Back from Italy!

I went to visit my brother in Rome for a couple of days and wow what a weather change! I will never (well I can’t say that) make pizza again after eating some of the food. Wow…It was good to get away, but even better to see my brother. He was growing some sort of Ravens beard or something, but it was more like patches. More power to him. Rome was out of this world. The hotel was literally a few blocks away from the coliseum, which was amazing. The pantheon, the roads, and the forum it was just truly spectacular. I definitely want to go back. Maybe after my service though, we’ll see. My brother is doing well and I think that is what I enjoyed the most. Seeing him. I know he enjoyed my company too, but to see him and not via skype, well it was a late Christmas for me. We went out, drank, had dinner, all the things we hadn’t been able to do like we do during the summers. Hopefully he can find his way back to Europe during the summer and we can do it again. I know it was a great trip for him as it was for most of his friends, for me it was interesting hearing English again. I must say I kept having the problem of starting conversations in Bulgarian or ordering in Bulgarian. Smooth Jon- real smooth. I guess that means another step in the process of Peace Corps right? When your brain starts to function in Bulgarian? Always interesting. I also celebrated 8 months in country when I was in Italy, so Nazdrave! (Cheers!)

Here’s a post from December:

So it’s December now! Not as cold as you would think. It has been very mild and not too much snow at the moment. More rain than I could actually want. I’m sure it will be considered a good thing when I find out that winter is only going to be 6-7 maybe 8 weeks long. Last week I went to visit my friend Ryan up North for Thanksgiving. It was awesome. He’s right on the Danube River. Kind of a trek for me, but it was totally worth the small get away. It was actually colder there than it has been in the mountains. Things are starting to move along. I’m starting to find projects, whether or not they get in motion is another story. Hopefully they do! I’ve decided that I will be going to visit my other friend Joe for Christmas again up North because I want to spend New Years here. I’ve heard many good things about New Years in my village as the population grows with all the tourists. Time will tell!

So here’s another one of those posts from before Thanksgiving.

Hey again!


So I’ve been in country for 6 months. Wow! I’m at my IST or in-service training. It was a nice location since it only took about 3-4 hours to get here. I am loving my site. It is getting somewhat cold, but definitely enjoyable. In about a week I will head up to one of my buddies’ site and spend Thanksgiving there. Maybe have some turkey and try to stream the football games. Hopefully it will be a relaxing time, after all it will take me about 13 hours to get up North. Here at IST it is good to know that everyone is feeling the same way. You find yourself at site with a lot of free time and questioning on how you can improve on certain things. The fact of the matter is though, sometimes people are purely content with how they are and what they have. It becomes a process of ‘OK, how do we do this, and how can it be creative?”, or “What do YOU want to do?” I’m still doing a lot with the kids, or trying to. I’ve been chopping wood for the last couple of days, so I’ve been able to stop my work out routine- chopping wood is enough. The process to do this is first you slam the axe into the cylindrical shaped piece of wood, usually 70-80 pounds. After the axe is lodged into this piece of wood, you then lift up the whole piece over your shoulder and flip it- so that the axe is facing down with the wood hanging from it over your shoulder. Then in a smooth-swinging motion you slam the end of the axe onto the stump, so that the axe if facing upwards. It then splits into two. It’s quite interesting and very melodic…and therapeutic. This motion is usually one quick action and takes less than 2 seconds to complete. So I think I’ve deserved the right to not have any workouts this week. Well IST sessions are about to get going I’ll post more after Thanksgiving or sooner!

4ao.

Well Long overdue.

Well over the next couple of days I'll be posting copies of what I had written in word when the internet was going haywire in November, December and Now. But it's back so I have about 6 posts that will be posted in the next couple of days!

So here's the first post from November:

Well here it is November and hopefully it will continue to be just as good as October was! We have a In Service training coming up and that means close to 6 months in! Which is amazing. The language is coming along and my office is slowly but surely moving forward. The snow has melted and I've spent most of my time just chopping wood and teaching classes. I'm pretty excited about the snow because it is sooooo gorgeous here covered in white! My brother moves to Italy after Christmas to study for about 3 weeks. Hopefully I can work something out where I can visit him. I'll keep you posted!