Dobre Dosh'li V Boboshevo

So much to say, so little time... I have been in Bulgaria now for a week and am absolutely loving it. We arrived in Sofia on Monday morning and drove to the small mountain town of Panichiste for staging. The entire group of community development and youth development volunteers stayed at a small hotel for three days of training and staging. The group is composed of 42 people, a majority of them being young and out of college for a couple years. It was great spending time and bonding with the group and I feel very lucky to have been placed with such a great group of individuals. On Friday morning we all boarded a bus to the town of Dupnitsa to meet our host families.

My home for the next two and a half months will be Boboshevo, a small town of around 2,000 people in the south-west of Bulgaria. It is a small but beautiful town with great people and very little else. There is a cafe, one restaurant/gas station, and a couple of small stores but no internet, no public phones, and no bank. Sadly this means for the next few months my updates will be sporadic at best and probably only once every week or so when I come into Dupnitsa. I will also be unable to post any pictures of the town for now but if you can find any online I highly suggest checking it out. I am living with a great family in a small, soviet-style apartment block near the center of the town. Stefan is a 62 year old chicken farmer who enjoys his rakia and singing and Raina is an incredible cook who works for the municipality. I couldn't have asked for a better family to be stationed with despite the fact that they speak no English and I speak almost no Bulgarian. Yet we get by and life is good. I am stationed in Boboshevo with four other volunteers and Yulia, our Bulgarian language trainer. Days consist of helping Stefan and Raina out in the garden, canning food for the winter, walking around town and studying Bulgarian. I have been jogging every day which will be a necessity as I seem to be eating all the time. Just last night I had three meals from 8 PM on.

One ironic thing is that many Bulgarians from the age of 20 to 40 speak Italian as they live and work and Italy during the year and are simply back home for the Italian holiday of ferie. So although my Bulgarian is lacking my Italian is in top form... As for now I must go get my lishna carta or national ID card but I will be back in Dupnitsa on Monday with another update. Dovishdane!