Flu-cation

We interrupt these posts about our amazing trip to Egypt to bring you news from real life.
"Svinski Grip" (свински грип). 
That's what's going around these days. The good ol' H1N1 "Swine Flu."  It's enough of a problem that they canceled all classes in Bulgaria this week.  Our students weren't actually sick (almost no absences), but other schools got it.  Shannon's got it.
I wouldn't recommend it. Swine flu sucks. I've never seen her so sick (I'm also sure I've never personally been that sick myself, thankfully). She's now missed 5 days of work, and has only left the house twice in the last week, both times when I drove her to the doctor's.  Last week (when I decided she really needed to see a doctor) she told me "Every follicle hurts. Everything hurts."  A few times she actually broke down in tears from the pain and misery of it all. She had convinced herself that maybe the excruciating all-over pain was just the remnants of muscle pain from starting a new pre-work morning yoga routine, but she also had a fever of 103, so maybe she was just delirious.


So I've got a really sick wife and no students, but I am still supposed to go to work every day this week. This was supposed to be final exam week. It was going to be a busy week with proctoring, grading, writing comments, etc. Now there's a fair amount of thumb-twiddling. Waiting. Actually, it's been kind of nice. I had a real 2-day weekend. Didn't work at all. Left my sick wife at home (she really wasn't very good company...) and went out to dinner, went dancing, went skiing, practiced for Faculty Follies, slept in. Good stuff.
[I'm really not the heel I sound like here, I swear. I have been taking care of Shannon, but there's really not so much to do when all she wanted to do for most of the last week was sleep.]

So I'm using this flu-cation to my advantage. Catching up on end-of-the-semester grading. Applying for jobs. Getting the car fixed. Going to the pharmacy. I really don't know how I would handle things like getting the car fixed if I were working full-time this week. Well, I do know. I probably wouldn't get it fixed, which is why I just today got around to getting the winter tires installed.

Winter tires? They're required in Bulgaria from November to March, I think. I was pretty skeptical on the whole matter, considering I've only ever used "all-season" tires in Michigan, Montana, Chicago, etc, and did just fine. Well apparently all-season tires are a LOT better than summer tires. At least they're a lot better than MY summer tires. I had to push my car out of my parking spot yesterday because there was a wee bit of snow/ice. I had to reverse down a street a 1/4 mile because I couldn't get up the vaguely slippery hill after leaving the pharmacist. I barely could turn left onto the Ring Road, because my side of the intersection had a slight incline.
OK, so the summer tires had to go. But where are the winter tires? I asked Mike, whom we'd bought the car from (he told us last spring that there were winter tires). "They're in the basement." "Are they the only ones there?" No, but they're the ones straight in there." OK. They didn't really look any different than my current tires, except maybe older. I asked him again "Yeah, those are the ones we used, the ones Ian gave us." OK.

At the shop, the mechanic took one look at my "winter" tires and said "Those are summer tires. 10 years old. Put them in the trash." Awesome.
He did have 3 used winter tires he'd sell me for cheap, but not four, sadly. And he didn't have the equipment to install them, even though I'd called in advance and expressly asked about changing tires. He drew me a nice map to a friend that could install them (I probably drove past 13 other tire-change places en route to his friend, but no matter.)  I got to his friend's shop, but couldn't find the door. Seriously, no door. No glass door with a nice "OPEN" sign. No big garage door. One padlocked shut steel door. One this-can't-really-be-a-door crack in the steel wall. But there were barely visible lights on, so I knocked. Nothing. Knocked again. Wall opens. "Miro?" "Da." Luckily the first mechanic had called ahead, because this one spoke no English, but we communicated acceptably well and for 19 leva I had 2 new-used winter tires installed on the front.
Back to the first shop. Hadn't had a car check-up since Albania in August. "You don't have any brakes." Awesome. Not entirely true (I had been stopping, after all), but still disconcerting. I alredy knew I didn't have any shocks. I could feel that in my ass every time I drove anywhere.
Apparently there is a $30 accessory plastic cover that keeps dirt out of the shocks (I think this is standard in the US), but someone had been cheap and didn't install it, so enough dirt had gotten into the shocks to seize them up completely. "They don't move. It's like you don't have shocks at all." Tell me something I don't know. To fix the brakes and all the shocks would cost (even at dirt-cheap Bulgarian labor prices) 750 leva (about $500), which is about half the value of the car.  Not sure I want to do that, considering we're going to try to sell it in 6 months or less. I'll probably do the brakes and front shocks only, and see how that goes.
On the way home, with my new and improved winter tires ("now with traction!") I decided to try to go back to the pharmacy we visited yesterday to get Shannon's antibiotics. I didn't need any more drugs, just a "faktura," an official invoice that we can use to get reimbursed from our health insurance. They're a big pain in the ass. Whenever I ask for one it takes 10 minutes to fill it out. It's very official, with stamps and everything. Only about 1/2 the time can the pharmacist even give us one. Either they don't have the form, or the right person isn't there, or the special printer isn't working, or they just don't feel like it, I don't know. Yesterday I was told to "come back tomorrow" with my regular receipt, and they would upgrade it to the proper faktura. Today I used my best past-tense Bulgarian (which isn't very good), trying to explain that I was there yesterday and needed a faktura. After some attempts at responding in quick and complex Bulgarian, the flustered pharmacist responded loudly in English, "SIXTEEN-O-CLOCK. TOMORROW."  Sure...

You can't ever go to just one pharmacy in Bulgaria. Nothing like CVS or Wahlgreens or Rite-Aid exists. They are all smaller than an average US kitchen, packed floor-to-ceiling with one of everything. Well one of most things, except the particular brand of Vitamin C that the doctor prescribed you for the flu (yes, he did).The first one we tried yesterday was at our local Hit grocery store. The friendly man explained in English that though they were a pharmacy, they didn't yet have their license to sell prescriptions (they'd only been open a few weeks). So we tried a smaller one across the street. She had the drugs, but no fakturas, and these were expensive (by BG standards) drugs, so she insisted I go somewhere else that could provide me with a faktura. The third place also didn't have the fakturas, but I had a deliriously sick Shannon waiting in the car and at this point I didn't care, so I took her "please come back tomorrow for a faktura" at face value and fled. Or tried to flee, until I couldn't get my summer-tire'd car up the vaguely slippery incline. Which brought me to the car repair shop today, trying to replace my summer tires with even older summer tires.

I'm mighty glad I had several hours to kill today for these adventures in Bulgarian living. I'm also mighty glad I don't work in a Bulgarian car repair place, where it is apparently not standard to heat your work garage. Brr.
So there you have a rambling story from my flu-cation. I'm not really complaining. Campus is beautiful in the snow, skiing was fun, and having time to do grading is a blessing. It's just interesting. Last year we actually got days off of work when they cancelled school for the flu-cation, and we went to Italian Lakes -- amazing. This year...no actual vacation, an actual flu, and car repairs. You win some you lose some.  Get better soon, Shannon!

YAY!!! Ugh. (Yay?)

YAY:
We had a fantastic trip to Italy for our "flu-vacation." There will be several posts coming from that trip (I think I took about 300 photos!), but not this week. We both felt actual joy, something that has been a bit hard to come by recently.

Ugh:
But now we're back to work, and what a week it is. The grading period ended today, so grades are due on Monday (and comments for 150 students), meanwhile we're trying to make-up work that was supposed to happen last week and figure out how to adjust for losing a week of the semester. 3 candidates to be the new head of school are visiting this week (and we're supposed to schmooze with them), and all the Americans are supposed to team up this weekend to cook Thanksgiving Dinner for the Bulgarian Faculty & Staff (which sounds like a great tradition, but just more to add to the weekly schedule). Did I mention how tired I am? Monday morning was rough, and we even came home from Italy before noon on Sunday, supposedly giving us time to rest up and get ready. Vacationing in Italy was so fun, it makes reality so...unpleasantly real.

Yay: We only have to get through 8 days of very tough schoolwork, and then it's Thanksgiving break, when we're heading to Istanbul. That will be fabulous I'm sure. After that, 3 weeks til Christmas break.

We can do this.

Stay posted for interesting stories and beautiful pictures...

School's out!

The Bulgarian Ministry of Health and Education just canceled our classes for next week due to the Swine Flu epidemic. My understanding of Bulgarian news is mostly limited to rumors and mistranslations, but I believe all Sofia-area schools are being shut down. After hovering in the high 20% range all week, our school actually crossed the fabled 30% absenteeism threshold today, so our school would have likely been shut down individually, even if they hadn't issued a city-wide closure. Kind of crazy. For the last few days, the students that were here knew that we might cancel school, and there was a "last day before Christmas vacation" squirelliness to classes. I've never been somewhere that was shut down for health reasons (the before (the students are calling it a "flu vacation"), although I think Westridge should have been a few times.

I'm supposed to report to work on Monday for meetings, lesson planning, and grading. Maybe Tuesday also, but no one really knows. We'll have to make up the missed school days later in the year, which won't be pretty.

But the good news: insta-vacation! I want to go somewhere that I can get last minute travel to/from cheaply, and where the swine flu season is not any worse than here. :) We're both still healthy, and hoping to keep it that way. Even if I just do lesson planning and grading, I might as well do it somewhere exotic, right? I'll take your suggestions for last minute travel destinations in the comments...

When pigs fly....

So...swine flu. Yeah, I thought it was kind of a joke too. One of my friends here made a nice "piggy flu" Halloween costume. But now things are getting a little crazy. Maybe it was that virology class that I took at Northwestern that still gives me the heebie-jeebies, but sometimes I have a hard time not believing the hype. I don't necessarily think that H1N1 is the new 1918 Spanish Flu, but there will be one, and when the next epidemic flu strain comes, it will be ugly.

30% of Shannon and I's students were out sick today. Yesterday there were almost 200 students out sick in our school (out of 700), and I'm sure it was worse today. The cafeteria ladies were (sometimes) wearing surgical masks. We're supposed to be getting anti-viral hand sanitizers around school, but I haven't seen anything yet. (I wish they would put paper towels in the bathrooms, maybe more people would wash their hands!). I gave a "wash your hands -- cover your cough -- get some sleep -- stay home if you're sick!" lecture to any students that did come to class today, but who knows if it did any good. The pressure-cooker environment of our school doesn't help the situation. Students (and faculty too) come to school when they shouldn't, because they don't feel like they can afford to get behind in their work.

There have been four deaths in Bulgaria so far attributed to H1N1. 48 schools in Sofia have been temporarily closed so far for "flu vacations," and I would not be surprised if we are shut down soon as well. Even if we don't get shut down, it's pretty hard to figure out coherent lesson plans with a rotating cast of students and empty desks.

Google has had success tracking flu outbreaks based on the number of searches for "flu" and similar phrases. The results are scientifically sound and have been published in the journal Nature. Here is the current chart for Bulgaria.

Luckily the Bulgarian government is all over this one: they will vote soon about whether to approve spending (~ $8 million US) to order swine flu vaccine. That's right, about whether to order it. There is none available in Bulgaria. If they approve the funding, it might be here in January.

Shannon and I are healthy (for now), and I am very thankful for that. We're trying to get some rest, eat well, and wash our hands both regularly and fervently. Even if it's "just" the regular flu going around, and not something more insidious, the idea of being unpleasantly ill in a land where I don't speak the language nor understand the health care system is rather unappealing, to say the least.

On the plus side, we met today with a visiting insurance broker from our health insurance plan. I have never had and doubt I will ever have again a health insurance plan with coverage this good. It's worldwide. $100 annual deductible. Many things are 100% covered, and most everything else is 90%. Emergency medical evacuation is included if we need treatment and we're not somewhere that can provide a suitably "Western" standard of care. Our agent told us that if she tried to buy a similar plan for her employees in the USA, it would cost about $1600/month/employee. So that's nice.

The Bulgarian equivalent of "Cheers" is "наздраве" (pronounced "NAZ-dra-vay"), which translates as "To your health!" (Much like the German "Gesundheit!").
I think it's time for a hearty наздраве all around.