Scenes from the BG life...

Here's a fun cultural fact: if you are crossing someone's path, they don't wait for you to cross before they continue to walk. They simply dodge you and usually they hit you in the process. I get jostled all the time. No joke.

It has been a few very low-key days here. It's warming up some, but it is raining on and off all day. We're still both on the mend, lung-wise, and so we've been doing a lot of this:
This is a picture of Nathan reading to me. We're doing a 2-year reading plan of the Bible and we're also taking turns reading books to each other. I led off with Agatha Christie's An Overdose of Death and Nathan is now reading Ender's Game to me. After this we are going to re-read all of the Harry Potter books. We all know I'm not a huge fan of them, but it's a nice series that we've downloaded for free so it should give us enough reading material for the next year or so.

In Bulgaria, the word for store or shop is magazine and here is a sign advertising a "magazin" downtown.

And because I'm always taking pictures of Nathan--here's a picture of me and a Bulgarian telephone booth.

Bulgarians are very, very not religious, but here is a shrine by the Green Market.

And, to round it out, here is a picture of the ubiquitous BG sticker:

And I know I've mentioned it before, but history, as a discipline, is so different here. First of all, everything that anyone learns in school is a created myth. Also, no one learns about the underpinnings of western civilization. Seriously. There is no expectation of a general knowledge of Greeks and Romans.

Also, events that happened 1000 or 2000 years ago are still fresh in people's minds. It is just so shocking to me who comes from a place where our history is so young and yet we still don't know much about it. The massacre in Wilmington in 1896? Never heard of it until my second year of college. But Bulgarians still do things a certain way based on the way they interacted with the Byzantine Empire 1500 years ago!

There is a also a reverence here for the past--even if it is not your past. This is strange, I think, considering all of the "created" histories, but sites that were important to one civilization are still revered by another. For instance, the transformation of sites under the Turkish occupation from Christian to Muslim, but still very much holy and preserved. Interesting.

Nathan and I can't wait to see what happens in election news in the coming days. We're a bit disheartened about Obama, but jazzed about McCain. Keep us updated!