cluster Group Meeting we debriefed on our visits to various PCV's, had a session on the Bulgarian school system (it's much like ours) and visited an orphanage. Then we headed back to Saedinenie to study for our first language class in a week. It turns out that I do actually forget everything I know in six days, so language class was somewhat stressful. The head of the language department chose that day to visit our class which put Maria (our language teacher) under some pressure as well. It was during this class that such things were said as, "take me to your brothel, or my dog will drive your car!" We hammered away at language for three days and by Thursday were more or less back in rythym. We also had to go shopping for food, plan and cook a Bulgarian dinner for each other. This was an unqualified success if I do say so myself. We made palachinki, chooshki biyourek, and shopska salad. Palachinki are crepes and we filled them with shredded chicken and mushrooms for the meat-eaters and veggies and rice for the grazers. Chooshki biyourek are peppers that are filled with a cheese and egg mixture, flattened and fried. People from both ends of the food chain seem to enjoy them! A shopska salad is simply tomatoes, cucumbers & feta cheese. The tomatoes are wonderful here, but we'll only have them for another few weeks and then they'll be "over" until next summer. Stoil insisted that I bring a bottle of his wine and another bottle of rakia to the festivities and everyone agreed that "he 'da man!!"

Stoil is truly cool. He looks like Walter Brennan in any old John Wayne film, wears an ankle length pink housecoat with panache, and roars outrageously at any politician unwise enough to appear on TV during dinner. The other night he poured us each a small neat whiskey instead of rakia and I noticed the difference immediately. For one thing my vision never actually blurred and I didn't hear the roar of jet engines that always accompanies a glass of rakia. It's tame stuff this whiskey and I don't feel it's a proper drink for men. We'd best save it for the ladies and small children.

Further to the week. We also had a visit by Carl Hammerdorfer, the head of the Peace Corps in Bulgaria and with site assignments coming up next week, this added to our general stress levels as well. We are always being assessed and this was just one more notch on the site assignment pistol. Then we had to arrange for and facilitate a Community Meeting. That means that we were expected to go out into our community and invite people to a meeting to give us a general idea of what they think we could be doing here to help out. This meeting was held on Thursday night and we had nine people show up. They gave us several ideas and we're supposed to choose one to work on while we're here for the next few weeks. Their ideas ranged from complete the sewerage treatment plant to giving some of the senior citizens a few lessons on the computers. Brian and I are willing to tackle the sewers but I think computer classes are going to win out in the end.

Then on Friday we had a Hub Meeting in Pazardjik. We are usually taken to and from Hub Meetings in a PC van because the bus schedules between there and Saedinenie are pretty bad. The van picked us up right on time but we were told that we'd have to make our own way home. So after the meeting we headed for the bus and got on one going to Plovdiv where we could catch a connection to our town. We were able to catch the last bus out of Plovdiv and found ourselves standing in the aisle. When the bus was completely full, and we were jammed against each other like people who knew each other much more intimately than was proper, the driver said in Bulgarian, "everyone move back" and he let another fifteen or twenty people on. It was one of those adventures that still doesn't seem like fun even a day or so later.

Anyway, this weekend is the big Festival here in town. Saedinenie is where the revolution began that eventually led to the overthrow of 500 years of Ottoman rule and we're going to whoop and holler about it all day Sunday. I'm really looking forward to being back in the midst of a crowded square filled to overflowing with sweaty strangers.

By the way, for those of you who are interested, I have added a couple of photo albums that will show something of the area and people I'm with.