Monthly Archive

I mentioned in my previous post that the hardest thing to leave behind here in Sofia is the people.  We have been so fortunate to be able to spend lots of time with Jon, Andrea and Samuel over the past several days, as they have graciously allowed us to stay with them until we leave.  We will miss having them so close, but know that we will still remain friends despite the long distance.  There’s a special bond that exists when you’ve gone through everything we’ve gone through together–moving overseas and being so far away from friends and family, learning a new culture and a new language, and the list goes on.

Yesterday we had gorgeous weather here, so we all decided to spend the day up on Mt. Vitosha.  We see Vitosha everyday, since it’s one of the dominating landmarks in Sofia, but we have just never gotten around to going up to the top.

We took a gondola lift almost all the way to the top.  It was about a 30-minute ride.  The lift is really just a couple miles from where we lived, so I can’t believe we just now got around to doing this.

We stopped for lunch near the top at a cafeteria-style restaurant.  This is also a ski hut in the winter.

We had good intentions to hike to the top of the mountain from the lodge, but the trail was much steeper than we were expecting.  The combination of a dog, a pregnant woman, and a baby made the steep climb very unappealing, so we came back down.  We still managed to get some pretty great views without making it to the top.

From close to the top we could see down into Sofia really well.  These pictures show our neighborhood.  For some reasons, the blocks look a lot better at a distance.

I was so glad that we got to spend part of our last weekend on Vitosha.  Not only is it something we have wanted to do the whole time we’ve been here, it is also a major part of the city and one that we both wanted to experience before leaving.  It was a good way to kind of “say goodbye” to this city that we’ve called home for the past nine and a half months.

Many of you probably know, but this Tuesday we will be boarding a plane bound for Arkansas, and we’re not sure when we’ll be back in Bulgaria.  We’re still in shock that we’re leaving.  We thought this was going to be home for the next 10-15 years.  But, sometimes life takes turns that we weren’t really expecting, and we are excited to see what God has in store for us next.

One of the hardest things about leaving is saying our good-byes, more than anything our good-byes to our teammates and other people we’ve come to know here.  There are also lots of little things we will cherish and miss.  I will miss our wonderful apartment here.  When we are back in Fayetteville and I look out of our apartment and see a parking lot or a street or a field, I will think back to our ninth floor apartment here that has a great view of the mountains during the day and the buildings lit up at night.  We will miss speaking Bulgarian (I don’t think that’s going to come in handy back home, but who knows).  We will miss the relentless snow in the winter, and the nice summers.  We might even miss walking to the store and carrying back all our groceries by hand.  I think I will be in shock the first time I return to Wal-Mart and am able to get a whole week’s worth of food in one trip, and not have to worry about it being too heavy to carry home.

On Thursday we said several good-byes.  We both said bye to our language helpers, and we also had farewell ice-cream with our landlady and her daughter, who is visiting from Spain.

OK, so maybe there aren’t any reports of flying saucers here in Bulgaria, but this monument nearly had us fooled.

This was one of the most intriguing sights we saw in our travels with James’ parents, and I thought it deserved a post all of its own.  We were originally looking for the “Shipka Monument”, a mountain-top memorial to the Russian and Bulgarian soldiers who fought for Bulgaria’s independence from the Ottomans.  We thought we had found it when we came to a parking area and spotted a trail-head across the street.  The fog was so dense that we couldn’t quite see what was on top of the mountain.  From the parking lot, all we could see was a portion of the tower and “flying saucer”.  We just figured that the Shipka Monument was up there somewhere in all the fog.  James and his Dad went to go check it out, while his Mom and I waited down in the car.  We weren’t too excited about all the climbing, so we sent them off with the cameras to take lots of good pictures.

As it turns out, the monument we were looking for was elsewhere.  This “flying saucer” was apparently some kind of former Communist monument that had been completely demolished on the inside.  We did a little research when we got back to Sofia, and found that the monument is called “Buzludzha” and was a former Communist meeting place, housing gatherings of 30-40,000 people.  It has been basically destroyed since the wall fell.  The only way to enter is through a broken glass window.

The next day we all went up there, since James and his Dad had figured out that we could drive up to it.  It was still shrouded in fog, which just added to all the eeriness.  Here are some pictures of the outside and inside.

Buzludzha

If you read my last post about Bulgaria, then you may remember that I mentioned a restaurant serving “vinaigrette with estrogen”.  At least, that’s how it appeared in their English translation of the menu.  The Bulgarian word on the menu was nearly identical to our word for estrogen, so we assumed that this was some kind of new-fangled food craze that we had yet to hear about.  When we looked up the Bulgarian word in the dictionary, we couldn’t find it.  We only found “естрагeн” (meaning estrogen, like it had been translated into English), but could not find “естрагон”, which was the word used on the Bulgarian menu.

Last night as we were eating with Jon and Andrea, we mentioned this to them, wondering if they had any clue as to what this was all about.  They were puzzled, too, but then Andrea suddenly remembered  a packet of seeds she had bought for their garden.  She went and grabbed it, and the big mystery was instantly solved.  The word we had seen on the menu was the Bulgarian word for “tarragon”, incorrectly translated into English as “estrogen”, all because the Bulgarian words for “estrogen” and “tarragon” are exactly the same except for one letter.

Vinaigrette with tarragon sounds like something I would try, but vinaigrette with estrogen?  Not a chance.

I think if any of you out there would like a job in editing, then you’d find plenty of work here in Bulgaria.  This particular restaurant would really appreciate your services, because I’m pretty sure that no English-speaking person in their right mind would ever order that menu item.