LG's Excellent PC Adventure

I spent this past week traveling back and forth from Stara Zagora to Sofia to visit the dentist on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It's about a 3 1/2 hour bus ride each way so it made for a long week. The PC dentist is a Bulgarian who was trained in Sweden and speaks perfect English albeit with a Swedish accent. He did a fine job on my teeth and I don't have any worries about the quality of my care for the two years I'll be here. A small side benefit of the many trips to Sofia is that I now have a pretty good grasp of the public transportation system in the big city. The bus arrives at the misnamed "Central Aftogara", which is the bus station on the far north side of the city. The PC office is south and west and it takes two trams to get there. The dentist's office is in the Kempinsky Hotel which is on the southern edge of Sofia. A bit of trivia about the Kempinsky, it's the hotel used by the man who shot the Pope. He stayed in Room 911 the night before his assassination attempt. Our dentist uses Room 110.

The public transportation system works differently in Sofia from the rest of the country. Everywhere else you just get on and purchase your ticket on the vehicle, not in Sofia. There you must go to a kiosk and buy your ticket before you get on the bus, tram or trolley. Then after you get on, you have to take your ticket to one of the little ticket punches and stamp it yourself. Periodically a ticket checker will board the vehicle and demand to see your punched ticket. If you don't have a ticket or you have a ticket that hasn't been punched, you are subject to a fine. It's sort of like the honor system with a gray area.

I was able to make good use of my trips to Sofia to meet with a few people who might be able to help me draw up my request for funding for the disabled knitters. Networking is the name of the game here and I'm out of practice. My colleagues at work have developed an incredible network and they are able to bring in experts in almost any field whenever they have a need for advice or assistance. For example, we've been asked to provide training for two new groups, a group of pharmacists from Bosnia and a group of journalists from Armenia. Our expertise is in setting up the training programs and we'll just go out and subcontract with local experts on the pharmaceutical business and journalism. However, these two groups won't be arriving until next February so we probably won't begin working on the projects until after New Year. Right now the only contribution I can make is to tap into the PC network and I'm still learning just how far that network extends.

The weather here has turned rainy and cold so I used Sunday to cook. I made two big pots of soup and I'll live off of them all week. One is a lentil soup with onions, carrots, garlic and big chunks of ham and the other is a chicken and mushroom soup with some veggies and rice thrown in for good measure. The bread here is wonderful and my next project is to learn to bake. By the time I leave Bulgaria, I'll be reasonably self-sufficient.

As with the States, this coming week will be a slowdown week. We won't work on Friday and we'll have a very light schedule between Christmas and New Year's. Some of my friends are gathering in Plovdiv for Christmas and then going into Saedinenie for the day on Saturday. There seems to be some concern on their part as to whether or not they are invited back by their host families. My attitude is that "I'm family and they're stuck with me!". If I tag along I'm sure Veneta and Stoil will be delighted to see me, and if not, they'll fake it.

I'll try to get one more journal entry in sometime over the Holidays, but if you don't get to it; Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and a very Happy and Healthy New Year!!