My Balkan Dance Debut

The Parent Teacher Balkan Dance Group

Shannon and I in our matching costumes

Some of my students - the students are such wonderful dancers!

The ACS Fountain

Happy Holidays!

Christmas Abroad

Last night I relaxed with the other international faculty playing "Christmas Jeopardy" and drinking German mulled wine while people opened the Secret Santa presents purchased for them in far-off places like Hungary and Turkey. We answered game show questions about the intricacies of Charlie Brown Christmas and It's a Wonderful Life and ate snickerdoodles, chocolates, and quesadillas. There may even have been a cheese ball, slightly squashed for that tasty rustic look.

Our friends will soon split off for the holidays - to Venice, Austria, Istanbul, London and the Ukraine. Many will go all the way home to the U.S. But all of us have somehow expanded our definition of Christmas traditions by spending advent abroad.

A sampling of the international traditions I've learned about lately:

La Befana
In Italy, children get their presents on January 5th. Tradition holds that an elderly woman called La Befana, who was once invited to go with the wise men to see the Baby Jesus and refused, now searches the world for the child. She leaves presents wherever she goes in hopes that one will reach the baby she missed.

Santa's Helpers?
In Holland, in what is perhaps a vestige of Colonial days, either 1 or 6-8 black men (depending on whose story you read) accompany Santa when he arrives in Holland from Spain. Rick Steves and David Sedaris both point out the strange nature of this tradition in their holiday writings. Strangest of all, children who don't behave just might get kidnapped by Santa's helpers, and carried off in burlap bags. Read more here.

German Food
It's hard to beat the German Christmas market for new ideas for the Christmas kitchen. Candied nuts, gluwein, fruitcake, frosted gingerbread, doughnuts - it's hard to get through a city square in December without some delightful snack or other. Two perennial favorites are lebkuchen and stollen. Click for the recipes.

Bulgarian Banitsa - with Luck
I would almost say Banitsa is the national dish of Bulgaria, though it's probably got competition from the shopska salad. Banitsa are pastries formed with sheets of dough and every filling imaginable (pumpkin, apple, cheese, turkish delight), though the most traditional hold a combination of cheese and egg. At Christmas, many families put fortunes or tiny coins in the banitsa for the table. One student told me her grandmother puts coins in three that only she can recognize, and then makes sure her grandchildren get them every year. Read more and see an unbelievable bad video of banitsa preparation here.

Venice Boat Parade
In Venice each year a group of boat-owners decorate their craft with Christmas lights and take to the canals. I was pretty excited to see this when we go to Italy in a week, but it turns out the joke is on me. It's Venice Beach, California. Click to see pictures.

Alternate Thanksgiving

Because we weren't able to celebrate a proper Thanksgiving in Bulgaria (yes, there is such a thing as a proper Thanksgiving in Bulgaria), we decided to have an alternate feast with Sam and Lesley, who also missed the holiday. Together with friends from both sides, we traveled up the mountain on Sunday to their house, where we took part in what Sam excitedly called a "day of gluttony." Betsy's sweet potato crunch, Sam's homemade bread, Lesley's turkey, and all the other side dishes (I contributed the pomegranate seeds to the salad -- I don't like to rob Betsy of the joy of cooking) made for some loosening of belts. But not so much that we didn't do a little Balkan dancing after dinner. Just like the pilgrims did long ago...

ACS Christmas Cookie Exchange

This year I am advising the ACS "Cooking Collective." Every week a few students cook and the whole club samples and learns on Mondays at lunch. Brilliant.

My first big contribution as adviser was to suggest a Christmas Cookie Exchange - every member of the club would bake different cookies and bring in copies of the recipe, and we would invite faculty as well.

Fun: Check

Festivity: Check

Good Food: Check

Highlights included "English Pie", "Dried Grape Cookies" and "Christmas Cookies with Honey." There was even a lovely Bulgarian version of the powdered sugar walnut cookie known variously as Swedish Teacakes, Russian Teacakes, and Mexican Wedding Cakes.

Now I just have to get through our Balkan dance performance at the Christmas concert and the Wednesday caroling through the halls and my festive teacherly roles will all be successfully completed....

Bet you don't know what "girini" means

I was reading a book review today at The Australian on a book called Why Italians Love to Talk About Food. The headline drew me because I've been experimenting with Italian cooking ever since we got back from Cinque Terre.

I was especially interested by this passage:

"Yet even the culinary passion is a union based on a wealth of diversity, as the variety of pasta types reveals, all of which, of course, should be matched with particular sauces. Take the following selection, whose names come from the realm of zoology: farfalle (butterflies), conchiglie (shells), lumache (snails), creste di gallo (cock's comb), code di rondine (swallowtails), occhi di bove (ox eyes), occhi di elefanti (elephants eyes), occhi di lupo rigati (ribbed wolf eyes), occhi di passero (sparrow eyes), girini (tadpoles), vermicelli (worms), linguine (little tongues), and orecchiette (little ears)."

Crazy, eh? But cool.

Read the whole review for this book written about Italian food by a Russian ex-pat here. So just to be clear, that makes me an American ex-pat in Bulgaria writing on an Australian paper about a Russian ex-pat in Italy. I love it.

Both Images borrowed from Google Images.

Hiking in Lakatnik

The ACS Hiking Club took its first trip today, having been delayed by the flu vacation a month ago. We went to Lakatnik, a simple, traditional hike on the limestone cliffs of the Iskur Gorge. Though other areas in the country are more stunning, this was a nice introduction to the year, and a great chance to get out into what our students call "the nature." (Many languages, we've noticed, attach an article to the word "nature," a hard habit to break when translating into English.) We had a stalwart, happy group of fifteen students, who dallied along, glorying in the chance to be outside of Sofia. We took many breaks, especially at the Communist monument atop the cliffs.

At the beginning of the hike, we crossed (read: bounced over) a bridge spanning the Iskur River.

A climbing shack. The Iskur Gorge is the most popular climbing location in Bulgaria.

Jess and Jeff, the two teachers who accompanied me, and Georgi, the president of the Hiking Club, "conquering" a small outcropping.

Ivan and Simeon

The Communist monument on top, and lunch time

Yulia and Lora. The monument is in the background.

Stefan is actually catching a spider here. I have NO idea where it rappelled from.

On the way down

My favorite thing about Hamburg

The Rathaus

A View from the Park near our hotel

Hamburg is clean, nice and expensive. It has a lot of parks, two lakes, a slough of Starbucks and more shopping shopping shopping. If we had been there just one day later, my favorite thing about it might have been its many Christmas markets. However, since they were still under construction, there was really no contest.

My favorite thing about Hamburg is that they sell dachsund cookie cutters in the kitchen stores. This year's Christmas cookie charge will be led by festive dachsunds. Thank you, Germany!

The Sofia Christmas Market

Today after parent-teacher conferences Brett and I headed downtown - dipping into Sofia's new Subway shop, passing by the new Starbucks, crossing near the new metro and then walking into Bulgaria's very first Christmas market. Things seem to be changing with every blink of the eye here in Bulgaria.

After visiting Christmas markets in Nuremburg, Munich, Basel, Brussels, Vienna and Prague, we had certain expectations: wooden nativity figurines, roasting chestnuts, mulled wine, glass ornaments, perhaps a live sheep or two. The Sofia Christmas market did not have these things. However, it did have something I've never seen at another market, something pretty amazing.

Gracing the skies above the market we saw a chorus of angels, lit from within their windblown white plastic robes. They flew in strange contrast to the early winter gray of the park and clouds. The angel just above the market entrance appeared to hover directly over the upraised gun on the Socialist-Realist statue behind the market.

I may not have sipped any mulled wine today, but I did meet some beautiful angels.

Sunrise on Campus

We've had some lovely late fall weather lately, and are seriously hoping it will just fade slowly into spring come January. Ha. Anyway, we're enjoying it and the lovely sunrises coming with it. These photos are by our friend Jaime Johnson, from her balcony on campus.

Holland: Snapshots

A House on the Canal

There are two ways to live "on" an Amsterdam canal - you can buy one of the colorful narrow homes reflected in it or buy a houseboat to plop down in its waters.

Seems to me the houseboat option might actually be the simplest of the two. Consider the following slight inconveniences to owning a canal home...

1. Because the fronts and therefore the doors are so narrow, most large items have to be hoisted via pulley from the hooks sticking out from the roofs.

2. Houses, perhaps due to the water shifting underneath them, frequently begin leaning at surprising angles - pitching forwards, right or left over time.

3. There must be some kind of law about repainting every 14 months because never have I ever seen so many perfectly manicured brick fronts. We saw brown brick, red brick, tan brick, creamy brick, black brick... with black shutters, white shutters, red shutters... with round windows, rectangular windows, square windows, arched windows... with step gables, triangular gables, bell gables, neck gables. Remembering your gable's name might be almost as hard as keeping your house pretty enough, but at least there is this guide to help.

The simpler way...