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!)

Holiday Travel is Awesome! (Part 1 of 3): EuroSnow

Written 21 December 2009

(This is a rather long screed, so I broke it into pieces. Click here for part 2, or here for part 3. )

Tonight is technically the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, but Shannon and I know better. For us, it was last night, and the forces of light have already defeated the forces of dark. What follows is story of a hapless holiday travelers. It is not a particularly tragic tale, not one that would get the 5 minute “human interest” piece on CNN about the “Blizzard of ’09 strands holiday travelers: area woman unable to rejoin family before double-lung bypass surgery on plane to Iraq deployment while carrying gift baskets to child cancer survivors.” For that matter, lots of people had worse trips here in Europe.

No, nothing so tragic -- just a sucky couple of days.

Winter break is finally here! It was a draining few weeks leading up to it, with parent-teacher conferences, Science Fair, and lots of special holiday events to keep the calendar busy. We were ready to relax. Some internationals chose to fly back to the US/Canada for some family time, but we figured that was too expensive, too much of a hassle, and how often would we have a chance to spend Christmas in Europe?

We didn’t have big plans for break. We just wanted to visit a few friends in Europe, see some pretty scenery, and get a chance to speak German (for me) and English (for both of us). We decided to head to London for New Year’s (visiting Chryssi & David) and Austria for Christmas (visiting Meghan & Justin from Montana while they were visiting Meghan’s parents).

It is hard to get to Austria from Sofia. Flights were over $400, and the bus/train takes 24+ hours. But we found a $25 one-way flight (really) direct to Venice on WizzAir. Sweet. We planned two nice days reprising our honeymoon in Venice, then take the train into Austria (only 6-7 hours now), saving both money and time. Our flight to Venice was Saturday afternoon – nice and relaxing, with no early morning or red-eye flight to screw up our sleep schedule.

We got checked onto our outbound flight, stamped out of the country at Bulgarian emigration, and loaded onto a plane-bound airport bus. Then for no apparent reason, people started leaving the bus, some crying. What’s going on? No announcement, just people leaving the bus and heading back into the terminal. (Life in Bulgaria, especially when you’re flying el-cheapo airlines, is a series of unexplained events forcing information-poor decisions.) Turns out our flight had been canceled. No explanation.

Eventually we found out that all flights into and out of Venice were cancelled that day due to “the biggest snowstorm we’ve ever had here.” Luckily WizzAir has another flight in a few hours and would happily re-book us. Oh wait, that’s what might happen on a real airline. The next WizzAir flight was 3 days later, putting us into Venice one day after we planned on leaving Venice. Along with our Sofia friends Brett & Betsy, who were also stuck not getting to Venice, we considered playing poker with our WizzAir paperwork that theoretically at some point might allow us to get our money back. Can’t say I’m too hopeful on that front.

Time to go back home to regroup (after we found a taxi, which was rather difficult as we weren’t on a scheduled arriving flight). We spent several hours on the internet searching for new flights and hotels, but eventually found a reasonable option. (While at home, we also helped the brother of a Bulgarian colleague who was stuck in Washington D.C., in their blizzard, and who needed a ride to Dulles and/or a place to crash for the night. It’s a weird, wonderful interconnected world. Thanks Neil!) We tried to convince the hotel in Venice not to charge us for the two nights of hotel we’d reserved and couldn’t get to. Still waiting to hear on that one.

We ended up with a $117 flight to Milan the next day. It would have been fun to visit Venice, but our priority was getting to Austria to meet up with Meghan, Justin, and baby Orla. The train from Milan to Innsbruck was about the same distance as the one from Venice to Innsbruck. Sunday morning we went to the Sofia airport much earlier than usual, to avoid any holiday crush of travelers. We zip through security, and then wait. And wait.

And wait.

Our flight is never officially delayed, but we ended up taking off 1.5 hours late. Apparently the entire Sofia Airport had been closed for 45 minutes due to whiteout conditions, but they hadn’t ever mentioned that to anyone actually in the airport.

We had given ourselves a 2 hour buffer to catch a train in Milan, but with the flight delays we were now getting pretty worried about making our train. Surprisingly, the shuttle bus from the airport to Milan worked flawlessly, getting us to the central train station in plenty of time to discover that our train was canceled. That same snowstorm that canceled our flight to Venice the previous day had apparently royally screwed up the Italian train system. Here I mistakenly thought trains were much less susceptible to weather shenanigans than airplanes. Luckily for us, they didn’t bother putting up the “cancelled” sign until moments after we purchased the ticket for that train, forcing us to wait in a very long line for customer service to refund our money and change our ticket. [I would like to award a personal Medal of Traveler Heroics to the man who wore his Santa suit around the train station and passed out candy. Thanks, Milano Centrale Santa, for keeping spirits up among thousands of cold, confused, distressed people.]

Above (top): Brett, Betsy, and Shannon, waiting in line in Milano to change our tickets off canceled train #1. Above (bottom): Milano Centrale Santa, handing out candy. You Rock!

Did I mention it was cold? Think about waiting for a train in a cramped, smelly, smoky meat locker. Americans usually don’t have much to crow about when comparing our train system to the European train system, but here is one area I think we’ve got an edge: heat. Europeans apparently don’t believe that train stations ought to be heated. Whether it is the giant fascist Milano station, the functional, modern, and attractive Innsbruck station, or the dilapidated and oppressively Stalinist Sofia station, none are heated. They actually seem colder than the outside, as they never see sunlight or warmth. Some of the internal rooms/offices are heated, but the main halls and waiting areas are iceboxes. We had tried to pack extremely light for this trip (a total of one small suitcase, one small daypack, and a shopping bag for all of our stuff for two winter weeks). Therefore we weren’t really prepared to endure hours of waiting in a smoky meat locker. We were so excited when our train out of Milan finally showed up, as it meant we could at least wait in a somewhat warm train car, out of the meat locker.

Coming up in Part 2: Verona: "Why the DMV waiting room doesn't seem so bad anymore..."

Holiday Travel is Awesome, Part 2 (of 3): Verona

(This is part 2 of a three part story. See part 1 here and part 3 here.)

The trip to Innsbruck was supposed to be 6 hours from Milan, with 2 connections, getting us there at 10pm. Our first train out of Milan was cancelled. Then the next train out of Milan was cancelled. After waiting in the long ticket line (Thanks Milano Centrale Santa!), we got a ticket on a third train, and that managed to depart only 70 minutes late. Welcome to Verona, Italy! Fictional home to Romeo and Juliet!

By now we’d of course missed our connection. Must stand in another long ticket line in Verona. Get directed to different long line, this time for “train information.” Informed that the only way we’d get to Innsbruck in the next 24 hours was if we stood in long line #1 again, exchanged our onward Italian ticket for one on a German train set to leave at 1:00 am. Yes, leave Verona at 1:00 am, three hours after we thought we would be in Innsbruck. Keep in mind that we were paying for a hotel in Innsbruck (whose reception closed before midnight), and we might still be paying for a hotel in Venice. Given the late hour, we chose to upgrade to the fold-down seat option (“couchette”) on the train, giving us a make-shift bed for a few hours that night until we could stumble into our Innsbruck hotel room.

We had 5 hours to kill on a frigid Sunday night in Verona. We didn’t think anything would be open in the city, so went down to the train station McDonald’s. I know, I know, but at least McDonald’s had heat. And maybe wi-fi. Our Bulgarian cell phones wouldn’t work (thanks Vivatel, for not even giving us the option of paying through the nose for roaming charges). None of the shops that might sell a SIM card for the Italian cell phone networks were open. Neither could we buy a calling card for the pay phones. Internet cafes in town were closed on Sunday night. If we could just get on the internet, we could figure out how to contact Meghan & Justin to tell them we would not be meeting them in Innsbruck that evening, and maybe be able to call/write our hotel in Innsbruck to beg for a late check-in and or room cancellation.

Below: Can you tell how happy Shannon and I are to be at the Verona train station McDonald's? Mmm, mmm, can't wait to get me one of those "il Mac"s.

McDonald’s has wifi. It is free. But you need a password. And you can only get a password by getting a text message sent to your Italian mobile phone. If we had an Italian mobile phone, we would have used it to call our hotel! I would have happily paid to use their internet, but there was no way to use their free service. Grr. Happily an English-Italian traveler eventually helped us with the pay phone (calling internationally from a pay phone using coins is harder than you might think), and we were able to call the hotel in Innsbruck to warn them of our late arrival.

Below: Shannon and I had an impromptu photo contest to see who could best capture the mood of the moment from our seats in McDonald's. Some of our favorites are below. In the middle picture, note how excited the girl on the right is to also be stuck at McDonald's, and that the girl on the left appears to be camping for the night. The bottom picture is the douchey guys sitting next to us, who of course left their trash on the table.

At 10:30 pm they kicked us out and closed McDonald’s. Out into the cold station. The only semi-warm place was the waiting room, which reminded me of a 1970s DMV waiting room, except the only people waiting to get their licenses renewed were winos who had recently soiled themselves.

Oh, the stench! Sweat, stale smoke, urine, shit. Too many people packed in, watching the sad old monitor blink more train delays. Every so often you’d get overwhelmed by the humanity, flee the room for some fresh air and space, only to humiliatingly shuffle back to suck up some fetid warmth.

As it got later and later in the evening, the ratio of stranded passengers to actual winos decreased, while the stench increased. We couldn’t take it anymore, so we decided to go walk around Verona. We figured everything would be shuttered up, but at least the exercise might keep us warm.

Up next - Part 3: "Where the hell is the train?"

Holiday Travel is Awesome, Part 3 (of 3): "Where the hell is the train?"

(This is part 3 of this story. See part 1 here and part 2 here.)

Here begins the the only fun part of the evening. Walking around Verona (yes, the same Verona where Romeo and Juliet were so unhappily in love) was quite lovely.

(Below) Shannon trying to enjoy streetlife in Verona, around 11pm on an icy December Sunday night.

(Above) Christmas tree, shuttered Christmas Market, and the old City Gate in Verona, Italy

The streets were decorated for Christmas, there was a public outdoor ice skating rink next to the giant Christmas tree, and a flashy lingerie store located immediately in front of the giant Roman amphitheater.

(Below) Verona: The 3rd Largest extant Roman Amphitheater (holds 20,000 people, still used today), next to a swanky lingerie store.

We would like to go back there in the daytime and/or summer. Unfortunately a sign at the train station that we only sort of understood (our Italian isn’t very good) seemed to warn that they would close the train station at midnight. How could they close the train station at midnight when a train was coming at 1am? Whatever, stranger things have happened, so we hustled back to the station.

At around 12:30 am the Caribinieri (Italian cops…but there are several different layers of Italian cops, and I think these are the lowest on the totem pole…somewhat like traffic cops) closed down the waiting room, kicking everyone out into the train platforms. It was interesting seeing another woman waiting for our train spend 10-15 minutes arguing with the Caribinieri about how they couldn’t just close down the station and make us wait in the cold. (They apparently could, and did.) I don’t think US cops would let someone argue like that…they’d just arrest her for disturbing the peace or something.

Oh well, we could wait 30 more minutes. There was another German train on the platform parked and waiting, whose sign said it was going to Innsbruck and then Munich, just like ours was supposed to. I tried to ask the conductor if this was our train, but no. Weird. This phantom train wasn’t even on the train schedule. Our train was delayed. And delayed. The new time came and went, and they didn’t bother putting up new delays on the board anymore (that would have required there still being employees at the station). There were some families with small kids waiting who were dressed worse than us, unprepared for the subfreezing weather.

We were so tired. We were so cold. I ran up and down the length of the train platform a few times in a pathetic attempt to get warm. The train didn’t come. The other train to Innsbruck was still waiting on the platform. Something strange was going on. I had a revelation: on our way to Istanbul on a previous trip, I knew our train split up at some point, with half the train going to Romania. Maybe this was the same thing, with this train waiting to join up with our nowhere-to-be-seen train. I tried asking the conductor in my foggily-remembered German (with the aid of plenty of hand gestures). “Werden dieses Zug und die anderen Zug zusammen sein?”

Ja?

I was right! “Können wir on dieses Zug warten? Es ist nicht so kalt.” Yes! We could at least wait on this other train, where it was much less cold!

I went out and tried to explain this (in German) to the others waiting for the train, especially the man with the 3 small underdressed children. Another man tried to talk to me in Italian, but I couldn’t explain, so he found a man who spoke both German and Italian to translate (welcome to the Tower of Babel). Everyone piled onto the second train to wait, cramming into the hallways and baggage areas. I can’t believe that the second train had been there for hours and no one else from the train had offered to us to wait onboard (it was only us left at the station) and that no one else waiting had tried to ask what I did.

Our train finally came, only 1.5 hours late (now 2:30 am). Finally, warmth and some sleep! Except not really. Our reserved couchette seats that we paid $50 extra for? “No, they are full,” reprimanded one stern German conductor. She didn’t bother explaining to us where we should go, just seemed annoyed that we had the temerity to want to use our own seats. There were some “regular” seats available in an unheated car, but those cabins (and their occupants) smelled too horrible. After standing around confused and tired for 30+ minutes, and seeing that no one from the train was going to offer us any direction, Shannon and I decided the least unpleasant option was to sit on our luggage in the overflow bicycle storage area. At least it was heated and didn’t smell bad. Welcome to life in steerage.

Shannon, in steerage at about 3 am.

Eventually the one friendly conductor (who I’d seen earlier arguing with the nasty female one about the need to find somewhere to put the family with 3 small children) found a few seats in a heated compartment (not our couchettes, mind you). I managed to get an hour or two of fitful sleep, though I don’t think Shannon did. I tried to set my alarm for what time I thought we would be at Innsbruck, but we had so many delays it was futile. Hopefully they would announce the stations. Nope. At one point I looked out and realized we had stopped at Innsbruck. Shit! Race to throw on shoes, grab luggage, and jump off the train before we ended up in Munich.

Helloooo, Innsbruck! The train station in Innsbruck had heated waiting rooms (even the bathrooms were heated!) and wi-fi available for free from a café. If we’d been stuck for hours at the Innsbruck station, life would have been much less unpleasant. We quickly walked to our hotel as the city woke up, getting there at 6:30 am, only 8.5 hours late. Looks like a nice town – we looked forward to exploring it eventually.

The lovely morning view of Innsbruck from in front of our hotel.

Three cheers for Innsbruck's Hotel Breinössl. Though their front desk had closed at 11:00pm, they left us a key (at this point they had re-opened for the morning, but we hadn’t expected that). The room was much nicer than we expected too. We showered, had our free hotel breakfast, and crashed.

By the time we got to Innsbruck, Meghan & Justin had already left for Vienna, so we didn’t get to meet up with them, but we would have been too exhausted to ski anyway. Sad. Maybe next year.

So, our misadventure by the numbers…

1 canceled flight

1 closed airport

1 delayed flight

2 canceled trains

3 delayed trains

2 hotels booked that we couldn’t use, in 2 different countries

2 couchette seats that we paid for but didn’t get (Deutsches Bahn, I’m coming after you!)

No Venice.

No visit with friends (which was most of the point of this trip!).

8+ hours spent waiting in subfreezing temperatures for trains that wouldn’t come.

Snow? Not that much snow, actually. Where is this big storm? We’ve only seen a few inches anywhere we’ve been.

On the plus side, Verona seemed nice. Oh and it sure is nice to finally be in Austria.

Happy Post-script: I’m writing this 24 hours later, and life is much improved. I much prefer being in Austria than traveling to Austria. After our morning nap, we had a nice stroll through some Christmas markets in the impossibly cute old town, drank hot mulled wine, and took in a Christmas concert at a local church. We had a really hard time staying warm all day…it was cold (about 20° F), but not that cold. I think all of our energy reserves were just shot. Today we slept in, and the sun is shining. Maybe we’ll do some skiing this week, but right now that sounds too cold. Happy update…we just found out the Venice Hotel did not charge us! Thanks, Ca’ San Giorgio! Please give them your business!

We expect to spend Christmas in Salzburg, trying to avoid any unnecessary train travel. We hope you’re all with the people that are important to you over the holidays! Frühe Weinachten!

Taking a breath

It's been quite a little whirlwind for a while here. This weekend is low-key, and pleasantly so. Starting about a month ago, we had many many students out sick with the swine flu, so many that they closed all Sofia schools for a week. Thankfully we stayed healthy, and used the time to travel to Lake Como and Milan in Italy. Hopefully I'll have a chance to post pictures and stories from that wonderful trip soon.

After coming back to school we had tons of make-up tests/quizzes to write/proctor/grade, and then grades & comments were due. I didn't particularly enjoy writing comments (even if they were only a few sentences) for about 150 students. This was the same weekend that we were also cooking Thanksgiving dinner for all the Bulgarian faculty and their families. That was a wonderful event, but exhausting and time-consuming.
Thanksgiving break - 4 days in Istanbul. That trip was also fantastic, and pictures will come, I promise. Returning home after vacationing is always hard for me. Besides being tired from travel, you're going back to work...it can be a rude transition. It's even harder after coming back from places as wonderful as Lake Como or Istanbul. Sofia has some nice bits, for sure, but it objectively pales in comparison. I felt pretty much the same way when I lived in Los Angeles whenever I came back from Zion, or the Sierras. The first glimpse of the LA basin over Cajon pass always made me think about flipping a U-turn on I-15.

The following weekend (Friday night and Saturday) we had parent-teacher conferences. This was a much more difficult experience than at Westridge. At Westridge, we had conferences during the several days before Thanksgiving (no school that week), and many families were vacationing. I taught half as many students, parents made appointments for their conferences (so I could figure out what I wanted to say to each parent) and I generally had a reputation as somewhat of an easy grader, meaning I didn't get too many surly visits. Here we had to do them after a long hard week of school, I had so many parents (70+) come through that I never even had time for a pee break in either of my 4 hour stints, and I had a lot of "concerned" parents who wanted to know why their child was studying all the time for Biology but still not getting an acceptable grade. Oh yeah, and more than half of the conferences were conducted with an interpreter, which added an interesting element (Do you talk to the parent or the interpreter? What exactly are they saying to each other?). I explained (over and over, so that by the second day my interpreter could just more or less give one of three versions of my canned speech) how the textbook (new this year but one that I didn't choose) was very challenging ("the most commonly used textbook in the world, for University students, so of course it is quite difficult for 10th graders that are still learning English"), that I offered students a "do-over" on a test where the class average was a 63%, and that I was adjusting the curriculum to move more slowly through the material to increase comprehension. Sometimes I admitted that I had been learning more about the rest of the Bulgarian curriculum (students are learning just now things in Chemistry I thought they already knew), and that next year I would plan the curriculum differently, not that that would help your fine son or daughter. I told them (repeatedly) to encourage their child to come for help during office hours, and that the material covered second semester would likely be less abstract and more approachable. Lather, rinse, repeat, times 70. It was exhausting. All I wanted to do after conferences was go home and sleep. On Sunday I chaperoned a student hiking club trip, which was a great chance to get outside and to meet some students on a more personal level, but it was also another 10 hours spent doing school-related stuff but not doing any required school work like grading or lesson planning. I couldn't get any sympathy at home, either, as Shannon spent much of the time when I was hiking working on Science Fair preparation. For both of us, it was the weekend that never was.

Science Fair was Wednesday last week, which involved some students showing off research projects they had done, and then the rest of the school being involved in science-related games/activities to keep them occupied. The research projects were great, and I would like to do more to encourage students to do these next year. The science "knowledge bowl" (trivia) and "Science Survivor" (relay race with 4-5 different science-y puzzles) were fun, but they took a LOT of time and energy to put together, and I'm not sure that the students really "learned" anything from them. I felt somewhat like a pinata maker...hours making a game that students tore through in a few minutes. The morning after science fair the whole science department looked like zombies. (How's that for a slasher movie idea...zombie science teachers attack the school after science fair?) I felt like I had a hangover, though I hadn't been drinking. During science survivor, I was the only male faculty member helping to run it, so I ended up with yelling and corralling duties (my low voice is good for something). Next year we need a whistle and/or megaphone, as trying to direct 200 students in a noisy gym (4 different times), with just me yelling...ouch. My throat hasn't yet recovered fully.

Friday night we had a Christmas party at the house of the school president (nice place...Khruschev reportedly stayed there back in the day when this campus housed the Bulgarian secret police). It was the start of the recovery. A lovely evening, with a secret santa gift exchange and a very nice feeling of community. I must admit Westridge spoiled me with lavish Christmas parties, but the happy feeling here was the same, even if the catering wasn't so fancy (well actually, it wasn't catered at all...just food from the cafeteria and various teachers taking turns as bartenders). After the party a large group of both Bulgarian and international faculty went out bowling. Yay, bowling! (For what it's worth, I rolled an 80 the first game and 142 the second...consistency is not my strong suit).

Yesterday we had a mellow "clean-up-the-house and get-grading-done" day, but we forgot about the grading parts. :) We had packed up our bags to do some grading at the Starbucks downtown (it's smoke-free), but on the bus got a call from some friends and detoured to go watch the movie 2012 instead. (I thought it was both awful and fabulous, others thought it was just awful. Shannon pretty much had to go see it for research, as she's talking about earthquakes and volcanoes in class and all of her students are asking her about it.) So right now, I should be grading, but this is much more fun.

What's next? Final week of school, then more exciting travels. Shannon and I are set to perform 2 Balkan Dances as part of a teacher/parent troupe at the Christmas concert this week (in front of the whole school and parents). I'd be a little more excited about that if I knew the dances, but we're working on them. Hopefully we can get some video of that to post here. For Christmas break we're flying to Venice (because a one-way flight was only $25! My carbon-guilt is acting up, but how could we resist?) for a few nights before heading to Austria (destinations TBA...definitely the Alps). We'll spend New Year's in London, visiting with our newlywed friends Chryssi and David.

I know the Thanksgiving-Christmas corridor is a crazy busy time for lots of people, ourselves included. We're having a lot of fun, when we have a chance to slow down and think about it. We miss you all, and regret that we couldn't spend more holiday feasts with each and every one of you, geography be damned. Stay tuned for upcoming posts (with photos!) about Istanbul, Italy, and (a nice place you haven't heard of) Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria.
Love
Jeff