Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to the inaugural (and, for that matter, final) Bulgaria Awards ceremony! These are the awards for the coolest, the silliest, the funniest, the most wretched things (technical term) we have encountered this year!

This, the first half of the awards ceremony, is brought to you by Stu. My delightful wife Elly will conclude the presentation soon!

Best Cake and Coffee Establishment:

неделя (Nedelya – BGian for “Sunday”)

Humf – we took you here! Their coffee is kinda okay (which in Bulgaria means it’s exceptional!) and they have a huge range of yummy cakes. Like the majority of Bulgaria’s plentiful cafes, Nedelya is very nicely fitted out with a giant display fridge for the cakes and classy (albeit fake) dark wood panelling all over. If only smoking was illegal inside! We enjoyed being able to go there and chill out on a weekend afternoon – and the fact that you can get two coffees and two big slices of cake for around AU$5 is nice too! Just don’t ask for one of their branded calendars (they’re borderline soft-porn!).

Best Language Mistake:

Elly and I were at Mirem’s house for a Turkish lesson and we were learning Bible verses in Turkish. Actually, it’s worse than that; we were being given important verses by Mirem and being asked to translate them into Turkish to show that we could render them intelligible. This is difficult, since the English used in the Bible is very different to spoken English, and we really didn’t have the requisite Turkish to make it work! But we tried. And paraphrased drastically. Anyway, none of that excuses my language mistake…

What Stu meant to say: “Allah bize Kutsal Ruh verdi” = “God gave us the Holy Spirit”.

What Stu actually said: “Allah bize Kutsal Ruh vurdu” = “God struck us [with] the Holy Spirit”.

Gah! Definitely time for a mono-lingual holiday!

Best Dad-Joke in a Language Other Than Your First:

Another Turkish pun (on purpose this time). So… the Turkish word for prayer is “dua” (pr. doo-ah), and the Turkish word for wall is “duvar” (pr. doo-vahr). I’m sure experienced Dads all over the world are sitting there nutting out the possible puns already! Elly and I had gone to the Millet meeting (church) which had only just started being held in the church building you might have seen in our video (when it was half-built).

So, this one evening, Kemal was up the front praying loudly (with his eyes closed) to end the meeting. He was swaying from foot to foot a little bit, with his arms way up in the air. Without noticing, he started turning away from the rest of the meeting until he was facing the wall. His supportive wife started poking people and pointing at Kemal, sniggering openly. Before long there was an irresistable ripple of laughter happening, at which point Kemal finished praying, opened his eyes, realised he was facing a wall and joined in the giggling! And it was at that precisely timed moment when I pointed out that Kemal was supposed to giving us a dua (prayer) not a duvar (wall). Ha ha ha ha! Well done, Stu.

[start of slightly off-topic rant.] When they started gathering at the “church building”, the change in the meeting was profound[ly disturbing]! Whereas when we’d met in Kemal (the pastor)’s house, people would show up late, if at all, and Kemal would give surly, 10-minute sermons, things changed. Attendance doubled immediately, and people started bringing musical instruments, and Kemal was transformed into a yelling, ranting, enthusiastic preacher-man! If that sounds good, it isn’t. Really, all that was happening was that the people were mimicking the behaviour they might have seen at the Bulgarian (ie. “real”) meetings. It went entirely against their own cultural norms and while it might have made them feel good to be able to associate themselves with what they saw as a real meeting, it could really only get in the way of them genuinely engaging with Jesus in their unique cultural context. [end of rant.]

Best ‘Thank goodness no one else speaks English’ moment:

Okay, this one needs some explaining. Are you familiar with the Meyers-Briggs style of personality test? Elly tells me they were quite the rage on Facebook this year. The test is a way of categorising different personality types and your “result” takes the form of four letters – E for extrovert or I for introvert; S for sensing or N for intuition; F for feeling or T for thinking; and P for perceiving or J for judging. If that’s confusing, bear with me because it’s not strictly relevant to the story! In the last section, Elly is a “P”, meaning she generally needs to hear lots of info before being able to make a decision. So… there we were, walking down the road, with people around, loudly talking in English about our preferences in decision-making.

Elly said (something to the effect of): “But I like to know all the relevant facts before choosing…”

What Stu meant to say: “Yes, that reflects your preference for “perceiving” rather than “judging”.

What Stu actually said: “Yeah, but that’s because of your P-ness”. (Say it out loud; it’s funnier.)

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Is making bad jokes all we’ve done this year?!

That’s all for now. You can be sure that Elly will update you in a couple of days with the final few categories.

Hope you enjoyed the show. Cue the orchestra.

Cheers

Stu.

Humf arrive safe and sleep-deprived last night. Elly has accused him of bringing the wonderfully cold and wet weather from Tassie – does that sound right? How’s the weather since he left? All we know is, as soon as Humf left the Antipodes our weather went from a week of balmy 20-25 degree days to a bitterly cold, wet and windy 8-9 degrees C.

Check out Humf’s blog for regular and fascinating updates on his impressions of Istanbul and Bulgaria (not to put the pressure on or anything).

The plan this week:

- CHILL OUT (why? Mainly because Elly and I finished our huge 12-week term yesterday and we’re tired!);

- Give Humf a good idea of what Haskovo is like (because even though Haskovo isn’t “impressive” compared to the big European cities, it’s so different to Australia that the novelty of it makes normal things fun!);

- Give Humf a taste of what we do every day (eg. he’s coming with us to the birthday party of our language helper’s son this evening in the mahalle; we’ll drag him along to a Millet church meeting on Sunday and a Turkish lesson on Monday; Dave and Rob are thinking up something “culturally challenging” for Humf to possibly be involved in…);

- Lastly, we’ll be thinking about what we want to do for the rest of the time we’re all on holidays (visiting the Nairns in Romania is much more appealing since they announced that it’s been snowing this week! Going to Cappadocia in Turkey sounds awesome too).

That’s all for now.

Cheers,

Stu.

ps. Here’s a photo (showcasing the weather!) I just took from our balcony – click on it for a bigger version!

We recently spent two social evenings in our local mahalle. Just a refresher for all of you not up on our BG lingo, the mahalle is where one would find most of the Millet. In Turkish mahalle means ‘neighbourhood’ but it’s also a euphemism for ‘slum.’ It’s easy to see where they get the idea from, especially with the sewer water running freely down the middle of the main street.

The Millet sure know how to throw a good street party though! Last Tuesday we were invited to a ‘Welcome Baby’ party for a girl that I met during our first week here who had given birth to her first child on Sunday or Monday. As we walked towards the house with Kathryn and Aydin, I commented that the song we could hear in the air was familiar…and getting louder the closer we got. Indeed, the ‘Welcome Baby’ party was well… like a bush doof as Stu put it. Just without the drugs. The music was far too loud for any conversation, there was lots of dancing, a big trestle table was set up for the 40+ men in attendance to sit at and eat and drink and smoke. We were greeted by the new baby’s grandmother, who took us inside to meet him. We were amused that while this big party (there were maybe 200 people milling about) was being held because of the baby, the guest of honour and his mother were huddled in a room at the far end of the house, trying desperately to feed and sleep.

The four of us sat in the baby room; poor Stu didn’t know where to look with all the breastfeeding going on. He chose to stare at the floor until this plan was foiled when the floor became our dinner table and was set with newspaper covered in porn.

David told us afterwards that the party wasn’t really about the new mother, or even the new baby. It was thrown by the new grandmother, but even then it wasn’t about her either. I guess any excuse to party will do!

Tonight (Sunday) we were invited by Mirem to accompany her family to their church meeting. In the past week she had been encouraging (read: badgering) us to memorise the Lord’s Prayer (or Matthew 6:9-13) in Turkish and when we finally accomplished this, she announced her plans to introduce (read: show off) us to her meeting. This was the first time we’d been on a social outing as a friend of a local without David or Kathryn and it felt pretty special!

The meeting was held on the outskirts of the mahalle in the house of a man named Osman (we think, no one actually told us). We opened the meeting by reciting the prayer (Stu did much better than me) and we managed to bring tears to some eyes (in a good way – we don’t think it was because of our wonky pronunciation…). The group then sang some songs; we had been handed a Cyrillic Turkish Bible  which, amazingly, we managed to follow. Osman then read from Hebrews 2 and preached a bit on it, then the group shared prayer requests and ended with more singing and collection. Mirem translated some of it into simpler Turkish and so we had a vague idea of what was going on. The meeting lasted just over an hour and had similarities to western church.

We didn’t mind that we hardly knew a word that was being said, it was quite fun and felt good to be included in a local church like that. Mirem announced before the meeting that we were also coming to a prayer meeting on Wednesday night which should hopefully also be enjoyable.

We welcome a new reader today – Mal. Good to have you on board! More rangas the better.

Have a good one

Elly xx