Birthday

word of the week: приятелки (priyatelki) - friends

This last week I turned 23, and now I can say I finally feel like an adult. A lot has happened since I've come to Bulgaria, and I guess that becoming an adult is a logical result of all of it. But don't worry, I still have my sweet, innocent charms! And I am still mistaken as one of the youth volunteers when I'm with them... I guess I still have a ways to go before I can look like an adult :-)

Throughout the day on my birthday, people kept taking me aside to give me presents, which was a really nice break from the seminar. Nelly gave me a beautiful red shirt that really looks good on me (shown in the picture with a PC fiend of mine), some perfume, and a big, wonderful, red flower all of which were from everyone in the office. Another friend gave me a potted rose plant, another a bottle of wine, and another a candle that smells like roasted marshmellows. I think it's funny that you can get candles that smell like marshmellows in Bulgaria, but you can't actually get marshmellows. oh well.

The party was good, and everyone loved the rice-krispie treats and smores. We volunteers had a good time teaching our language trainers the names of these treats. We had to break them down into syllables like they did with us when we learned Bulgarian, and it was pretty funny to reverse the roles.

The seminar itself was pretty good, too. It was on how to write projects, and a lot of the activities we did I think would be really good to do with the youth volunteers at my organization. They have a lot of really great project ideas, but then they just wait to be told what to do to make them become a reality. We're hoping to do a training series with them on what a volunteer is (the concept of volunteerism is relatively new in Bulgaria), and I think it'd be good to include some of the things from the seminar. We now have a new youth worker at my organization, and I'm really excited about working with her on this.

This Saturday, I went with Sonya and some friends to see an exhibit of wax figures. The figures were life size, and there were a lot... Harry Potter and his friends were there, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, some American singers, Bulgarian national heroes, Shrek and his friends (on the left), and more. We took a bunch of really funny pictures.

Well, that's all for this week. Till next week!