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!
Showing posts with label swine flu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swine flu. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Sunday, December 13, 2009
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
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
Friday, November 6, 2009
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...
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...
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
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.
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.
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