I had an advantage in terms of Bulgarian culture shock since I lived 4+ years in Puerto Rico with my family. Upon our arrival to Bulgaria I kept saying “wow...this looks familiar”, of course Bulgaria isn't Puerto Rico, this was mainly just an easy way for me to adjust to such a different environment. Chris had a bit more “Culture Shock” then me, which I think has to do with this Puerto Rico advantage I held. After jet lag and adjusting passed we had a fun couple days at a first annual music festival in the Village of Voditsa, where we met many travelers, foreigners, and locals alike. I think Soeren-Raedek came close to meeting as many, if not more people then we did, as he was constantly high fiving people I had merely smiled in passing to. Our email contact list is much fuller then it was a week and a half ago when we arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria I can say that much. Even on our train ride from Sofia to Voditsa we met a wonderful guy named Angel whom certainly lived up to his name. Angel told us quite a bit about the area and helped welcome us to Bulgaria with tips and first person info. (It was a 5 hour train ride and Angel was riding with us for 4 of those hours...so you can only imagine how much we all talked!)
Even though we haven't been here but a
week and a half it feels like 3 or more! We have been taking in so
much of the culture, the language and getting to know our hosts
better. So far our work has contained of husking walnuts (which we
will be doing more of the rest of our time here), relocating mud
bricks, taking down the festival site, removing a vegetative menace
simply called “creeper”, piling firewood, gathering vegetables,
cleaning and preparing a future “rocket stove” site, and more. In
the following days and weeks we will be doing much of the same things
and more, this rocket stove is the big project ahead of us, it is an
L shaped mud brick oven about 2+ feet or so high, that has a channel
down the center of it where the smoke passes through, thus if sat on
will also double as a warm bench to sit on. I will of course know
MUCH more about it by the end of the week. I will also be taking
pictures of the progress to post here on my blog.
One thing every single Gendron family
member loves so far about Bulgaria is the farmers/shepherds, that
walk their cows, sheep, or goats, up our street every day. Most of
them take their herd to the field on a hill nearby (where the
festival site was located) to let the animals graze and get fresh
spring water for awhile. It is awesome to see and hear the shepherds
yelling and guiding their large herds around! I get a kick out of it
every time, I love it!
As for our communication with the world
outside of the Village of Voditsa we will be trying to make posts or
at least small updates every couple weeks (give or take), all
depending on how busy we are and how motivated we are on our
non-volunteering days (days off, if you will). Even though we haven't
been here long our days off have been spent going to the nearby
larger city of Popovo, spelled in Bulgarian as; Попово.
We
will try to be updating at our earliest convenience! We have internet
available to us, it just all depends on when we get around to getting on
the interweb!
Thanks for wanting to keep updated as well as reading!! I am going to need to resize the pictures because they are all to big to be uploaded quick enough - I will do a follow up post with pictures as soon as they are ready! Sorry! :( Here is the one picture that uploaded:
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| Soeren getting walnuts out of a barrel. |
