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!