you guyssss.

I can't sleep. We have a bus to catch at 7am to head to a tiny little Bulgarian village to play with tiny Bulgarian children all day. And on Tuesday, our English lessons begin - I think I'm too nervous to sleep. I'm just googling random Bulgarian facts until I feel sleepy enough to try again? I counted sheep for 26 whole minutes, it didn't help.

Did you know lions used to live in the wild in Bulgaria? The last one was shot & killed in 1936. Also the tallest cactus in the world is only 2.5 hours away from my apartment, I MapQuested it.

I'm not making any sense so I give up on being awake. - лека нощ!

- Катхлэн (thats my name in the Cyrillic alphabet. Maybe I'll just study my flash cards instead of sleeping?)

Hello, София.

just a note, my teams' blog is  

http://sofiateam.blogspot.com

and I'll be updating there a bit too.

So my trip here was interesting (and embarrassing at times), I took a 4:30am taxi to the Paris airport alone, which was crazy nervewracking & I couldn't get TAKEN out of my head, didn't get enough Euro out of the ATM to pay my driver so I had to explain in caveman French that I needed a 'Euro dispenser', checked in on a broken machine that was out of ink so my boarding pass was a blank sheet of paper, got to my plane & they said my backpack was too large to take to my seat, (don't know how I took it on 5 other planes with no problem, get it together Czech Air) had a 3 hour layover in Prague alone, they made me through out my cherry coke, & they put my backpack under the plane again, this time without my consent - they just took it. I arrived in one piece but traveling alone can be so stressful. I need to learn 7 new  languages to keep up with my summer!

Here is different. My 2 trips are nothing alike, and I expected that - its still slightly shocking. But I had a wonderful first dinner! And my teammates were so happy to see me :) And downtown all lit up is beautiful and Eastern & nothing like I've ever seen. I'm just going to say it - Being an American is boring. I'm lucky I know, but I want to see as much of the world as possible, because the rest of the world is so much cooler!

Friday I told the Bulgarian government I'm living here. Weird. And I have a train pass. And a key to my apartment. This is real :) 

Our main mission is to get to know locals who are interested in learning conversational & practical English, and we are trying to get to know them as people in the process as well. We're working with kids, churches, schools, maybe orphanages, Starbucks, etc... there really is no set plan of how we're getting to know people - we're just hoping to be at the right place at the right time, and be there for someone who needs a friend, spiritual guidance, or just a friendly hello  :) 

I love it. I'm crazy excited. My heart could explode when I think about the people I may meet, the conversations I may have.

With all that said, this blog may change a lot. I can't say every detail of someone else's private problem, I'm going to be busy, and this experience will probably be hard to put into words. But I do want to keep it up so I can tell all you lovely people about what Bulgaria is like :) Ask questions if you want?

I'm excited. Weird things have already happened, like meeting Steve Musey (WHATTT) at a Bulgarian graduation. Or being stuck between 2 LARGE men on the bus to church. We don't have a shower curtain. And I have yet to see green vegetables in this country - a bad sign for my poor tummy. This place is so different. I like it already & i've only been here for 2 days. ADVENTURES, YALL!

Love you. :)

 I've seen that!

p.s. I may have a chance to go to ISTANBUL, Turkey for a couple of days, cross your fingers for me that it works out, I would LOVE TO. If it doesn't interfere with our work, I'm TOTALLY in.

Hello loves!

hi hi hiiiiiii -

So, I want to tell you about Bulgaria. BUT I can't till I finish up about my days in PARIS!!

After we sang in Notre Dame, (which was crazy wonderful) we had free time all night. So a group of us planned out all the things we wanted to see - the arc de triomphe, the Paris opera house, the Moulin Rouge, another H&M, (hahah DUH) and we even found a couple of vintage book & clothing stores, and I found THE BEST leather bag that I can't wait to use next semester at school :) And I bought a French bible & a hardback novel to keep my senior rose in.

I loved the parts of Paris that weren't full of tourists. Tourists suck. I know I was one but at least I'm polite!

The next morning we took a train to Versialles (well... we took 2 trains - we were going in the wrong direction for the first 15 min hahah) and like I said - I HATE PUSHY TOURISTS. The palace was beautiful of course, but there were a billion people & they all wanted 3576 pictures of the same thing... it sort of ruined it for me. But I liked walking though the gardens - this place is huge! I don't know a lot about Marie Antoinette or the royal family, but I do know that the country was starving to death when they were living in this grand place, so that is slightly unnerving. I spent most of the morning thinking about how wasteful & unaware the royal family seemed to be. No wonder the country revolted & Marie got beheaded... I never understood before, but once I saw this place, I did :) Too bad for her? hhaha

Our next stop was THE LOURVE!!!! Now, I did not do my research before. So wandering the place got a little crazy. I always thought the Vesuvian Man & The Last Supper were there? But they are in Venice & Milan. So I was slightly disappointed. (thanks ALOT DaVinci Code, hahah) But seeing The Mona Lisa behind bulletproof glass was exciting! And The Venus de Milo is beautiful. I think my favorite was The Winged Victory of Samothrace. Look it up, you'll recognize it. There were hundreds of others but I didn't recognize most. After we rushed to the Impressionist museum, but we ran out of time & couldn't go in :( The gift shop was good enough for me :)

Dinner was with the entire group - which basically meant our trip was over :(  Some of the members said sweet things about the seniors leaving, and I felt so sad & weird. I don't think it will hit me until the fall that Mads is really over. I'm gonna miss it so so much - no music 'class' could have taught me musicality like Mads has. And Dr. C is the best professor I've ever had. We all said goodbye in front of the restaurant, some of us were leaving for London the next morning, some were leaving for home, and I was leaving for Bulgaria! So I went to the hotel, packed my stuff & set my alarm for 4am. I didn't sleep much.... I was nervous with a dash of excitment, but also sad that the trip went by SO FAST. I loved (almost) every second :)

Now I can tell you all about Bulgaria! Talk to you soon :)

well this always happens, doesn't it?

It seems like every trip I've been on, the last 3 days are a frantic attempt to soak up the last moments. Which isn't bad obviously, but my blog/journal entries stop immediately the more I wear myself out! :) Which I did. Sleeping tonight is going to me marvelous. - BUT I'll be sleeping in SOFIA, BULGARIA!!!

Let me catch you up -

SO, the afternoon after Dachau, we drove a couple of hours (completely silently) to Frankfurt, & stopped at the little town of Rothenburg for a short visit. It was a quaint little walled city, famous for cookoo clocks & christmas ornaments? Hahah it was incredibly German and I enjoyed the quiet moments. Being in only tourist areas can be so strange and stressful. After a couple of hours & a stop to a bright pink ballerina bathroom, We grabbed dinner & drove into Frankfurt.

And I slept hard.

The next morning, we sang at Frankfurt Nazarene Church, which I LOVED. The people were so so happy to have us, and singing for them really made us come alive. With our choir robes in a non-air conditioned building, we got pretty toasty, but we even introduced ourselves in German & they gave us a 5 minute standing ovation at the end. Such precious people. Then a homemade potluck lunch & play time :) I met a lil baby boy who was so confused by my English, he just stared at me the whole time I held him.

We headed to St. Bartholomew's cathedral in downtown Frankfurt, &  sang a 20 minute concert there, then had a bit to wander downtown. I wore a dress cause it was Sunday, it was windy, this was not funny:)

That night we sang for Hanau church of the Nazarene that night, which is a tiny group & service is held in a bar. Hows that for stereotypes? ;) And after the service we had German pizza with some of the members. I really love Germans. They are so warm & they laugh so much! That night I took a shower in the strobe light bathroom like I posted earlier, that was interesting hahah :)

THE NEXT MORNING WE DROVE 7 HOURS TO PARIS :) And I got so excited once we crossed into the city limits!! We headed straight for our hotel to drop off our stuff, grab some dinner to go, AND HEAD TO THE EIFFEL TOWER FOR A PICNIC. Which really has been a dream of mine since, well, forever - and it happened! So much fun. I ate a whole container of cherries too. And I had tomatoes and mozzarella & toast for dinner - I was quite the happy camper :) Getting up to the top was a long [& slightly stressful] situation, but it was SO worth it. I took a bajillion pictures and fought my way to the edge of every view and man French people/Tourists are RUDE but I watched the sun go down at the tip top of Paris. My goodness, I loved it. (Also I was standing within inches of a French lesbian couple, and one of them proposed. Then they made out for 20 minutes...? Not exactly something you see every day, eh? hahah oh, French life.) When the tower lit up, my heart started pounding. Its so beautifullllllll! I didn't want to leave even though we'd been there for almost 4 hours.

The next morning we headed to sing in NOTRE DAME!!! We took a 'secret' entrance & got our robes. Some of the choir got sick completely out of nowhere, so the poor things had to leave during our performance :( I was really worried about them. But who gets to say they had a stomach virus and used the choir room's toilet in Notre Dame? Pretty much no one. Its a memory if nothing else ;) The church is beautiful and amazingly old & I want to watch the Hunchback of Notre Dame RIGHT NOW. Our senior ceremony was right after. And we all bawled.

Because Mads is over for me - and I'm pretty much heartbroken about it. But I can't be in college forever??

So - I'll be honest, I'm freaking tired. I'm gonna head to my little Bulgarian bed now, & i'll finish up tomorrow :) LOVE YALL.

words and stuff

Last night,
at our hotel in Frankfurt,
whenever you turn the water on,
the bathroom lights started flickering.

So I basically took a shower in a disco.
or a haunted house.

Also, I shaved my legs in that disco/haunted house...
but now I'm in France where supposedly no one shaves...
so that was a waste of my precious German time...

NOW I'M HEADED TO 
THE EIFFEL TOWER LAWN 
TO HAVE A PICNIC DINNER 
& WATCH THE SUN GO DOWN!!!!

:) I'll tell you all about the last 2 days some other time, 

when I'm not so excited (and hyper) I can hardly type.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH bye!

concentration camps & such

I just ate Burger King. I am ashamed. We're on our way to Rothenburg, & I was somehow hungry... oops ;)

This morning we went to Dachau, the first concentration camp in the world. I knew it would be a lot to take in, but I didn't really expect this feeling? I want to tell you all the history I learned from the 3 hours we were there, but I'd be typing till tomorrow... a brief overview it is.

So basically, this camp wasn't known for mass murders - most of the people that died there passed away from exhaustion or sickness. Quite a few (thousands even) were murdered for 'misbehavior', but once they were gone, the camp claimed them all as suicides. (There were gas chambers on the grounds, but were never used for mass execution. That sort of thing took place in Auschwitz - the people that were sent to Dachau died slowly from malnutrition & exhaustion, unless they provoked guards or challenged the system. Or tried to escape.)

This first camp was built in 1933, and was created for Hitler's political enemies, as a way to make opposition to Hitler impossible. It was a model for all the other camps built in the next 16 years. It was filled with Jews, Roma, priests, homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses, gypsies... basically anyone who was not part of the 'fittest' race - Social Darwinism played a huge role in who was sent there. Any people group that was viewed as 'weak' was to be completely done away with asap.

The motto of the camp was 'Arbeit macht frei' - Work will set you free. But, most died of the absurd and inhumane living conditions, without any hope of ever being free again. People worked 12+ hours a day, doing nothing but pointless labor, designed to torture the body but mostly the mind. They were fed one bowl of nutrition-less soup a day, slept in barracks that were designed for 200, but instead housed 2,000 at a time, many were the test subjects of deadly medical experiments, (tests like seeing how long a man can live with consuming nothing but saltwater, what organs fail first when dying from hypothermia, how much air pressure the human brain can endure - sickening stuff. Disgusting, unnecessary & completely unbelievable)1 bathroom per 2,000, no heat, no rest, no doctors, Typhoid, lice, families were purposefully separated... the list goes on forever. At the camps worst moments, the crematory was burning all night & all day to dispose of bodies. They were only buried when the coal ran short.

Everything I read made me shiver.

I learned about a Jewish doctor who was a taken there, he was secretly trying to help the sick. He was caught, tortured, &  told he'd be shot if he didn't stop - but he kept helping others, he said because he took an oath to do so. He was taken to the shooting range the next morning. I'm sure there were more doctors with this same story - but it really broke my heart. I kept thinking about my dad, and how I was sure he would have done the same thing. Thoughts like this can make you feel so heavy.

None of these people had done anything wrong. That doctor did NOTHING wrong, yet they were all treated even worse than livestock. the unfairness of it all is completely staggering.

We went through the museum, watched a 20 minute movie on the history of the camp, (the pictures were so graphic I hardly watched... my stomach was in knots every time they showed a pile of bodies. The gruesome details were so overwhelming I just listened instead of watching. Everyone was sobbing. The place felt haunted) & went to the memorial chapel at the back of the grounds to sing, which was terribly hard to do though the tears. We've been pretty much silent since. We're on the bus now but I think there is a mutual understanding of reverence for the rest of our day.

p.s. I posted 3 blogs in a row, just so you know :)

Its STILL Spargle week?

We left Salzburg early in the morning (Friday, the 20th), and drove into Germany pretty quickly. My only complaint about the European Union is that crossing all the borders is too easy! I want my passport stamped, darn it. My Greece stamp is just the date, and nothing for all the others! DUMB.

We drove to a lake named Konigssee, surrounded by the town on Berchtesgaden. We took a boat to the furthest side of the lake, where we took a little nature walk - it was GORGEOUS. I can't wait to have a strong enough internet connection to put all the pictures up. We waded in a pond & wandered through the woods & took a million pictures. It was very quiet & peaceful & also a great change of pace compared to all the buildings & cathedrals we've seen. I wanted to have a picnic so bad. This was a few miles away from the 'Eagle's Nest', where Hitler spent his summers. We could see it from our boat ride. We also sang at a tiny little chapel on one of the banks of the lake. After biking all night before, I was a nature woman for a whole 24 hours almost! ;)

After some outside time we drove into Munich & went into town for dinner. I liked Munich a lot - it seems like a college town. I saw a lot of people my age, heard a lot of English & other languages of course, but it seemed like somewhere I could live. I sort of want to look into schools there... these are new thoughts :) BUT - we ate dinner at the oldest brewery in the city, the German beers were ABSOLUTELY HUGE and it was crowded & hot and there was a polka band and the food was great but our waiter was not a fan of Americans it seemed... I hate potato salad from home, but I ate it 2 times in one day here! We wandered around some more in downtown Munich after dinner & sang in the crowded areas, met a couple drunk boys... haha. We took the subway back to our hotel which was quite the challenge, so I slept like a baby as soon as we got back to our hotel.

(by the way, I'm writing all this on the bus, so when I get to the hotel that hopefully has internet, I can post it. Its hard to catch you guys up when so much has happened!)

This morning, we went to Dachau - Hitler's first concentration camp. And I'll need a whole other post for that story - I'm still processing. I've felt heavy all day.