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!