Our National Television Debut

It only took 6 months of living in Bulgaria before we made it on national television! Our colleague and friend, Carolyn, has been writing an excellent and quite popular blog about her life here, and has managed to attract a regular audience of Bulgarian readers, including many she has never met. As part of a social experiment, Carolyn wanted to try, as best she could, to live within a typical budget of a Bulgarian for a month. She had a rather long online discussion on just what that meant exactly (her housing, like ours, is provided by the school, although maybe a 20-something single Bulgarian would still be living with parents, etc etc...you can read some of the posts on this here, here, and here), but she settled on a budget of 400 leva (about $280) for the month. That is almost double the minimum wage, but less than the roughly 600 leva she determined would be a normal salary for someone in her position. Carolyn recognized that there were definite limitations to the experiment, such as her already-purchased plane tickets for a weekend trip to Rome, her ability to put off major purchases for a month that she might not be able to do if this were her actual salary, and her lack of a true local's information network to save money, but she thought it would still be worthwhile. (My apologies Carolyn, if I'm butchering your experiment...it's my best attempt to summarize it.)

Apparently one of her regular readers was a producer at Zdravei, Bulgaria, an equivalent to the Today show on NBC or Good Morning America on ABC. He thought this was interesting, and asked Carolyn if he could record some of her regular life as she carried out this experiment. And so they did...they taped her making oatmeal, riding the bus, teaching class, ordering food in the cafeteria, and (this is where we come in) Balkan Dancing.

Shannon loves dancing. Shannon hates speaking in front of people. So you can imagine how excited she was to have Carolyn's film crew at our Balkan dancing lesson. Many of the Bulgarians there (mostly moms of our students, actually) also did not want to be on camera, and kept shoving me over to stand next to Carolyn. Things got more entertaining when after only about 10 minutes of the lesson the power went out on campus. No lights, no music. Whoops.
Luckily the light on a professional video camera is quite bright. We did the rest of the lesson with only the light from the camera. Stoyan (PE teacher and the Balkan dancing instructor) carried around his tiny netbook computer for barely-audible sound. It was all rather amusing. After the lesson, Shannon and I were slow to get out the door, and the camera crew cornered us.

"How much money do you spend in a month?"
"Er, I don't know really."
"C'mon, give us a number!"

Shannon and I tried to keep track of our expenses when we first got here, but the bookkeeping was inflated by lots of one-time moving-in type expenses (shoe rack, sheets, bookshelf, etc). We also found that we were spending a lot less than we were making, and found it hard to care enough to keep track of everything. I also was used to paying for most things in the US with a credit card, which gave me a quick and easy record of my expenses, so having to keep track of lots of little receipts for cash just seemed so, you know, annoyingly 20th century. :)

What I said on the video (I spend roughly 50 leva during the week, maybe another 70 leva on the weekend) is probably reasonably close, if I don't count weekends where we travel (and we haven't since New Year's) or do any major shopping (I had to replace some broken jackets last weekend, but I'm definitely not much of a shopper). I probably underestimated (I sort of forgot about the big weekly grocery shopping trips), so maybe my monthly average for day-to-day living is closer to 600 leva. I'm thankful that when your housing is provided and your utilities are cheap ($10 month for cable/internet, $15 a month for my cell phone), your salary goes a long way.

I didn't really mean to come off negative about Bulgaria, but when he asked me "What surprised you the most when you arrived here?" I had to answer with my first impressions. (Dogs and litter). Mostly I didn't really have any idea what to expect here, so the best answer is everything surprised me. I also was unprepared for how much harder teaching here would be than I remembered it being at Westridge, but I didn't feel like getting into that on camera.

At any rate, several of my friends found the video hilarious. Not so many of my students have seen the video (it airs at 7:30 am, when they are likely in transit to school), but they probably will soon with the magic of the internet. I really needed a haircut. Shannon really didn't want to be on camera. But my dancing could have been worse, and I think their stray dogs video clip was nice.

I'll try to get a Bulgarian to translate some of the audio for me, and I'll post it in the comments. You can turn off the YouTube "pop-up video" comments if you want. Go to the lower right corner of the video player, click the "up" arrow, and the top button says "Turn off annotations." The anchors of the show chit chat for a while on this clip, so you can skip ahead a minute or so if you want. This is video #4 of the 5 part series. Other clips can be seen here: Part 2, Part 3 (can't find part 1).

Enjoy!

Zipperless, Cold, and Sad in the Balkans

Ok, maybe not so sad. But that was the subject line of an email I sent to Mountain Hardwear's Warranty division ("lifetime warranty!") when I told them how I now have not one but two broken jackets with non-functional zippers. What follows is a portion of the letter I wrote to their warranty division. At any rate, I thought you'd enjoy these photos. I posted them on Facebook as well, but maybe the wider world would like to appreciate the suckiness of Mountain Hardwear's zippers. Hopefully I'll soon be able to add a comment to this post about how awesome their customer service is, although so far all I've gotten is an auto-reply that their warranty division was short-staffed and not accepting emails right now.

Dear Mountain Hardwear,


I have been a loyal customer of yours for over ten years, and have convinced many of my friends that your products were worth the extra money due to their quality design and durability. Last summer I moved from Bozeman, Montana to Sofia, Bulgaria (I miss the Rockies, but the Balkans are interesting) to teach high school biology. It was a big move, and while I couldn’t take very much of my gear with me, most of my Mountain Hardwear items made the cut. I kind of looked like a Mountain Hardwear commercial when I would layer up with my SubZero Vest, Windstopper Tech Jacket, and a mountaineering shell you don’t make anymore. (I could have added my SubZero parka, but that would have been overkill!) A colleague of mine moved here from California and bought a whole line of new North Face attire to keep him warm, so of course I teased him about how he had chosen the inferior brand. That teasing didn’t last long.

Me, in happier times, in my fleece jacket. Oh, how I miss you, zipper.

Walking home from the grocery store one chilly October night, my jacket zipper got stuck. Not a big deal, except that it would not pull free. Even after I got home, I was trapped in my coat. You can see the ridiculous pictures below of my attempts to escape. My wife had to cut the zipper head off with pliers to free me! Had this happened on one of my more adventurous outings in the mountains, it could have been a real problem. As it was, now the only fleece I brought to Europe was broken, and backed by a lifetime guarantee that required spending big money for international postage. Worse than that, winter was on its way, and I didn’t want to wait several months for the jacket to make a round trip to the USA via mail. Frustrated, I decided to suck it up and try to muddle through until summer when I would return to the US for a few weeks.

Stuck in my Windstopper Tech Jacket. The pit zips came in handy for attempts at freedom, but ultimately, not handy enough.

Unsuccessfully trying to force the jacket over my giant head. I can't blame the jacket for my apparent mushroom head. As I couldn't really go to school like this, the only option left was to attack the jacket with pliers.

And then another zipper broke, on a different Mountain Hardwear jacket! This time it was my mountaineering shell. What are the odds of that? I was out skiing this time, but luckily it was a sunny day and I was close to home. If I had been in the backcountry or on a week-long trip, I would have been much more upset. My friend with the North Face gear is really starting to give me the hard time now -- at least all of his zippers work!

Check out the cool broken zipper. I now leave it half-way up to keep warm (the Velcro closures also don’t stay closed at all), making my nice mountaineering jacket a rather awkward pullover.

Showing off my two broken jackets next to a lovely map of Bulgaria.

I would try to take the jackets to a local tailor to try to repair the zippers, but they are technical jackets with expensive parts. There is a windstopper liner on one and gore-tex on the other, and I didn’t want them damaged any more than necessary.

So now it’s mid-winter in Bulgaria, and I’m now down two jackets due to zipper failure. If only I had some extreme story to explain how I broke my zippers…sadly I do not. I would like to go skiing, but I no longer have any reasonable gear to do so that doesn’t require safety pins to keep even a little of the snow and wind out. This is not really acceptable. I would like to continue to be a loyal Mountain Hardwear customer, so I hope your lifetime warranty will come to the rescue. Even though the jackets are in terrible shape right now, they still are all I’ve got, so I don’t really want to mail them away for months. Do you have any possible suggestions? Does your European office deal with issues like this (as I am living in Bulgaria), or should this go through the USA office (where I bought the items)?

Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

Feel free to hang these photos around the office – I’m sure they’ll brighten someone’s day. I don’t really know how my head got to look like such a mushroom while trapped in your jacket, but that is indeed how it looked.

Sincerely (and coldly)

Jeff

Down the Rabbit Hole: Hip Hop in Bulgaria

Had a long, tough week (two weeks? three weeks? it all blends together) getting ready for and then giving semester exams. We have a 3 day weekend now before second semester starts. Several ambitious faculty hopped a cheap flight to Rome, but I decided that was crazy, as I have far too much grading to do before Monday (and comments! always the comments!).
Lucky for me this meant I was in town to attend a friend's birthday party at My Mojito, a local bar/dance club. I'd been before on a Friday night in August, when it was a trendy, expensive, euro-chic disco. On a Thursday night in February, the main dance floor is closed off, and a DJ is spinning for the weeknight crowd from a make-shift booth behind the bar. The DJ was playing hip-hop, and though I'm no connoisseur, I think it was all American and mostly stuff I'm familiar with: Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, WuTang Clan, the Roots, K'Naan, Cypress Hill, and a little cheesy Sir-Mix-a-Lot thrown in for booty-shaking good measure.

At 10:45 when I got there, our party of 10 or so kind of dominated the lounge, but by midnight, it was filling up, and people were starting to dance. The people-watching was fantastic. Picture, if you will, what your image of the crowd would be in any major US city playing the music I listed above.
This is not what we saw.
Apparently, hip-hop in Bulgaria is the haven for the freaks & geeks. I mean that in the nicest possible way.
There was very little of the "everyone dressed in black, lots of bling, lots of perfume" Eurostyling I'd come to know and love. Instead, it was like stepping into a Seattle coffeehouse scene, or maybe a Doc Marten's commercial. Lots of frumpy t-shirts and designer sweatshirts. In a country without much of a gay/lesbian community, it also seemed (surprisingly) that the lesbians were out in force. Fantastic! I'm glad there's a more tolerant place available then I had seen so far.
On the other hand, there's the guys. The dudes wearing big Fubu jackets and Hollister hoodies? I don't know how else to describe them except: chumps. I'd think about White Men Can't Jump, except I think Woody Haroldson could have schooled any of them at basketball. They were friendly enough, and I'm glad they were out having a good time, but it was weird for me not to feel like the intimidated poser white dude for once.
My personal favorite for people watching was the gentleman we came to know as "brown hoody guy."

Lead singer of Weezer (not Brown Hoody Guy, but there is a resemblance)

Imagine the lead singer of Weezer (or Buddy Holly, if you're of that generation) minus most of the cool. Make him short (sub 5 feet?). Give him a hint of a hunched back. Then make him solo on Dance Dance Revolution all night, a little off beat. And make him fearless. It was awesome. The little white dorky guy was rocking out to the hip-hop, completely un-self-consciously. I just couldn't stop watching. Don't ever stop dancing, Brown Hoody Guy!