A Post

So, I chatted with my mom recently and we discussed the fact that I haven't written anything here in awhile.

I don't have anything to write about.

I mean, I probably do but it's all the same old stuff. I've finally gotten to the point where my life here is seemingly mundane and nothing is new enough or interesting enough to write about. I teach, I work with cute kids after school, I coach volleyball, and I...

Plus, why would anyone want to read about my life in MP when they could read about a man being bitten by a rattlesnake in a Walmart:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18068554

Or the fact that Britney Spears is joining X Factor USA:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/18067912

The internet is truly fascinating. So much information. So little time.

-Age

Things I've Said While Teaching. Seriously.

Phrases I've uttered in my English classroom here in Bulgaria:

• No drinking beer in class

• Stop punching your friends

• Let me smell that. Oh jeez. Rekia is for adults, not 11-year-olds.

• You dropped your cigarettes.

• Please put you clothes back on.

• What's more important, English or what you're doing right now? ......Oh.

• Please don't light your chair on fire....Really? Why? OK, because fire is hot and I don't want to die.

• What just hit me? Oh! Free pen!

• You want to know what "M*** F***" means in Bulgarian? Well, we have dictionaries in the back. Look it up.

• Well, that was incredibly inappropriate.  .......Incredibly? Много  .....Inappropriate? Лош.

• You haven't drunk beer in over a year? You mean, you're one year sober?!?! Well, bravo. Stay on the wagon, buddy. You'll want to start middle school with a clean slate. ...........Nothing.

I substitute taught in So-Cal for a couple years so my American version of this list would probably involve less alcohol but certainly more foul language and the occasional weapon. Ah, kids.

-Age

Istanbul. Aşkım. Canım. Seni Seviyorum.

Although a picture is worth a thousand words and I have what amounts to 100,000 words uploaded onto facebook, I'd like to write about my recent trip to Istanbul so I can look back one day and remember all the little things.

• We took an over-night train. We being Katelyn, Evan, Nichole, and I. The man in charge of the non-sleeping section of the train was Bulgarian, the man in charge of the sleeping section (our section) was Turkish and knew only a few phrases such as "15 euro" and "no problem" and "OK?" which made things equally frustrating and hilarious. Nichole spoke to the Bulgarian man in order to translate for another passenger who only spoke English. She was doing really well except for our drunk Turkish conductor who kept interrupting her with "no problem, no problem" - he was such a mess and later asked one of the other passengers to buy him a bottle of Johnny Walker at the border. 

• When we got to the border at 1:00am, we had to get off the train and get onto a bus because Turkey is remodeling its train lines. Great. Then, the bus wasn't working and we had to wait 2 hours for someone to come fix it. Fantastic. Then, after about 30 minutes of travel, it broke again and we had to wait for a new bus. It was pretty terrible but we finally made it to Istanbul and immediately took very long naps before going for dinner, tea, desert, and then beers. We made up for the time we'd missed.

• We made a scavenger hunt for ourselves to complete by the end of the trip. We had to find:
• 5 hipsters
• Neon pants for each color of the rainbow (purple turned out to be the hardest to spot)
• a group of 30 children or more (they were everywhere)
• 2 men on one Vespa
• 2 people walking together wearing the same outfit (we saw that 3 times)
• a mosaic
• a viewpoint with at least 5 mosques visible at the same time
• a Whirling Dervish
• a PCV
• an American
• a hooka (shisha, nargile, water pipe) bar
• and other things I can't quite remember

• We made up a game called "friendly men" because Turkish men are very friendly towards each other and enjoy linking arms and putting arms around shoulders while they walk and talk. We got one point for every "friendly men" couple we pointed out. I believe the total tally was around 30.

• We made educational videos about Turkey, particularly Hagia Sofia, which I hope to upload to facebook if my internet will let me do something so fancy. They star Katelyn as the tour guide and Evan as the curious tourist. She explains the artifacts, culture, and tradition of Istanbul in six very entertaining specials. They involve giants, mashed potatoes, rectangles, and Santa Claus, among others.

• We drank a lot of Turkish tea. We even played a game of backgammon with a bunch of men in business suits while drinking tea (now that I think of it, that was on the scavenger hunt list - backgammon).

• We loved the hostel staff: Can (pronounced John), Gulsum, and Memo. We talked about men with Gulsum and she imparted some wisdom about Turkish men while we told her what we knew of American men. We smoked shisha with Memo and Can and played a game where I gave them a theme and they had to smoke the theme. Can's theme was shy. He's pretty hilarious so needless to say we all laughed hysterically and then he went on to tell dirty stories about foreigners smoking hooka for the first time and we laughed some more. Memo's theme was sexy and he made the most of the hooka's shape. We also had a dinner at the hostel that involved Turkish dancing at the end and we taught them how to horo. Then we did the limbo and learned that Turkish people can really bend. We stayed up all night talking and laughing and playing games. I also learned, from Memo, some romantic phrases in Turkish like "my love" - "my soul" - "my one and only" - "I love you" while Can taught us all dirty words and phrases in Turkish that I won't repeat here. 

• On our one night to go out on the town, we started off with 7 guy friends joining us. Before we actually made it to the bar, we had 0. Nichole joked about how pathetic that was but we ended up dancing all night to very strange music at a very strange bar and having a great time. Nichole dances really well and, at some point in the night, the bartender pretty much forces her to dance on the bar top and she insisted that Katelyn go with her. Katelyn, my friend who's deathly afraid a fire, joins her to dance on the bar which the bartender then lights of fire. Maybe one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Evan, seeing what the bartender had in mind, begged him not to do it. He said not to worry, lit some alcohol on fire, Katelyn froze in panic, eyes wide, and then jumped off the bar followed closely by Nichole. Epic.

• A very cute Turkish boy proposed marriage to Evan and then asked her out for tea (natural progression). She went. It was very cute.

I think that's all. It was a great trip.

-Age

Call Me Grimm (but don't really, I probably wont' respond)

My sixth graders are studying past tense in short stories and my counterpart asked me if I had a story I could recite for the class. I didn't. So I made one up. It went like this:

"Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess. She lived in California and was bored with her life. She wanted adventure. She wanted excitement. So she traveled to a far away land called Bulgaria. There she found a small school with many beautiful children and began to teach English. However, there was a group of evil students. They made the princess's life miserable. She came up with a plan. Every day after school the princess would go deep into the woods and spend one hour digging a giant hole in the ground. She dug and she dug and she dug and after many months and lots of hard work, the hole was finally ready. She told her evil students that they would be going on an excursion in the woods after school that day. She led them into the woods and as they neared the hole she told them she wanted to play a game. For this game they would have to close their eyes and follow the princess's voice. For possibly the first time ever, they did as they were told and when they neared the edge of the hole the good students from the princess's sixth grade class pushed them all in the giant hole where they were left to think about their evil ways. Then the princess and her sixth graders lived happily ever after. The end."

They enjoyed it.

-Age

(This fairy tale is 90% fiction. Only the evil and good students are real. There is no hole. I'm not a princess. And I would never use a shovel as a disciplinary tool.)

I'm Uncertain About Certainty

Certainty.

I don't actually think this exists.

Two people can know two opposite things with what they consider to be absolute certainty and all it really shows is that both are kinda arrogant.

Plus, sometimes, the not knowing is so much better than the knowing.

Think about a movie, or album, or book that you just loved and you watched, listened, or read it over and over again and it got to the point where you wished you could go back and experience it for the first time all over again cuz that's when it held most of its magic.

Not knowing holds so many possibilities.

So many of us joined the Peace Corps for similar reasons. I won't go into them cuz frankly they're boring by now but I will tell you just one of mine. I'd lived in the same town in Southern California all my life. I'd had the same friends, then same life, the same little bubble that I wasn't even aware existed cuz, well,  bubbles are see-through and sometimes you just can't tell you're in one. I was typecast, so to speak. I had my role and that was it - breaking out of it wasn't really an option cuz if I ever did anything that wasn't a typical "Adrienne" thing to do someone would surely stop and say, "Hey, look what Adrienne did. That's not right."

But.

In joining the Peace Corps, I got to experience an all new country, all new group of people, all new everything. I got to be whoever I wanted to be and change the things that I desperately wanted to change about myself without anyone being the wiser.

And now, with graduate school, I get the opportunity to do it all over again. And it's exciting. I like the uncertainty of a new place, new people, and a new me.

I'm a huge, no, HUGE fan of people who are genuine. Completely themselves all the time and couldn't give a rat's ass whether what they do is popular (which is actually unpopular) or unpopular (which is actually popular). But that doesn't mean we can't change. Self-improve. It comes with time and maturity and, most importantly, experiences. I'm happy to be experiencing so much with my life right now and as this Peace Corps journey is coming to an end, I'm excited for the not knowing of the future.

-Age

10 Things

10 Things I Love About Bulgaria:

• martenitsi
• wild flowers
• teasing my students  
• hanging my clothes out on the line on a sunny day
• when my colleagues make each other laugh
• watching my students horo
• hearing my 5th graders insert a random English word into a Bulgarian sentence
• "той беше unfriendly, Мис."
• "Аз съм пич и много confident. На ли, Мис?
• strolling the pazar eating a bag of fresh cherries
• friendly drivers giving me a ride to the next town over
• feeling very confident about using public transportation

 10 Weird Habits That Will Be Awkward When I Get Back Home:

• nodding for "no" and shaking for "yes"
• inserting a random Bulgarian word into an English sentence
• "I want a pizza без corn and mayonnaise, please."
• "Hey, стига, that's not funny."
• talking to myself
• putting feta cheese on everything
•  treating every bed and couch as though they're made of clouds and goodness
• hugging washing machines and kissing dryers
• insistence on unwavering and intense eye contact during every cheer
• assuming you can take a break from work and chat with me at any point during the day
• complaining about the length of words and lack of acronyms
• suggesting weekend trips that are several hours of travel away

-Age

How Low Can She Go?

I've been feeling low lately. Not at all myself. I blame the weather and almost believe it but I think it's just a case of Peace Corps Blues. I'm homesick and I'm weighed down with the thoughts of what these next four months mean. 

Also, I've changed.

I reached a lot of my limits. The limits of my patience, my compassion, my kindness. The things about me that I once thought limitless have reached their frayed ends. It's as if there are two sides of me, the old me and the new me, fighting for who gets what when this is all over. The old me is negotiating how much it's willing to allow as permanent change and the new me is negotiating which changes it wants to keep and which it wants to leave here forever. 

Here's what I'm afraid of:

• I've grown lazy.
• Will I be able to go right back to being busy? Will I be able to handle a 10-12 hour work day without once feeling overwhelmed or overworked, as I once did? Will I be able to work a normal, 8-hour work day and fill-in the rest of the time with practical and interesting tasks? Or has learning to relax and take things slower without the guilt (though, clearly, there's still guilt) something I want to keep?

• I've lost a sense of unconditional kindness and compassion.
• I've always had this strong idea of mankind as a whole. I help you if you need it and you help me when I need it. We give and take and try and perfect the harmony of a connected humanity. But, now, there are people I refuse to look at when I'm walking down the street, eyes I can't meet going down the halls of my own school, people I'd rather not associate with because of bad past experiences. These people aren't necessarily in need...but...is it still kindness when it's easy? If it's hard for me to lift my head and smile at a man I know will more than likely make me feel uncomfortable, isn't that all the more reason to do it because that may be the only smile he gets all day? When a student who makes it his job to flip me off at every chance walks past, shouldn't I still say hello just in case this time he'll keep his opinion of me to himself?

•  I've lost motivation.
• What do I want to do again?

• I don't listen.
• I used to pride myself on being a good listener. I genuinely cared and wanted to hear everything my friends, family, and students had to say. Now, I'm so full of my own worries, complaints, and ideas, I've suddenly so much to say, that I don't really listen anymore. I interrupt and I go on and on and when people need an ear, I'm all mouth. On the other hand, I've learned who of my friends are also good listeners, maybe something I didn't notice before but appreciated now (the inverse is also true, unfortunately). But, will I calm down and listen when I get home?

•   I've gotten grumpy.
• Where's the line between assertive and bitchy? Cuz I really don't know. Sometimes I think well done, you've stood up for yourself and other times I think why did you just say that? When several hours of train travel in one weekend, lack of understanding, cultural obstacles and the like become too numerous, I just let the bitch out. I didn't even know she was there. Do I like her? Do I wanna keep her? Maybe as just a weapon for extreme situations? I really don't know.

I'm afraid of those things and other things too - like rabid dogs, the plague, and rejection letters. That moment right before you go over the edge on a roller coaster. Cauliflower.

I'm interested to see how this all turns out. But, right now, I'm feeling a little low. But spring is apparently here as of today, so that's encouraging. Maybe I'm just an icy snow queen who should avoid places like Siberia, the North Pole, and Minnesota.

-Age