Today (as long as you’re reading this hot-off-the-press on Thursday!) marks 2 months until we leave Bulgaria! So we’re continuing the list of things we’re not so keen to lose:

The following continues on from this post.

5. Not being understood: why is this a good thing? Well, for two reasons, both of which are devious! Firstly, having the ability to conduct private conversations in public can be quite handy! You know, important matters like: “Darling, you have a large piece of spinach stuck between your front teeth”, or “Don’t you think she’s a bit old to dress like her daughter?”, or “I’m a bit tired and bored, how about we make our excuses and leave?”. Secondly, once you’re used to the fact that no one is speaking a language you can understand, you simply tune them out. It’s great! No need to turn around to see why that dude behind you is yelling… he’s almost certainly not yelling in your direction! And when we go out for a coffee, the many murmurs in Bulgarian mingle together into a strange kind of white noise that’s very conducive to the kind of introspective conversations that Elly and I keep finding ourselves having lately!

We’ve been wondering what it’ll be like when we get back to Australia. Will we cope with suddenly not being able to block out all the noise? Or will we accidentally ignore people? Who knows.

6. Non-processed food: actually, Bulgarians LOVE their nasty, stale, preservative-laden processed foods! The supermarkets here are laden with such wonderful goods as: packets of cooked sausages (hellooo killer bacteria!), individually packaged (stale) croissants piped full of sickly strawberry goo, cheap chocolate bars full of cocoa-less ‘chocolate’, dubious flavours of soft drink (pictured above)… the list goes on. However, it’s also quite easy to avoid all that rubbish and we have really been enjoying doing so over here! Fruit and vegetables are cheap, as are dried beans (our new staple!), white cheese, rice and pasta. Eating out is healthier too – ‘fast food’ doesn’t really exist here, so it’s more likely to be traditional Bulgarian fare (stodgy but authentic). I would say “I hope we keep it up when we go back to Australia”, but the above basically describes what we preferred to eat anyway – except that in Australia there’s no financial incentive to buy non-processed food. I think Coles and Woollies have a secret tax on eating healthily!

7. Europeness: I suspect we Australians subconsciously or otherwise consider Europe to be altogether more authentic, or sophisticated, and truly beautiful than Ausland. If someone had told me that a year ago I would have laughed (bitterly!) in their face(s), but having spent our time here I realise that I came to Europe with that very notion tucked away in my head somewhere. The feeling first showed itself when I first entered this shady pine forest underneath Mt. Vitosha – but other might have experienced it as they walk through the doors of Chanel in Paris or Gucci in Florence*. It’s a feeling that leaves you saying “Oh yeah, I’m in Europe, baby!”. I’m afraid to say that it is cool to be in Europe, after all.

[* An additional example might be drinking cappuccinos in Venice... in saying that, I give "told you so" rights to my sister Sal, who I once mocked for her glowing (and allegedly frequent) reports of the quality of coffee in Italy!]

8. A clear and uncomplicated purpose: this one is a bit more philosophical. Around October 2008 when we made the decision to come to Bulgaria we were filled with a near-euphoric sense of purpose. I’m sure others have felt the same thing at various times in their lives – witnessing the birth of their child; accepting an amazing job offer; buying a house; deciding to follow Jesus, etc. I remember feeling lucky that I knew what the next 18 months of my life would look like (it certainly satisfied the control freak in me! For about 5 minutes).

Something of that feeling has stayed with us during our time here. Which is not to say that we haven’t struggled, or found teaching Aydin or learning Turkish difficult – but we retained the luxury of knowing what we’re here for and how long we’re required.

I have two observations about this; forgive me if they contradict each other. On the one hand, if I were asked to narrow down what I’ve learned from our experience to one thing, it would be this: that we’ve been privileged to see through David and Kathryn (and several other missionary families) what a life lived with a singular sense of purpose can achieve! What we hope to bring home is a sense that ‘we’ (meaning, ‘we mere mortals’) can live our lives with some of the same purpose. Not in the sense of striving to be over-achievers, but in the sense of living intentionally. In other words, I’d like to put more thought into how I spend my time – which includes re-evaluating how much of that time I designate “mine”.

On the other hand, sometimes desiring to find a purpose can distract us from simpler things. What I mean is that God moves in mysterious ways and we don’t always see what his purposes are – and so our own sense of purpose often has nothing to do with it! Elly and I think that’s true with our trip to Bulgaria. We certainly felt called to be here, and had that sense of purpose that I described. And we know that God used us to help the Richards’ at the perfect time. But what will we take home from it? Well, we’re not returning to missionary college – though that was a possibility before we left Australia. Neither are we returning to Australia to employ our skills in teaching 6-year-olds, or speaking Turkish. In fact, we can’t really pinpoint what it is that we’ll take from our experience here – personal growth, God’s timing, something we may never know. What we do know is that it’ll be good for us.

Eww. And before I get all mushy, I’m outta here!

Cheers

Stu.

Uh-oh.

It’s been too long between blogs! We beg your collective pardon. We promised not to let our blog ‘fizzle out’ so hopefully we can get back on track!

It’s 10 weeks until we leave Bulgaria! That’s an attractively short period of time, to us. One of the other missionary families asked us if we were looking forward to leaving. We diplomatically answered that we were looking forward to getting home, rather than leaving Bulgaria. It’s true; as the time for us to leave gets closer – amidst continuing feelings of homesickness! – we are also beginning to imagine some of the things we’ll miss when we come home.

That’s the topic of this blog: things we’ll miss about Bulgaria, and – on a slightly less upbeat note – things we’re worried about in relation to returning home.

1. The price of things: we normally loathe talking about money with our language helper, Mirem, since it makes us feel so awkward. By which I mean ‘rich’, of course. But today we had an interesting discussion where we started comparing the differing prices of things in Australia and Bulgaria. It started with the price of the internet. We explained that our sharehouse prior to leaving Australia was on a AU$70 per month plan (between 5 people)… whereas we’re paying BGN16 (AU$13) per month here for 4 times the speed and no download limit. Bread is AU$3-4 a loaf compared to 80st (AU$0.65); tomatoes AU$6-10/kg compared to BGN1-2 (AU$0.80-1.65). Mirem was horrified. We explained that people earn more in Australia. I think we gave the figure of AU$1500 per month which, on reflection, would be below the minimum wage. Mirem suggested that the average wage here is BGN240 (AU$190) a month. On top of that, David recently told us that unemployment rises to around 40% in the mahalle during winter. Actually, facts like that kind of put any whingeing I might have had about how expensive everything is in Australia into perspective…

2. The Lada: what can mere words say?

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3. Dodginess! I remember writing about this from Istanbul before we’d even made it to Bulgaria last June. There’s a completely different attitude here to things like safety, efficiency, hygiene etc… Chainsawing firewood in a kindergarten playground during recess? Yup, no worries. Postal clerks going about their business merrily ignoring a room full of people wanting to get their letters stamped? You betcha! BBQ chickens on a set of rotisseries with raw chickens dripping onto cooked ones? Absolutely. We saw equally good examples in both Turkey and Romania, too – obviously it’s just we uptight Australians who worry about such things. Ok, so I’m not about to ignore everything I know about preventing salmonella outbreaks, but there’s certainly something liberating about not worrying so much!

4. Snow: ok, this is more relevant to right now where it’s minus 6 degrees outside and steadily snowing! It’s been cold all week but it’s only just started snowing again. It makes all the frostbite worth it. I went for a (short) walk after dinner just so I could kick around in the crazy stuff. Did you know that when it’s this far below freezing the snow on the ground behaves like very fine sand? And you have no hope whatsoever of making it into a snowball? It’s like dust!

Well, I’ll be uncharacteristically succinct and leave it there for now. I had some much longer and more boring thoughts to share with you, but hey, I’ll leave that for another time since it’s late and you’re all about to start waking up and checking all your favourite blogs, right?

Cheers,

Stu.

We all of a sudden discovered that today (Dec 8th) marks 6 months since we left Tas.

I’m reflecting on our 3 month reviews and finding it amusing that we proudly called it our ‘first quarter’ because we hadn’t realised at that stage that we’d only be here for 10 months.

So what has changed in the past 3 months? Are the big topics of the last milestone (culture shock/homesickness, language, teaching) still important to us, or have we found new things to dwell on? Do we regret being here yet? Are we keen to get home?

Culture Shock

I just asked Stu if he’s still feeling culture shock or homesickness. He said yes without hesitation, which surprised me. The other day I realised that I no longer pined for home and decided that I must be ‘over all that.’ But then, I have been on holidays and as a result have spent a lot of time being in contact with friends back home. I guess those things are always going to be sort of hanging over us because we’ll never really feel like we belong here and it’s not so much a pining for our home culture but more a general feeling of having no idea what’s going on outside.

I’m not scared about the next 4 months, because I know they’ll be quite similar to our first 4 months and it’s comforting to know that we survived those fine. Saying this makes me think about a television series we’ve been watching lately called FlashForward. The basic premise is that the entire world blacks out for 2 minutes and catches a glimpse of what will happen to them in 6 months time. For a lot of people in the show, knowing what the future brings gives them hope and/or determination. Hope because they have a future worth living for, and determination to change their path if they didn’t like what they saw. I guess what I’m experiencing here isn’t really the same, but now that all the uncertainty about living here has faded away it’s easier to look at our remaining time here and feel calm.

Language

I won’t dwell too much on this topic here, since Stu wrote about our Turkish lessons in the last post. It feels good to be at a stage where we have a 27% chance of understanding what someone is saying to us, and a 62% chance of being understood. (Those statistics are completely arbitrary and were just numbers I thought looked good) Occasionally I catch myself starting to translate into Turkish (in my head) what I’ve just said/written, and today I was talking today to a friend at home and she said something and my first response was a Turkish word. Fortunately it was over chat so I had time to remember the English equivalent before responding.

Years ago Stu and I had this friend* who went to another country for a few months to learn a new language. When he came back he would constantly slip in a word or phrase of this language into conversation. We (being the circle of friends) got completely frustrated by this behaviour and were adamant that he was showing off his new found knowledge just to show how smart he was now. I’m sad to say that our friendship with this person was never the same again. Stu and I have been thinking about this incident and cringing at how ignorant, selfish and immature we were. How could we know just how much it confuses your brain to learn a new language? We have been worrying that we will alienate our friends back home with our new language because of this past experience.

[*I've not gone into any details here to protect this person's identity and I ask that people familiar with this story also respect this when they comment ]

Teaching

Not much to say on this because we’ve only just started again this week after a 6 week break. We’ve definitely settled into some kind of rhythm and Aydin appreciates that we have our roles and stick to them. Stu does maths and I do English. It’s good. Kathryn was given the advice by everyone but Aydin’s actual teacher to get him to redo kindergarten. We didn’t have a strong opinion on this either way, but it will be good to know that by doing so will ensure that Aydin will have a better chance of retaining the core basics in both maths and reading. We’re hoping the teacher is ok with the hold back.

Regrets?

We still don’t regret being here. Well, that’s not entirely true. The recent uranium fuss has changed our contentedness here a lot. We have the promoter meds for chelation, but we don’t start on them til we’ve built up our zinc for 2 weeks, but without even opening the bottle we could smell that it’s not going to be a pleasurable experience. Stu explained earlier that it’s because of the uranium that he’s felt culture shock strongly in the last few weeks – it’s easier to resent living here when you can’t even drink the water! We have gone so far as to say to ourselves that if we’d known about the uranium situation then we wouldn’t have come. I guess it is all part of God’s big plan and there is a part of me that feels kind of proud that we’re here doing this and aren’t sitting at home because we were putting ourselves first. It would be nice to know for sure how much we should be worrying about our health and whether drinking bottled water, avoiding root veggies (no potatoes, carrots, parsnip or mushrooms in winter? Come on!) and taking the chelation meds is enough.

Home?

Ever since we confirmed our return dates, we’ve felt like we’re ‘about’ to go home. I’m sure in 4 months time I’ll reflect back on this post and think ‘oh, but it did feel like just the very next day we were leaving.’ Stu is very keen to get home to his new job and I’m very keen to get home because we’ll be temporarily living with Sam and Dani (brother and fiancee) and I just can’t wait to live with Dani. Neither of us grew up with sisters so this time together before they get married is going to be very special.

And here are the official dates:

• April 1: Our last day of term
• April 4: We catch a bus to Istanbul and the metro to the airport to catch our flights which leave at 9:30pm.
• April 5: We catch a flight to Australia. Because things aren’t simple with us, we’re booked onto a flight which will take us to Sydney but we’d rather go to Melbourne so we’re on a waiting list for that. Who knows if we’ll get onto it or not.
• April 6 very early am: We arrive in Sydney or Melbourne. If it’s Sydney then we’ll be booked onto an arvo flight giving us enough time to grab our first decent Australian coffee in the city. If Melbourne, we’ll be organising to have breakfast with my brother Will and the Arnotts and then contemplating spending the night in Bendigo so we can meet our nephew. (Oakleys: hope that’s ok with you! Completely up to how we’re going)
• April 7: We’ll definitely be back in Tas on this day. Someone shall organise a party for us.

On that happy note, I’m off to watch more tv

It’s getting colder. We’re loving it. Next week will bring an expected high of 2. We’ll be coming home to a Tassie winter and laughing in it’s face!

Families: we successfully posted your Christmas presents today. They’re now in the safe (?) hands of Bulgarski Poshta and Australian Post (allegedly it’s the latter that lets the side down this time of year).

Lots of love

Elly xx