Sofia, finally!

After one of the craziest weeks of our lives, we finally made it to Sofia, Bulgaria! Let's recap the week. Last Friday, Shannon successfully defended her PhD thesis, and is now "Doctor Shannon," a doctor of Ecology and Environmental Studies. That evening we had a great going away/PhD celebration party at our house. It was supposed to be a BBQ on the patio, and we were supposed to be all packed before-hand, but constant rain and our massive piles of stuff messed with those plans. Oh well...we just shoved aside the packing boxes and had the party inside. Thanks so much to everyone who came -- it was great to see you all and we appreciated your well wishes.

We spent all day Saturday packing, with Shannon's dad doing a masterful job with stuffing the Uhaul truck. We didn't get on the road until 7:30 at night (a wee bit after our planned 9am departure), drove til midnight, got up at 6 am and drove the rest of the 750 miles down to the Denver area, arriving just in time for another going away party! :) Down at Shannon's parents we got to spend the evening with her aunts and uncles and our friends Heather, Bajji, Dave, Leah, and Hanna. Thanks all for coming out to see us off.

Monday was more packing, as well as all the last minute "Oh my god we're leaving the country for 2 years" tasks, so we were up until well past midnight, again. Just trying to get so exhausted that we could sleep anytime, I suppose. We left for the Denver airport at 6:30 am.

Tip for international travelers: don't get 3 legs of your flight on 3 different, non-partner airlines. We didn't have a choice, as we didn't buy our own tickets, but it made life much more difficult, having to go to the ticket window in Denver, Chicago, and London to get our boarding pass for the next flight, and each time beg/cajole them to not charge us again for the extra luggage (United claimed months ago that we could pay them up front for the whole trip, then tried to change their story at the airport...not OK.)

After wandering Heathrow stupidly for almost 2 hours as we tried to figure out our next flight, we eventually got to use part of our 8.5 hour layover to take the tube ("Mind the gap!") into the city and spend a brief lunch break at the Tower or London with Chryssi (we're excited to be on the same continent as her again).

Traveling is almost always tiring and somewhat stressful (at least the way I usually travel...sorry Shannon!), but as we were on our approach to Sofia it started to hit me just what we were getting ourselves into. I said to Shannon, "I've done some crazy sh*t in my life, but this is definitley up towards the top of the list!" We were arriving well after dark in a new country where we didn't speak the language, we didn't know where we would be staying, if anyone would be around to orient us, if we could even get to a grocery store the next day, yikes yikes yikes.
As we landed, the passengers applauded, and a smile broke over my face. I like places where they still applaud a safe landing (or is it the excitement of a vacation destination?), as opposed to just expecting perfection.

We got all of our luggage (8 checked bags in total, plus 2 carry-ons each). We just walked right through customs without even slowing down. The school sent a driver with a big van for us, and took us on the surprisingly short (<15 minutes) drive to the school, which is set off from the main city a bit and is very quiet and peaceful on campus. We weren't sure if we were going to be living on campus or about a mile away, but we were taken to a beautiful apartment right on campus. They are still working on restoring the building, turning what was known as the "Frat House" into 3 separate apartments, but this one is done, and all the furnishings/fixtures/walls are brand new (they were still assembling furniture yesterday). We aren't sure that we'll get to stay in this unit, but we hope so...it's probably the nicest apartment I've ever had! We were very happy that the school had been thoughtful enough to buy a few essentials for us (bread, cheese, meat, soap, beer, wine...), which made the apartment much more welcoming.

After we'd been here about half an hour (about 11pm), 3 of our new colleagues came by to welcome us. It was very much appreciated, as we could ask them lots of questions (and polish off that bottle of wine the school had left us!).

I'll post some photos later on, but things are going well so far. Everyone has been very helpful and friendly, our apartment (or what will hopefully be our apartment) is great, and the campus seems nice and wooded.

Thanks to everyone who has been sending us well wishes. It was very hard to say goodbye to everyone -- we hope you'll write/call.

FYI, you can call us at area code (зоз) 5eight6-lfive71, and it will connect to us via Skype [I put some weird characters in the phone # to ward off web-crawling robo-spammers, but if you can't read it, just email us]. Free for us, and all it costs you is whatever a call to Denver costs (no international charges). We're 7 hours ahead of US Eastern Time Zone here, and are still trying to get used to the jet lag.

bye for now...
jeff