Shannon likes to dance. A lot. Especially line dances and Balkan dances and things with steps (more so than random going-to-the-club dancing). So she was very excited when the wonderful PE teacher and volunteer Balkan dance instructor Stoyan organized a dinner and dancing outing with the group of teachers, parents, friends, and community members that have been Balkan dancing with Stoyan. The restaurant при братовчеда (Pri Bratovcheda, or "The Cousins'") is located in an unlikely spot: the interchange between two of Sofia's largest streets, nearly _in_ the interchange. Step inside though, and the roar of traffic is replaced with the happy sound of people dancing and raising their glasses in celebration. There was live music appropriate to dance a variety of "horos" (the line dances that many Americans associate with Greek dancing, but is popular all over the Balkans). The tables are set with traditional festive table cloths and Bulgarian pottery, and the traditional Bulgarian food looked tasty (I only sampled the fried potatoes with cheese (пуржени картофи съц сирене), which I can whole-heartedly recommend. The restaurant is not very big, so when the dances get going they wind in-and-out of all the tables, even outside the restaurant then back in another door.
I arrived 2+ hours later than Shannon, as I apparently needed a longer post-Open House nap than she did. When I arrived, she was all sweaty and smiley, telling my "I've been smiling so much my jaw hurts." Excellent.
Thanks Stoyan, for putting this together. This was a relatively rare chance to socialize with a broader mix of people (especially Bulgarian) than we usually get a chance to do, and it was just plain fun.
Below are two poor quality (but effective) videos I shot with my phone that give you a sense of the music, atmosphere, and dancing. Enjoy.
Video #1
Video #2
Showing posts with label balkan dancing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label balkan dancing. Show all posts
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
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!
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!
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Balkan Dancing
Jeff and I performed two Balkan dances in front of the entire school at two Christmas concerts.
Jeff is the only guy with a blue shirt/vest on. I'm in a black dress with an orange apron (4th from the end of the line in the first dance). All the girls in blue dresses are students who actually know how to dance, while the rest of us (in black or yellow) are teachers who are just doing this for fun. And it WAS a lot of fun even if we don't look terribly professional.
(Thanks to Brett and Betsy for putting this video together!)
Jeff is the only guy with a blue shirt/vest on. I'm in a black dress with an orange apron (4th from the end of the line in the first dance). All the girls in blue dresses are students who actually know how to dance, while the rest of us (in black or yellow) are teachers who are just doing this for fun. And it WAS a lot of fun even if we don't look terribly professional.
(Thanks to Brett and Betsy for putting this video together!)
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
This is not the post you're looking for...
I still will post Greece pictures and stories, I swear. I even edited the hundreds of photos down to a semi-reasonable number. The whole thing just takes a while, and we've been busy.
Sorry for the non-post. I just didn't want all of our loyal followers to think we've abandoned this site. I've been pleasantly surprised since I installed the visitor counter a few days ago how many people have been stopping by our site, even though we haven't posted anything.
Life continues here in Sofia. We're trying to get our heads above water with lesson planning (and soon grading), advising, life in Bulgaria, etc, etc. I've been surprised at how hard this teaching transition has been for me, even though I've taught before. The schedule and resources are very different, not to mention the challenges of teaching to english-language-learners. Of course it's all been much more difficult still for Shannon, as a first-timer at most of this.
Life also got tragically crazy here too...one of the students at our school was killed in a car accident, causing much upheaval in the community. Though I was actually faculty advisor of this student, I'd only met him once (and didn't teach him), on the first day of school. I've been involved in helping various communities deal with trauma, but I felt very helpless this time around, as I didn't know the student and don't know the rest of the student community yet either. Hard to watch so much sadness. There were 500+ people in the auditorium when they made the announcement, and you could hear a pin drop. Needless to say, the school was pretty disrupted in many ways last week. I'm learning that other people's grief seems to bring up my own as well, things I thought were pushed down out of the way enough to let me live my day-to-day life. [Miss you mom...]
We've had two weekends where we've stuck around Sofia, mostly resting up, doing schoolwork, and taking care of chores.
One fun outing was when we climbed up Mt. Vitosha, the 7400 ft mountain just outside of town. It was fun to hike (we took a ski gondola up and then hiked about another 1.5 hours up), but the weather was cold, foggy, windy, with very low visibility. Just about every other day for the last two weeks I could clearly see the summit from campus. Oh well.
Last weekend we did a variety of chores, trying to acquire boring things like more teaching clothes, a bookcase, and cell phones. We were definitely foiled on the cell phone front. That's a confusing enough experience in the US, but far worse here. After nearly 2 hours (yes, 2 hours) in the cell phone store, talking through an employee at the store next door (who didn't know anything about the phones or the plans) acting as an interpreter (because he spoke a little bit of English), we threw our hands in the air and gave up. We'll have to do our homework on the internet (where there are often english-language webpages of Bulgarian companies, and Google Translate is a decent option when there isn't) and go in knowing exactly what we want. Asking detailed questions of salespeople is not a luxury we have here. Part of the problem is that we were considering getting "smartphones" (wi-fi, web browser, GPS), but didn't really know what we wanted. Any fancy phone recommendations out there? The phones are much more expensive here (the new i-phone runs close to $1000, for instance) due to the lack of large long-term-contract discounts.
We just started doing Balkan dancing and yoga classes, both taught after-school by other teachers here. I had fun, despite my lack of bendiness or coordination, but I'm going to be mighty sore tomorrow, as the classes were back-to-back today.
Well, we surely will post Greece pictures/stories soon, and maybe some other stories about life. Thanks for all that are thinking of us.
-jeff
p.s. Our thoughts and prayers go out to my Grandmother Helen, who is in intensive care after a nasty fall down some steps, breaking several bones. We love you and are wishing you a speedy recovery, Grandma!
Sorry for the non-post. I just didn't want all of our loyal followers to think we've abandoned this site. I've been pleasantly surprised since I installed the visitor counter a few days ago how many people have been stopping by our site, even though we haven't posted anything.
Life continues here in Sofia. We're trying to get our heads above water with lesson planning (and soon grading), advising, life in Bulgaria, etc, etc. I've been surprised at how hard this teaching transition has been for me, even though I've taught before. The schedule and resources are very different, not to mention the challenges of teaching to english-language-learners. Of course it's all been much more difficult still for Shannon, as a first-timer at most of this.
Life also got tragically crazy here too...one of the students at our school was killed in a car accident, causing much upheaval in the community. Though I was actually faculty advisor of this student, I'd only met him once (and didn't teach him), on the first day of school. I've been involved in helping various communities deal with trauma, but I felt very helpless this time around, as I didn't know the student and don't know the rest of the student community yet either. Hard to watch so much sadness. There were 500+ people in the auditorium when they made the announcement, and you could hear a pin drop. Needless to say, the school was pretty disrupted in many ways last week. I'm learning that other people's grief seems to bring up my own as well, things I thought were pushed down out of the way enough to let me live my day-to-day life. [Miss you mom...]
We've had two weekends where we've stuck around Sofia, mostly resting up, doing schoolwork, and taking care of chores.
One fun outing was when we climbed up Mt. Vitosha, the 7400 ft mountain just outside of town. It was fun to hike (we took a ski gondola up and then hiked about another 1.5 hours up), but the weather was cold, foggy, windy, with very low visibility. Just about every other day for the last two weeks I could clearly see the summit from campus. Oh well.
Last weekend we did a variety of chores, trying to acquire boring things like more teaching clothes, a bookcase, and cell phones. We were definitely foiled on the cell phone front. That's a confusing enough experience in the US, but far worse here. After nearly 2 hours (yes, 2 hours) in the cell phone store, talking through an employee at the store next door (who didn't know anything about the phones or the plans) acting as an interpreter (because he spoke a little bit of English), we threw our hands in the air and gave up. We'll have to do our homework on the internet (where there are often english-language webpages of Bulgarian companies, and Google Translate is a decent option when there isn't) and go in knowing exactly what we want. Asking detailed questions of salespeople is not a luxury we have here. Part of the problem is that we were considering getting "smartphones" (wi-fi, web browser, GPS), but didn't really know what we wanted. Any fancy phone recommendations out there? The phones are much more expensive here (the new i-phone runs close to $1000, for instance) due to the lack of large long-term-contract discounts.
We just started doing Balkan dancing and yoga classes, both taught after-school by other teachers here. I had fun, despite my lack of bendiness or coordination, but I'm going to be mighty sore tomorrow, as the classes were back-to-back today.
Well, we surely will post Greece pictures/stories soon, and maybe some other stories about life. Thanks for all that are thinking of us.
-jeff
p.s. Our thoughts and prayers go out to my Grandmother Helen, who is in intensive care after a nasty fall down some steps, breaking several bones. We love you and are wishing you a speedy recovery, Grandma!
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