Authentic Bulgarian Miak

Mom said that my sister and I had to give our Eastern Europe extravaganza a name, and for this purpose we chose Authentic Bulgarian Miak. It suits the trip, partly because we intend to stop in Bulgaria for at least a day or two, but mostly because we've seen the movie that it references at least a hundred thousand times. Even if you are one of the ten people in the world who get the reference, you are still wondering why anybody would name a trip after that.


To update you (since I don't remember what the last post I made was about), my sister Sara has arrived in the great land of Georgia and is currently adjusting to this brave new world of supras and squat toilets. After my Peace Corps service ends (10 days!!! EEE!!!), we're going to mosey back to the US over the course of 4 weeks. Success will be defined as: 1) staying within $200 of our projected budgets, and 2) not killing one another.


So far, so good. She's been here three days as I write this, and we've seen Soviet model town Chiatura and country village Kheltubani. She prefers the latter, it seems, though this might be because the host family has made an inspiring effort to spend time together and to take us to ancient cave cities, both of which contribute to memories and culture and all that. In another show of culture, we did spend the entire day until 5PM staring at the wall and waiting for the heat to diminish a little bit.

As I write this, she's looking through the pictures we took today at the cave city and at Sioni, a 7th century church in the village of Ateni. She seems more delighted by the pictures of my host family's one-month-old puppy, but perhaps that's because there's no squeal-y equivalent for awe.

In any case, I will make a valiant effort to put forth at least one more post on this blog before I depart the country. I foresee posting approximately zero times during my four weeks in Eastern Europe, mostly because I won't have a computer.

And after that?

Well, I assume that most of the people who read this are travelers or wannabe travelers who enjoy reading about life in another culture. I also assume that none of those same people would be remotely interested in hearing Jennifer's Observations About New York, subtitled I Live in a Box. Nonetheless, I have come to the self-promoting conclusion that there must be someone out there who would benefit from a blog about the process of readjustment to America after Peace Corps. It should be interesting. But maybe it won't be interesting to you; should my hit counter slow to a crawl, I won't be offended. Just delete this page from your Favorites, and we can move on with our lives.

So this means that the next post-- my last post until late August-- should be about conclusions and What I Learned and such. We shall see; that sounds rather lofty and ambitious. To boot, it would really blow to end this era with 500 words of contrite fluff ("I learned that all cultures are beautiful!"). The suspense is killing me...