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.