Blogged too soon? Flooding in Deerfield (updated)

So earlier I mocked the unimpressive nature of Mother Earth's fury, as exhibited by Hurricane Tropical Storm Irene. I continue to hold that the actual storm was really quite boring as natural disasters go, at least around here. It rained for about 12 hours pretty continuously, but that's about it. We didn't get that much rain today (3.4 inches) and it never got super windy.
After that post however, I went for a walk around campus as the sky cleared. There was surprisingly little flooding anywhere near the academic and residential buildings, so I went to check out the lower athletic fields, and instead discovered a raging, frothy extension of the Deerfield River.   But I forgot that the whole lovely valley that Deerfield is in is in fact a valley, and apparently it rained plenty upstream, up North in Vermont. According to the old timers, the last time the water got this high was the "Great New England Hurricane of 1938."
I stood on some steps by the gym for a few minutes, assisting a local man that was concerned about possible cries for help from the lower levels of the building (we never heard/found anything). As I stood on the steps, I had to go up a step after standing there only about 5 minutes. I think the water was rising an inch (vertically, not horizontally) a minute at that point. An inch a minute. The tennis courts went from normal to submerged over the nets in about 30 minutes. The rate of rise slowed down, but the river kept coming up all afternoon. I don't know Deerfield well enough (I've only been here 6 days!) to know exactly how everything looked before, but I would venture that there is at least 10 feet of water covering the football field (it was up to the crossbar of the uprights) and moving FAST. Water was flowing across main street and the 5/10 Highway (both north and south of town), so we are pretty cut off. We can still go up and over the ridge towards the Connecticut River, but flooding on that river might cover the river road over there soon too.
There were rumors earlier in the day that the Harriman Reservoir (upstream in Vermont - the biggest rez in Vermont) had burst. As far as I can tell, that rumor is false, but officials are concerned about the stability of several upstream dams. The highway blockages are over 1/2 a mile from the river - there is a LOT of water down here.  Several families have had to evacuate their houses in town, and the historic Deerfield Inn has water 4+ feet up the ground floor (many of the evacuees are staying at the Inn!).  We're hoping that the river is done but some reports didn't expect it to crest until Tuesday. The Deerfield River dumps into the  (normally) much larger Connecticut River a few miles downstream from here, but the Connecticut River is flooding too, so that could perhaps push water back up the Deerfield from below.
It could be interesting for a few days.

Here are some photos and video shot this afternoon/evening (August 28, 2011).

Looking at the lower athletic fields, with water up to the crossbars of the goalposts. A groundskeeper watching the flood remarked "I guess I won't have to line the field tomorrow."

Track flooded. This area had never in the memory of anyone in town (50+ years) flooded.

Water creeping up to the back of the shiny new Koch Technology center, where I'll be teaching. I hope they put up some sand bags and/or the water stops rising soon.

Measuring how fast the water has risen at the historic Deerfield Inn.

Deerfield Fire Department: lots of antiquated emergency equipment got some use today.

Main Street of Historic Deerfield around 5 pm. The red house on the left was faculty housing that was evacuated.

We tried to buy emergency supplies on Friday, but the grocery store was cleaned out of water, and our camping water filter is still in storage.  We bought 50 16oz Solo cups and filled them with tap water before the storm. We've never lost water/power, but I'm a little concerned about the quality of drinking water with the river now covering many cow farms and outhouses. Emergency water ration flip cup, anyone?

Highway 5/10 heading south out of town. It was similarly blocked about 1/2 north of town.

View of the flooded valley from "The Rock" on Pocumtuck Ridge. The Deerfield Academy campus is roughly in the middle of the photo.

Another view from the Rock. The flooded area in the far right (next to a large building, which is the Deerfield gymnasium) is where the athletic fields are that are shown in the video above.

UPDATE: I found the USGS stream gage info for the Deerfield. Note that the median flow this time of year is 300 cfs (cubic feet per second) and about 3 feet deep, which is a pretty mellow river. Within less than two hours after Irene, it shot up to 100,000 cfs, and was running almost 25 feet deep!  The good news is that it appears to be heading back down now. Whew.

We'll see what happens tomorrow...

Waiting

So far I think tropical storms qualify as the most boring natural disasters ever (ok, excepting a drought, I suppose).  You get 3 days notice of something that is coming for you at the speed of a recreational biker, and then, finally, eventually...it rains. Not super hard like a thunderstorm or anything, just consistently  .My apologies to anyone harmed in this Irene business, I'm sure being in a coastal location or in a Cat 3 hurricane is an entirely different (and terrifying) story, but so far...yawn.

So I'm waiting for this tropical storm warning to turn into something worth staying inside all day for.

After  7 weeks on the road this summer, suddenly I'm doing a lot of waiting. Some of you may know that waiting is not a skill I'm particularly good at.
We traveled all of July in Europe (Slovenia, Venice, hiking in Switzerland, Milan, Copenhagen, Berlin, Budapest, and Belgrade...hopefully we'll get some photos up of those lovely places in the next few weeks, but here is a link to Hanna's nice blog on Slovenia, and we went with her) before packing up our life in THIRTEEN checked bags and flying home to the US of A. Once back in the US we visited friends and relatives in Colorado, Montana, California, Minnesota, and Michigan before ending up here in Massachusetts.  It was a busy few weeks.
First things I noticed about the US during my reverse-culture-shock: sad to say, but it's fat people. Lots of really, painfully, morbidly obese fat people, like the the guy at immigration at the Denver airport, sweating profusely just standing still in the heavily air-conditioned room (I was wearing my long-sleeve). There are overweight people in Europe, but nowhere near as many or as large. Some of it is certainly genetics, and lifestyle choices, but I have to believe there is something systemically wrong with what Americans call "food,", how much of it we eat, and our options to do otherwise.  [Not to mention our car-dependency that limits options for daily exercise.]  I also noticed the acres and acres of mostly-empty parking lots that we've put up around all of our big box stores and strip malls. Maybe only on 5 days a year are these parking lots ever more than 1/2 full, but think about how much good farmland is now under asphalt, about how it makes it impractical to walk from your average suburban dwelling to anywhere useful, without having to cross the asphalt wasteland on a hot August day, about how many more miles of sewers and roads and street lights we need because everything is so sprawled out on account of having sufficient parking, and about how damned ugly they are. Blech. Some things need to change.

After a day or two spent de-jet-lagging at Shannon's parents in Colorado, we got to spend some quality time loading the rest of our belongings, the stuff the didn't go to Bulgaria, onto a shipping container to be sent to Massachusetts. By American standards, we probably don't even have that much stuff, as it pretty much fit into one average shed. Still, we hadn't used it in two years, and with the exception of furniture, I'm not sure we will use it in the next two years. We half-heartedly tried to start culling our pile, but decided to procrastinate, determining that it would be easier to do at our new place, once we had a better idea of what we would need and what we wouldn't. Most of the problematic goods aren't even sentimental...just stuff that is not broken, but not currently useful, like extension cords and DSL modems. It seems wasteful to throw it away, but also wasteful to carry it around.

Perhaps I'm pondering these issues of waste and need and structural problems in society more than I otherwise would because of my new job. I'll be teaching environmental science at one of the top high schools (a boarding school) in the country. I'll also be the "campus sustainability coordinator," which is a new position that no one really has figured out yet. It's a little bit intimidating.
This is a campus full of talent and privilege. Some students were born privileged: the sons and daughters of kings, presidents, and titans of finance have gone here for two centuries. Others are privileged simply by being here. About a 1/3 of the students are on financial aid, some even getting full ride, which is quite a gift from a school that charges almost $50,000 a year (for high school!!!). The campus is beautiful, with exquisitely manicured green spaces and buildings (like the one I'm typing in) that date back to the Revolutionary War. The teaching and recreational facilities look like a nice liberal arts college at first, until you look closer at the iPod-connected-touch-screen treadmills in the gym and figure that most colleges don't have equipment this nice. The faculty that I have met so far have been uniformly talented, warm, and helpful. The few students I met last year during my interview were friendly, hard-working, and sharp. It is on all accounts a wonderful learning environment, but also at times a bit like the Truman Show. Is this place for real?

Right now, in addition to waiting for Irene, we're waiting for our housing. We've still got 10 days before students arrive, and I would love to get physically settled so that I can figure out my classes and the rest of my job. Unfortunately, we'll be living in the trailer park, excuse me, "modular dormitory" known as Chapin II (it's important to say it with the right looking-down-your-nose accent), and they haven't finished it yet. They're doing some construction this year so we'll be in the temporary housing (as new guy here I'm low man on the totem pole). There are 18 dorm rooms (all boys, all single rooms, mostly 9th/10th grade) plus three faculty apartments in our nascent trailer park. Our shipping container is parked next to the trailers, and we've got excellent temporary temporary housing, but it still would be nice to get moved in for real.

Home sweet home (soon to be), with shipping container in waiting in the foreground.

Half this week was spent in new faculty orientation, which was a bit of a blur.  They did a  nice job mixing social events (like dinner at the dean's and a canoe outing) with your usual anti-harassment trainings (favorite quote from the dean, "[the boys in the dorm] spend a lot of time naked"), but there was still a whole lot of information to take in. I don't think I've really scratched the surface yet of figuring out how the day-to-day life of this boarding school works. I guess I've got a few hundred pages of manuals to look over today as it continues to rain. (I've got extra batteries for my headlamp so I can keep reading in case the power goes out!)

New faculty plus some administrators, kids, and dogs. This is the view from "The Rock" above campus.

Spending 2 years in Europe was somewhat like an extended vacation. It was plenty of work, but I never really felt like I "belonged" in Bulgaria. In fact it made me come to terms with my own fundamental "American-ness", like it or not. 7 weeks on the road heightened our need to be settled somewhere, to dig in, to make a home. Now that we're here, it's frustrating that we can't start that process here. I hope this will feel like home. There are a bunch of free-range faculty children and lots of folks out walking their puppies; no one seems to lock their apartment doors. It's a friendly place, a bit like really expensive grown-up summer camp.


So now you're waiting, I suppose, for an ending to this rambling blog, but like any good literature these days, you won't get one. So there.

Last Weekend in Bulgaria

We're leaving. Soon. It's pretty hard to believe. Our two years here are almost up. Classes are through, and I gave my final exam last week. Now all we've got left is a LOT of grading, end-of-year paperwork, packing, moving out, and plenty of goodbyes. We've had some difficult times here, to be sure, but lots of amazing ones as well, and I think a lot of experiences that we'll still be processing for years to come. Next Sunday we're heading out for our month-long European adventurefest, so this was our last full weekend in Bulgaria. Many of our friends went to a big outdoor music festival, but it wasn't really our thing. I wanted to go to the Black Sea for the weekend or do an overnight hike. The reality that we were leaving in a week intruded on these plans, and we settled for one day in the mountains, and one day to get stuff done, which led to a busy weekend.

There's plenty of good hiking nearby on Vitosha (theoretically we could walk from campus, but a 30 minute drive is better), and an hour+ away are great hikes in the Rila mountains. I always like to go to new places though, and there was one major mountain range in Bulgaria that I hadn't hiked in yet: the Pirins. Situated between the ski-resort of Bansko to the north and the little wine village of Melnik to the south, they have Bulgaria's second-highest peak (Vihren at 2914m) and are delightfully rugged due to their glaciated past.  It's a 2.5-3 hour drive down to the Pirin range, which is why I haven't been hiking there yet (well that and the fact that during almost all of the school year there is too much snow for easy hiking). This was my chance.

Driving down after work on Friday, we spent the night in Bansko so we could get a morning start on our hike.  Our decent hotel room including breakfast was only 40 leva (off-season prices)!  Meanwhile our acceptable dinner at a schmaltzy and touristy mehana was 75 leva! Rarely have I paid twice as much for dinner as for lodging in the same town...oh well.
We drove over to the nearby village of Dobrinishte, which has a single ski lift that also provides access to some great hiking. 30 minutes on the lift carried us from deciduous forest at Hizha Gotse Delchev to sub-alpine krumholz and the beautifully situated Hizha Bezbog. Very nice.

Hizha Bezbog, in the Pirin Mountains near Dobrinishte, Bulgaria

We hiked a few hours through excellent mountain landscapes.

Djangal Peak, 2730m, in the Pirin Mountains

I wish we'd had more time. The lift stopped running at 4:30 in the afternoon, which is reasonable in the winter but dumb in the summer when it is light out until well after 9 o'clock. If we missed the last lift, we would  add 2.5 hours of steep (and fairly unattractive)  downhill walking on a ski access road.  The timing of the lift meant we had a farily short outing, but it was still excellent.
At the turnaround point for our hike we decided to go skinny dipping in Big Valyavishko Lake. This is not the coldest water I've swam in, but at 2280 m (~7,500 ft) it wasn't exactly tropical. At least there was no ice floating in it. Luckily it was windy and overcast, and we had nothing to use for a towel. :)

Big Valyavishko Lake, with two islands. Nice.

View East towards Djangal Peak from Big Valyavishko Peak

Swimming in the lake. It was chilly. I swam to the island, just 'cause.

Zoom in of above picture. You can perhaps appreciate from our faces how cold it was.

 
After our dip and air-dry, we realized we had 1:50 to hike back to Hizha Bezbog (and the ski lift) or we'd miss the lift down. It took us 2:30 to cover on the same distance on the way here, and we hadn't exactly been lollygagging.  Unfortunatley, the Hizha was only about 250 ft lower than our lake, meaning we couldn't even enjoy much of "it'll be faster going downhill" speed boost.  Time for a forced march. We hustled up the hills, and cruised on the flats, even running a bit on the downhills until Shannon's feet screamed at her to stop. Neither one of us really thought we could make it. But somehow we did...sweaty and breathing hard but with 10 minutes to spare. Woot!

The rest of the day was uneventful...30 minutes down on the lift, 20 minutes driving down on a windy mountain road, then 3 hours drive home, mostly on neglected and pot-hole ridden Bulgarian "highways." Note to folks living in BG: Google Maps will suggest that it is faster to go to Bansko via Velingrad (instead of Blagoevgrad). Don't believe Google. I didn't really, but I was curious to see the other route. The Velingrad route is about 30 minutes slower but much more taxing driving. The roads are in much worse condition and a lot windier. On the plus side, the Velingrad route has little traffic and is quite scenic, especially in the gorge between Velingrad and Septemvri. The portion west of Velingrad was interesting also, as it seemed like an area of Bulgaria that time forgot, with (I think) Pomak villages (mosques and all) old hunched over ladies in kerchiefs working the tobacco fields, and old men wasting away the day on a bench in town. Interesting byway, to be sure.

Today we had a productive day. I got up early (for a Sunday) and did laundry. Then we went downtown and did some shopping. We wanted to pick up some last minute Bulgarian souveniers. We went back to the Ladies Market, which had been the seen of some very frustrating cultural faux pas and/or "neither of us speak the other's language" miscommunications when we first went there in October of 2009. Now we understand the culture better, and our Bulgarian is as good as it will ever be. For no particular reason, we ended up at the shop of the same woman that refused to sell to us 2 years ago, after we offended her in some way. We were more careful this time. We bought pottery from her. We also bought pottery from her neighbors, but we were sure to wait until we completed one sale before we started another, lest it appear that we were trying to play one saleslady off another.
Then we headed over the gift shop of the Bulgarian Ethnographic Museum, where we bought some more pottery (more expensive, but we like some of their styles better). We also bought all kinds of other Bulgarian trinkets that suddenly seem important now that we're leaving. Last item on our souvenir agenda: art. Mike and Kate have lots of paintings from a local artist, and we've admired their work for 2 years. Yet whenever we saw the art sellers by Nevsky Cathedral, we never saw anything we liked. We were determined today. Past the booths selling old Bulgarian war medals and Russian/Bulgarian nesting dolls, we found the painting stalls. We eventually found Stoyan, dealer of some nicer work, including our favored artist, Rusalina Mihailova. We didn't find the exact thing we were looking for (a landscape of a cute Bulgarian village that we had visited...all of her works on sale today were of places we hadn't been), but we were both taken by a nice oil painting (framed and on canvas for only 50 leva) of some rowboats, so we have some art now. 

Sunny summer day in downtown Sofia.

The souvenir vendors near Nevsky Cathedral (the gold domes of the Cathedral are in the background).

Enough shopping...time to get to work. [Well, after a burrito (shannon) and duner (Jeff).] We found ourselves a table at an outdoor cafe in the park near the National Theater "Ivan Vazov" and I busted out all my final exams. Shannon graded multiple choice questions (THANKS SHANNON!) while I worked on the short answer. After a while a classical music quartet set up and played an hour-long concert at a summer festival stage right next to our cafe. It was about as pleasant a day as you can have while grading final exams.

The National Theater from our cafe.

Shannon, wielding her red grading pen.

Fountain in the park.

 It was a little less fun when the second act turned out to clowns. Seriously. Clowns aren't any less creepy when they're speaking in a language you don't really understand. Eventually the clowns drove us away, off to another favorite place, Pizzaria Ugo, where we graded and ate pizza and salad.
Hiking, shopping, grading, and even some laundry. It was a good, productive weekend.

We topped it off with yet another item that I really wish I had a picture of. We were waiting to turn left from the Billa corner onto Malinov (a very busy intersection), waiting next to the meager excuse for a carnival that was currently occupying the vacant lot formerly covered by the Balkanski Circus. As I got ready to turn, I saw a horse headed my way. Half-starved horses are not so rare in Sofia, but usually they're pulling a horse cart. This horse was was running free, running fast, and running at me. It came from across Malinov, near the Shell station, from the lane of on-coming traffic. It careened around idling cars, then bolted across Malinov, heading straight for us. I quickly dug for my camera, but only managed to capture this shot. Notice the blurry leg moving out of the frame to the left. I don't think I've ever almost been run down by a stray horse before while sitting in my car at a major urban intersection.

There's a lot going on here. Foreground: crappy carnival. Background: Vitosha mountain. Far left: A HORSE running down the street.

WikiLeaks hits Bulgaria

Wikileaks hits Bulgaria...
In this rather unflattering description of Sofia, written by a US Embassy staffer in April 2009, the author talks about the terrible streets, wild dogs, and organized crime.There are many nice things about this city and this country, but unfortunately, all of this is true as well (at least the trash strike ended before we got here...we saw one in Naples, Italy in 2008 and man was that awful). I particularly liked this line:

Drab, decrepit soviet style blocks rise up, in
stark juxtaposition to the Porsche dealership. Crumbling
streets with unevenly patched pavement, potholes that can
pass for tank traps, and sidewalks crammed with parked cars
are routine. Basic infrastructure is mediocre to poor.

 Read the whole article for a full view.  I honestly think things are getting better here, but it's really touch and go. The new Metro system opened a few months after this diplomatic cable was written (construction started in the 1980s, then was abandoned for 20 years), and is still quite shiny. It's great, and will be even better when they open the 2nd line and 1st line extensions that are currently under construction.  Streets are being paved in preparation for this fall's elections (apparently every 5 years the roads get better in preparation for elections, trying to convince voters that their MP is not so bad, even if the rest are bums).  The new expressway around the city (the "Ring Road" or околоврустен пут) is great in the sections where it is completed, and they've gone from 0 to almost-done in less than a year on the sections near the new IKEA (also going up in record time). The juxtaposition of old and new, flashy and trashy, are really quite overwhelming here. We had a lovely dinner last night with some Bulgarian colleagues in their very nice apartment, in a new building completely surrounded by drab, falling-down soviet-era apartment blocks. It turns out we didn't really need a map or directions to her place at all - her instructions of "go to Fantastico and it's the only new building in the neighborhood" were patently clear. I'd like to buy the whole country a few thousand gallons of paint. It would go a long way just to give everything  a decent paint job (something they've tried with some success in Tirana, Albania, actually). So anyway, read the unofficial "official" bad word on Sofia from WikiLeaks. I don't mind saying such things, as I'll soon be posting an album full of beautiful shots of Bulgaria taken on various ACS hiking club outings, which will even out the bad press, I hope.

5 perfect days in Thassos

Apparently some evangelical Christian pastor in the US did some heavy calculating and determined that the end was nigh, in fact, Saturday the 21st of May. Well-behaved Believers would be "raptured" bodily to heaven, while the rest of us would wait for our miserable end. We counted down the hours until showtime, but didn't see anyone ascending to heaven (we had even spent quite a while discussing who among us was most/least likely to be raptured...Hanna didn't have much confidence in my chances!). Although the rapture was apparently a bust, we spent a long weekend in what already seemed like paradise, so it was pretty hard to tell.  The paradise that would have to do for us un-raptured was Thassos Island, Greece.

Thassos Island is known as the "Emerald Island" of the Aegean. It is one of the largest and most forested of the Greek islands. It is far from the cruise ship circuit, and a bit off the beaten path of heavy tourism that fall upon other more famous isles like Santorini.  It is about 6 hour drive south of Sofia, then a short 45 minute ferry ride. Several of our friends have gone before, and all loved it. Shannon was skeptical that I would enjoy going to an island for 5 days -- would I get bored?  No, I wouldn't. It was wonderful. Or, as Shannon says "The most perfect amazing excellent vacation ever!"

The lovely bay that forms the 3km long beach of Skala Potamia and Golden Beach on Thassos. The high point of the island, Mt. Ipsario (1206m) is in the background.

This is the off season in Thassos. Many of the shops/restaurants are still shuttered up for the winter. It's a shame, because the weather was absolutely fabulous. It was about 80 F and sunny every day, with a breeze to keep it from getting too hot. The sea was pretty chilly still (I'm sure the swimming is better in July), but we still got in the water every day, and one day played at the beach all day, alternating from the beach chairs to frisbee in knee-deep water to playing catch/keep-away a little deeper. The beaches were very clean, and the water just sparkled.

20+ teachers (plus some family members, former teachers, and a boyfriend) caravanned down to Thassos, staying in a variety of nearby villas and hotel rooms. It was great. 9 of us shared my villa, about a 10 minute walk from the middle of a 3 km long beach (Skala Potamia and Golden Beach). Thassos is famous for its marble. Several colors are quarried there (including the "second whitest in the world"), and have been for millenia. Somewhat ridiculously, this leads to marble being so commonplace that the street curbs in the main town are main of marble, and crushed marble is even used as gravel on the dirt roads. Yup, gravel roads paved with sparkling white marble. The rocks of the island also made for enchanting sparkling sand (it looked like flecks of gold in the water) and excellent rock-hunting. Carolyn in particular found herself quite a rock collection.

Beachside cafe, with white crushed marble below the chairs.

I took runs along the beach, among the olive groves, up to a little village, and scrambled to a secret cove. One day we circumnavigated the island in our trusty red VW "хаиде". The 60 mile loop showed us different sides of the island, and we stopped at several beaches to sample their different flavors. One memorable spot was fairly unmarked but obviously no secret...we were never there alone. It involved turning down an unmarked dirt lane, driving 10 minutes down a gnarly dirt road, then hiking 10 minutes steeply down to the marble cliffs at the sea. A prehistoric marble quarry had left a hole next to the ocean that filled up with incoming waves. It was hypersaline because of evaporation (check out how well Pei Pei, Jess, and Carolyn are floating in there). The hole was so clear it was deceptive how deep it was...it looked only 3-4 feet deep, but I never touched bottom, even when jumping off a smallish cliff (I never felt brave/foolish enough to jump off the top cliff, but Jamie and Rich did last year after he proposed, apparently!)..

Jess jumping into the quarry hole.

Jess, Pei Pei, and Carolyn in the quarry hole.

The refraction does funny things to their body size. That and the high salinity that makes them float really well make for silly pictures.

Another day Shannon, Martyn and I did a 6 hour round trip hike to the very top of the island, 1206m high Ipsario Peak. It was quite a stunning hike, with huge cliffs, ancient trees, views to the beach, the mainland beyond, and even the not-so-close island of Samothraki. There was so much contrast on the island, with a great beach, a stellar hike, history (we kept driving by and sadly never stopping at any of the many Ancient Greek archaeological ruins...I've heard they're pretty good though).

Martyn and Shannon climbing up to the summit of Ipsario peak. The ferns above treeline made is super green.

The beach viewed from the summit. We of course went swimming after the 6 hour hike.

Jeff and big big very old and gnarly tree.

We all got plenty of sun, sea, relaxation, and good food. Our two-day work-week after Thassos was HARD -- everyone just had such a great vacation, and it fully felt like summer. At the time, we still had a full 5 weeks of the school year left! Still, I have to thank the monks Kiril and Methodious, who brought Christianity and literacy to Bulgaria 1200+ years ago, as our long weekend was in honor of their efforts. Thanks K! Thanks M!

In summary, Thassos is freakin' awesome. Beautiful beaches. Great hiking, ancient ruins, etc etc. We had no crowds, though I'm sure that's a different story come July and August.  Either way, highly recommended.

Click below for a Flick slideshow with some additional pictures.



P.S. Bulgaria finished a new piece of freeway a few months ago, that allows the main Serbia-Greece highway to bypass Sofia with a proper 4-lane limited access divided highway (called the "Lyulin" highway). This 17 km section is lovely, but I never expected to take it, as it doesn't go anywhere I want to go...just for bypassing the city if you're on a through route. NOTE: If you're heading north from Greece, and trying to get to Sofia, near the town of Pernik you'll come to an exit. It will tell you to exit for Pernik, and stay straight for Sofia. If you follow the signs for Sofia, you'll zip right over the "old road" between Pernik and Sofia, that cuts between Lyulin and Vitosha mountain. The old road is congested, windy, and in bad condition,  but is also goes to Sofia. The new road is shiny, empty, well-paved...a generally excellent road. Well, excellent unless you're trying to go to Sofia. The new road will eventually connect to the city center from the west, which is quite a bit out of the way for us in Mladost, over on the southeast. I said eventually, as you currently can't get to Sofia at all from this road. That's right. If you follow the signs for Pernik, you can get to Sofia via the old road. If you follow the signs for Sofia,  you can't get to Sofia.  Nice highway, Bulgaria, but you need to maybe work on your signage, maybe just temporarily cover up some stuff until you finish the rest of the road.  On the other hand, I suppose it's not so much worse than the 710 freeway in California, that heads from Long Beach to Pasadena. At least it's supposed to. It stops several miles short of Pasadena, leaving you in a surface street traffic nightmare, and it's been this way for decades, so if you're trying to go to Pasadena, it's best to NOT take the road labeled to Pasadena. Tricky.

Prom - BG style

I've been to a lot of high school proms. I attended 3 at Holt High School (with Kelly, Beth, and Lindsay), 1 at Onsted High (with Beth), and then chaperoned 6 or 7 more, at Westridge and Webb (with Laura). Last year I didn't get to the ACS prom because I was enjoying post-op at Tokuda Hospital, but this year, I was all in. Sadly, Shannon couldn't join me (it would have cost her over $100), but I'm sure she'll get her chance to attend a prom or twenty with me in the future.
At some level, all proms are the same. The kids dress themselves up all fancy: some of the guys look downright manly, and many of the girls look way too good. Families take lots of "they're so grown up!" photos, the kids get an expensive dinner, a big ballroom is rented, cheesy music is danced to, and kids stay out all night at after-parties doing all sorts of things that parents pretend/hope they wouldn't.
Some things are not the same in Bulgaria.  The main differences here were that 1. This was not a school-sponsored event and 2. All the seniors can legally smoke and drink. Which they do. A lot.

I didn't attend this year's prom as a chaperone, making sure kids were behaving. I attended as a guest, invited by the senior class, to take part in their general mis-behaving. It was a very different experience.

The prom-goers start out on campus for class photos around 6pm. With all the parents, grandparents, and siblings well-wishing (and some rented professional photogs/videogs capturing every moment), they took their places standing on the steps of Sanders Hall, just like their beginning of 8th grade photo, except now the girls were in formal gowns, the guys in suits (almost no tuxes), and they were drinking champagne out of their recently earned intramural soccer championship trophy. Yeah, they did that.  As a bulgarian senior tradition, the students chant their numbers, counting to twelve ("Edno, dve, tri, cheteri, pet, shest, sedem, osem, devet, deset, edinaiset, dvaiset, WHOOOOOOOOO!") before cheering wildly.  If you didn't know your numbers before, a few minutes at picture session would set you straight.

Teachers looking fancy: Lindsay, Pei Pei, Jeff, Hanna, and Abby

Some of the dresses were classy, looking like Jackie O or Helen of Troy. Some looked more like burlesque performers or something in a Tim Burton show. To protect the innocent, I'll skip some of those photos, though I have to say that given the rather revealing things these students wear to school regularly, I'd have to say that the dresses were overall much less whore-ish than I expected, and probably as a whole more decent than the ones from US proms.
All the kids were then shuttled downtown to the Sheraton (the first non-Socialist hotel to open in the country) in various luxury vehicles...it was a fancy car parade: Mercedes, BMWs, Audi's,  a swish Chrysler, a Lamborghini, convertibles, some classic cars, and a few students quietly getting into humbler rides.

OK Supertans: The somewhat less-swanky transit option chosen by the teachers.

At the Sheraton, with all the relatives still in toe, more counting to twelve ensued a the entrance. (" ...edinaiset, dvaiset, WHOOOOOOO!!!!!) An Asian man in his late twenties, casually dressed in a t-shirt and shorts and apparently a guest at the Sheraton, looked on with fascination, watching the whole procedure for a good 15 minutes.

All the teachers of seniors plus a few honored extras received prom invitations from the seniors. Considering how much they must have spent on the room, food, and alcohol, I considered it an honor to attend. After waiting for  more pictures and "WHOOOO!-ing", the teachers snuck inside and got seated. As a walked in the ballroom, I was handed a glass of champaign. So this is how it was going to be.
Before I got started on my plate of appetizers, a waiter came around offering healthy glasses of whisky and vodka (I declined). Sitting on the table were several bottles of tasty Bulgarian wine (and some Coke, Fanta, and water, just in case). At Westridge prom I had to help the dean of students look for drunk kids, as they would be breathylyzed and severely punished if they were caught drinking. Here students kept coming over to the teacher tables for toasts. Odd.
Besides the smoking and drinking, most of the official prom continued as any other prom would. Some awkward dancing, a dance-off for king and queen, and some teachers trying to stay awake (but mostly the teachers were on the dance floor, getting down).

Faculty table at prom

Dancing the horo at prom (I joined in)

Prom dancefloor. At this point Boyan still had his shirt on.

Teachers mixing it up at prom.

I like this shot.

At midnight the official prom ended, and most students migrated to Sin City, a popular chalga club, for the after-party. Chalga is a Bulgarian creation, a very danceable mix of traditional folk music with a techno beat, all set to insipid/degrading lyrics.  There are MTV-like channels and radio stations that play nothing but chalga. Other balkan countries have similar versions of folk-techno, I think, and each country is sure that theirs is the original (just as each country is sure that Macedonia is really theirs...but I digress).

Sin City.

And so it begins. Sin City: the after-party.

Last year only a few teachers went to the after-party. but this year I think at least 10 of us made it. After standing in line to be frisked by some mafia-goons (who were supposedly checking IDs too, as you were supposed to be 18 to get in, but I saw plenty of 10th graders there, so they weren't checking too closely), I almost turned around when I saw that they wanted 30 leva to get in the door (about $22). A $22 cover charge might not seem like much to you US city-folk, but 30 leva will get you dinner for two including a little alcohol at a medium-nice restaurant in Sofia, so it's pretty steep.  Sin City is considered the VIP dance club in town, where the celebrities and footballers go to celebrate.  I decided it would be a cultural experience and needed to do it, regardless of the 30 leva .

The inside was, well, amazing. LOUD. My ears were still ringing 24 hours later. Bright and flashy, as any good club should be. And PACKED.  The students had apparently reserved tables ahead of time that circled the elevated dance floor. I can only imagine what those tables cost, as they came with many, many bottles of very expensive booze. I'm guessing one of those tables (with booze) was 500-1000 leva, but I don't really know.


I only taught a handful of the senior class, so I didn't really know most of them. Too bad, as it was a pretty good show. This was where the booze was flying (and apparently some coke was being snorted). At a place called "sin city" packed with 100+ drunk, horny, and celebratory teenagers (not to mention the regular crowd of mafiosos and their prostitute-lite girlfriends, jammed into the corner and looking a little peeved about the high schooler intrusion), I expect dirty things happen.  I tried to leave before I saw too many of them happen.

Can you spot the teacher on the dancefloor?

I danced a bit, both on the elevated dance floor and just in the regular area, and just watched the show. There was a small live band wandering around in addition to the DJ. It was fairly insane. I was both fascinated to watch the spectacle, but self-conscious about being the creepy old guy in the corner staring at teenagers. In the end I stayed about an hour, but as I saw more and more of my current students (all underage, likely there with a fake ID or bribing the doormen), I decided it was time to make for the exits.

It's about 1:30 am, and it's starting to be a junkshow. There are 3 drunk teachers (one partially obscured) in this shot.

All in all, it was an excellent experience. I doubt Deerfield prom will be quite the same!

Short video clip from Sin City:



Social-Political footnote: I couldn't imagine how frustrating it must be for European students to attend colleges in the US, after having (legal) social outlets available like Sin City, and then having to make do with house-parties and illicit dorm room drinking for a few years. Tell me again why the legal drinking age is 21 in the US? Were the kids at Sin City going to do stupid things while drunk? Of course, but no different than US college kids (or high school, for that matter) do at a house party. It seems as if the main reason we're so tough on teen drinking in the US is to prevent drunk driving. I'm all for preventing drunk driving, but maybe it would be better to focus on the driving part, instead of the drinking part. I think drunk driving is pretty rare in Europe (I need some stats to back me up), partly because public transit and taxis are so much more accessible, and partly because driving is so much more difficult (expensive/difficult to get a license, expensive to drive, and if you get busted for DD, you lose your license. Done. You might not get it back for years, if at all). End rant.

Six Years

Many of you probably know that I had a nasty mountain biking accident several years ago.  Actually, exactly 6 years ago, today.  I spent 2 months in a neck brace and another month in physical therapy - I still can't turn my head very far to the right, but thankfully, that's the worst of my injuries.  I was lucky and felt that I had been given a new chance in life, so I made the decision to move on from Yellowstone and try to live my life to the fullest in Bozeman.

Just a year and a few months later, I met Jeff.  I new I was in trouble from day one.  We had a crazy romance that at times I thought would go nowhere, but luckily 2 1/2 years after my accident, he proposed.  We got married just over 3 years after, and we both finished our degrees just over 4 years after.  Five years after the accident, we were living in Bulgaria and I was nearly done being a high school teacher.  Now, 6 years later, we're still in Bulgaria and I'm a PR specialist - not something I ever expected to do in my life.

I think that I have successfully lived my life to the fullest during the last 6 years.  I earned a Ph.D., I married an amazing man who luckily is not only my partner, but is my best friend (insert gag reflex here), I took a teaching job that I was terrified of - and survived, I tried another new job that is so completely different from anything I've ever done or trained for (and I think gained more priceless experience in communications), and I've travelled all over Europe and a bit of Africa and Asia.  Now I'm getting ready for another move with Jeff - to Massachusetts in August.  Another new chapter that I hope will be full of adventure.  A pretty full life.

Today I've been going through what I've done on May 28th for the last 5 years - I always wanted to do something special as a sort of celebration of life.  Sadly, I can't remember for a couple of the years, but here's what I do remember:

May 28, 2006 - My friend, Diane, and I went to the Sasquatch Festival at the Columbia River Gorge - heard some amazing music, ate "sasquitches", and stayed dry during a hail storm by huddling under a tarp; the best part was when the rainbow showed up behind us and Matisyahu spoke about second chances - seemed prophetic

May 28, 2007 - Jeff took me and his friend Chrissy and her boyfriend (now husband) David down the Narrows in Zion National Park - one of the most beautiful places on this planet, I think; an amazing hike

May 28, 2008 - ? I wish I could remember what I did then

May 28, 2009 - I had a party at our house to celebrate friends and life

May 28, 2010 - I was here in Bulgaria, I believe there was a birthday get together for Lindsay's birthday

Today, May 28, 2011 - This morning Jeff, Jess (a fellow teacher), and I took seven students to Vitosha Nature Park to join in the national Volunteer Day and help clean up parts of the trail that our school has adopted (this is an initiative I've been working on with the school that I hope continues after we leave!).  It has been a beautiful sunny day and we all enjoyed being outside seeing all the flora and fauna of this mountain that is almost literally in my back yard.  Wildlife sightings were: two snakes, one dead skink (legless lizard), and two forest long-legged frogs (man can they jump!).  After returning home, Jeff and I napped out on the lawn - until it started raining, and then there was a very loud and quick thunderstorm - I'm sure two of those lightning strikes had to hit somewhere on campus.  Tonight is also Prom for our school, so all the students (and their families) got gussied up and came to campus to have pictures taken.  Prom is slightly different here in that it is not run by the school - in fact, other than the pictures on campus, it is not associated with the school, so the seniors actually invite teachers.  If you were not invited, you can buy a ticket for the equivalent of $132.  Jeff was invited because he teaches seniors.  I was not and since I don't really know the seniors, I decided not to go.  That's where Jeff is right now.  I'm enjoying a quiet evening at home.  I didn't take any pictures of the gussied up students, but I'm sure Jeff will and maybe we'll post some (although most of the dresses this year were fairly tame, unlike what I've heard other years have been like).  Anyway, it has been a very nice and memorable day.

On that note, I will leave you with a couple of group pics:

The Vitosha Adopt-A-Trail Crew

Jeff and all of his prom dates!

I hope everyone enjoys their Memorial Day Weekend!