My Bulgarian Journey: Last week of PST

I guess I'll start off with what when on this past week. On Thursday, we had our community project. It was a Community Arts Celebration and we held it at 5:00 on Thursday evening. The schedule included:

2 Groups of kids reading 2 Shel Silverstein poems

1 Group of kids dancing the Horo, traditional Bulgarian Dance

We read a poem by the Bulgarian Poet, Hristo Botev titled "Hadji Dimitar"

A group of Babas (grandmas) sang 2 songs

There was a 30 minute art activity where people were to draw what their town meant to them (we then compiled these into a binder to keep in the library)

Snacks

The Babas presented us with a history book of our town

We thanked the town and the town thanked us

We gave the library a game and 2 English-Bulgarian Dictionaries

We interviewed with a local television station from the town over

The event went well, the aim was to get people into the Cultural center and we had about 100 people which was great for a town of 2,000. There were even people from the nursing home there which was good to see. The babas speech even made me cry because it was so nice and I will miss my family once I leave on Saturday.

Here are a few photos from the art activity:

Then came Friday which meant we were going to Sophia. Sophia is the capital of Bulgaria and 3 million of the 8 million people in Bulgaria live there. I woke up at 5:30 and we left town at 6:20 to take a bus to Sophia. It took about 3 hours by bus to get there and then we went to the Peace Corps Headquarters of Bulgaria to have interviews with the Program Staff. We traveled around the city mainly by tram. After our interviews, we went to an amazing Indian restaurant and then walked around the city.

Here we are in front of a church:

A photo of Sophia (lions are a big thing in Bulgaria):

Guess what! There is McDonald's in Sophia, actually there are quite a few. Here is the menu:

Then on our bus ride home we found out they had oversold the bus ride. We bought tickets in the morning to ensure a seat however we ended up sitting like this:

Those people in the back are sitting on top of metal bars and I am in the aisle, on the floor in front of Kristin. It was an interesting ride.

On Saturday I was able to go to the Panorama in Pleven with my host family. This is a building built in the 1970s and inside is a huge, panoramic painting of a major battle in Bulgarian history between the Russian forces (on Bulgarian's side) and Turks. This building is huge, if you look at the small doorway of the building you can see how far in front of it I actually am to be taller than it. It was a well painted panorama and I was glad I was able to go.