#1 Supplier

I have enjoyed many vegetables and watermelons from her garden.

Potatoes

Getting the soil ready for the potatoes. I had no idea that you just plant a little potato and potatoes grow from it. Am I the only one? Beans and corn too. I still can't believe that you put a potato in the dirt and more potatoes come from it.

I was feeling so close to a cow today that I wiped the cold out its eye. My friend squeezed the utters and heated the milk for a minute then we drank deliciousness. I was thankful. Cows are good but the best move is to drink goat's milk with a raw egg and honey in it. You will be strong.

Swing

Do you hear that 'woooooosh' sound I make? I don't know why I made it but look how beautiful this is.

Best Field Trip

I went on a field trip this weekend with the 7th grade. We traveled to Banite. How can you go wrong with a three hour hike in the mountains, a sauna and a steam room, great colleagues and the nicest kids? This was as good as a field trip could be.

The teacher who planned it must have done this before. We rotated sauna time: first the girls, then the boys, then the women, then the men. The doctor and the bus driver relaxed in the jacuzzi while I sweated in the sauna.

I was beat after the hike and sauna but the students danced and had fun into the night.

Asen Dimitrov

The first time I met Asen he was wearing his Sunday best, slowly sippin' a bottle of red wine mixed with lemonade and chewing sausages. I was waiting for a sauna to heat up and I stopped in the cafe around the block to drink a coffee. It was 8:30 in the morning, cold, winter, I stood over the wood burning stove rubbing my hands while I waited for the woman to bring me a coffee. I pulled half of a three day old banana from my bag and before I could scrape off the brown from the exposed side, I was offered a plate for my half a banana. Then I ordered cream and I had everything. Enjoying my breakfast I made room for a sharp dressed man and that sharp dressed man was Asen. I didn't really make room, no one else was in the cafe. I just told him to sit with me.

He ordered a bottle of Bear's Blood wine. It costs two bucks in the cafe, the little bottle of lemonade costs 1.20. The wine is so bad though that you have to cut it with juice; it's like a free cell phone. You still have to pay to use it. Asen and I talked a little and then just smiled at one another.

When his sausages came I realized that he had no teeth and when he chewed his lower lip almost touched his nose.

I didn't have a drink with him because I had to go to the sauna. I use this time to think and periodically I jump out to write down a thought. This time though I could only think about that lip to nose chew.

On Friday, having walked for a long time without seeing anyone, I was glad to hear the sound of donkey hooves. And on that donkey was Asen. I have not had a camera for 10 months and I'd just borrowed one from a friend whose house I was walking home from.

Wooden Mushrooms

We have a cross country team. We don't have uniforms or compete yet but we run. Today, on a gorgeous run through the mountains, they stopped, cracked these off of a tree that they had spotted a long ways away, and presented me with this gift of wooden mushrooms.

Sway-ish

No nights on the town but I'm not missing much.

Baba Tsetsa

Tsetsa and Metodi. Nobody I know really knows them yet they took care of me for 10 weeks. Tsetsa, who was up at 5 in the morning or earlier, working in the garden, would wake me up, make me breakfast and then walk me, hand-in-hand, to school every morning.

She knitted me this sweater I'm wearing in the picture and she knitted me socks. She washed my clothes and when I got a girl's phone number at a wedding, she woke me up early the next morning to tell me that this girl was too fat for me. I didn't think so but I would not act contrary to this woman's wishes. And, she is a too much for a blog.

Metodi. If Tsetsa wasn't around, he would just yell at me. Imagine a 79 year old man asking me to hand him a fork but I don't know what he's asking. All I could do was drink his homemade booze and watch music videos. I cut his lawn and worked in his vineyard though, so I wasn't a total lump.

Keep the Countryside Clean and Green

I'd been in my classroom planning lessons, writing, and then I listened to that Morrissey 'Swords' record that my brother sent me. "Teenage Dad on his Estate," is the best. I try to get students into Morrissey but they're not getting hyped yet. Having skipped lunch, my mind wasn't sharp. When I walked outside and saw the 4th graders raking up garbage, picking weeds, and cleaning up the entire playground, I thought I was seeing something that wasn't really there. I clapped and told them 'Bravo'! They responded in English, "Keep the countryside clean and green." I had them repeat that phrase at least 12 times last week. They can also say, '13,' and '30,' perfectly. That took me saying a lot of 'Thhhhhhhhhhhhhh's,' and eventually drooling on myself but now they know it isn't 'terteen and terty.' Morrissey has to happen on his own though. All I can do is plant the seed.

Off to a Start

I left home for the first time when I was 18, moving from Chicago to San Francisco. It never dawned on me that I'd be leaving family and friends and everything comfortable I knew, when I decided to move. The realization struck when I was standing outside a bathroom at SFO and I started to cry. 'Why am I crying'? I thought. 'Oh, I'm really alone for the first time,' I remembered. Later that day, I realized I wasn't alone. I had my skateboard. I was bombing hills, skating spots I'd dreamed about for years and meeting other kids who skated, within hours of leaving O'Hare.
Two years later I moved to Oxford to study philosophy with the Dominican monks at Blackfriars College. This time I came prepared with boards from my friend Ando at FTC and boards, trucks, wheels and three pairs of Natas' Vitae shoe from my friend Rob at AWH. Oxford has a fun little skate park and I met a great group of guys who I'd drive with to Radlands skatepark in Northampton every Wednesday. We'd kill it, laugh and drink cans of Stella. The skate wasn't enough though. I had to write two 10-page essays each week and then present them to my tutors, one at a time, just me and a tutor. I was in the library every day. My routine was wake up by 8, no matter what, wait in front of my flat for Michael J. Inwood to pass on his way to Trinity College, talk with him if he showed or walk to the library without him, study from about 8 to noon, skate the ramps or the zoological library until 2, eat lunch, study from 3 to 5, and go to the pub from 5 to 8. Life was different than anything I'd known or imagined and I had to make it through a lot of rain to finally get acclimated to my environment.
My most recent move was to Bulgaria. While Oxford took one term, 8 weeks, to get in the grove, it's taken me about 10 months in Bulgaria. Sometimes I feel like I went to sleep, woke up, and now I speak Bulgarian (terribly if you ask some people but not that terribly), teach English to 3rd to 8th graders, coach a basketball team and wander through the beautiful Rhodopie Mountains. Other times, I recount each painstaking experience of being afraid to go to the store to buy bread because I forgot the word for it, of being laughed at by three year olds just for saying, "Hello." And, then I'd remember growing up on the Northwest Side of Chicago and that I was that three year old laughing at the kids straight from Poland. After endless gifts of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and potatoes straight from people's gardens, gifts of pickled everything (green tomatoes, cabbage, peppers, hot peppers, garlic, eggplant...), walks, talks, trips and falls, I'm standing on my feet.