New Year

Hope everyone is full and feeling guilty for already breaking their New Year's resolutions. I'm back at work after an great 3-day weekend spent in the Rhodopi mountains. There's a lot more snow up there than there is in Elhovo... Everything looked like the tops of those frosted oatmeal cookies (which i miss so much). Anyways we had a big shindig a small hotel in cheppelare, with our good friend Nasser, this crazy Zanzibarian/British ex-pat who owns the place. During the day on new years eve we walked up to a lookout point, and we uh, looked out over Cheppelare. But that quickly degraded into a snowball fight, which was enitrely Kate's fault. After that we wlked through town and found a man selling home-made wine and rakia out of a radio-flyer wagon... How cool is that? We bought him out and went back to the hotel to start drinking... The rest of the night was full of eating, laughing, dancing, and making a fool of ourselves in front of the other guests. I won't name any names, but we B-16s are a scandalous bunch... Any talk of us not knowing how to party is misinformed. When midnight came we watchted the kids set off about a million fireworks. I missed the countdown i think because i was too busy chasing the little british kids around pelting them with snowballs. Yes, i know that is wrong. After that we headed to the discotech, where I had a blast dancing and watching everyone make out with everyone. Then back to the hotel to pass out around 5... Good times.
The first I woke up around noon. Went to meet Celia and Sarah x2 @ Nicks place. Bummed they watched space balls without me. Got some food and hopped on a bus to Smolian... Where Sarah R.'s site is. She had lost her key (as had I) in the last night's debauchery, so we went to her counterpart's house to chill until we got a hold of the landlord. And of course you can't go to a Bulgarians house without it becoming na gosti.... So we stayed for 2 or 3 hours stuffing our faces. When we got there Sarah's counterparts husband said that we must dry our socks (he was very concerned about that for some reason). He brought the girls slippers and presented me with a brand new pair of dress socks... You might think that is a strange present, but seeing as it is the only thing i've gotten for Christmas so far, I was overjoyed. Then we went to Sarah's place, met Dave, Kalyna, and Rich. They shared their ski injury sotries over a bottle of whiskey, and we watched Euro MTV. Damn, it's sad... But I was so happy to see some recent music video's. Around 11 we went to a bar, drank a little, danced a lot. Celia kept on requesting Britney. Sunday I spent ALL DAY on a bus... not fun... Plus my iPod was out of batteries, so I to try and sleep. And I dont know about you... But I find it impossible to sleep someplace that smells like BO... Started to feel the beginnings of a cold around hour 6 on the bus, headache as well. But then, I had a 2 hour layover in Stara Zagora before my bus to Yambol, so I went to BILLA. BILLA for those of you in the states is like if IKEA did supermarkets. I mean, maybe it wouldn't be a big deal back in the states, but for me right now... It was heaven. You'd never think you could get excited about seeing a box of Uncle Ben's rice on the shelf. And I didn't even buy it! It was just comforting to know that in this country, if i had to have Uncle Ben's rice, I could take a 3 hour bus and get it. I was also happy to see: brown sugar, budwieser, cheddar cheese, pesto sauce, and BACON! I bought 3 packages of bacon.. And I plan on eating it ALL for dinner tonight.

New Year's resolution: just make the most of things out here, i guess. I only have 22 months left.

UPDATE: Got some pics back...

This is me throwing myself off the top of a hill in Cheppelare... There was a second of a half of true bliss... Then about 3 hours of pain afterwards, hah.



Either love us or leave us alone, we came to party!