Brace yourselves, this one may be epic.
So here I am, one week before Christmas overtakes Christian countries, dragging myself out of bed after a late night of eating, drinking and dancing at a friend’s birthday to write a new blog post.
At the end of each year one ponders where they are, how they got there and where they might be going in the future. It’s now been two years since my last Christmas in the states. Two years ago I had quit my job, sold all my possessions and was packing my bags in preparation to work my way around the world.
I was scared shitless, a state in which I typically tend to exhibit type A personality traits: packing and re-packing, making lists, re-formatting my resume… you get the idea. If you ever see me exhibit all three of these behaviors at once, back out of the room… very carefully.
The trip around the world lasted about 9 months – from January 1st, 2009 to September 2009, draining the entirety of the ½ of my income that I had saved from the year before. Along the way I made it through New Zealand and Australia for 3 months, Cambodia for 4 months and various other countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, India, Nepal and Italy.
At the end of the 9 months, I showed up in Istanbul on a 2 a.m. flight, with just enough time to sleep, shit and shower before tumbling in to work at 9 a.m. the following morning.
My beginnings in Istanbul were rocky, to put it mildly. I had no friends, no place to live and no idea how overwhelming a city of 16 million could be. It soon turned out that although the job I had secured was one of the better paid in Istanbul, it would be the most stressful and mentally unhealthy places I would ever work. In fact, a mix of culture shock, stress at work and general ennui kept me ill for most of last year – a cough that I picked up when I went home for Thanksgiving basically never left until April, and I would hack the night away, just waiting for dawn and the Muslim call to prayer to wake up and go in to the stress of my office. Depressing… but wait, it got better.
Last April, right around the time that Carol and Dad came to visit, I started my job search in earnest, interviewing at 4 universities, 5 high schools, 2 language schools and even a preschool (“don’t do it, Jennie!” my friends said, “they’ll poop on you.”)
Luckily, I got the job that I really wanted in a university and then had 8 weeks during the summer to mentally recover from the last work place. Friends came to visit, I traveled home, I saw family, I did weddings, I turned 30, and I crashed my car, narrowly escaping multiple collisions, as other cars sped past my spinning vehicle.
Coming back from the summer, I basically locked myself down in my neighborhood for a few weeks, providing time for reflection, guitar practice, working out regularly and generally allowing myself enough time to get bored; a true gift.
The new job started in September, my co-workers are great and the students are so much better than last year. On top of that, I work my own schedule, which means that although I have to design and create 16 hours of curriculum each week from scratch, I get to do it on my own time.
This alleviates the pain I had always felt from the curse of over-productive, organized people everywhere: you sit in an office 9 hours a day, while really only doing about 3 hours of work and spend the rest of the time watching office mates dick off, gossip, google surf or just be painfully slow at everything either said or done.
Now I can honestly say that whatever time I spend in the office, I am doing work. I’m also making friends and interacting with colleagues and students, but because I am not forced to be there, I tend to have much higher work output.
Since August, I have created, week by week, a working curriculum that teaches, provides practice for, and tests all sorts of academic skills such as research, writing, listening, speaking, note-taking, presenting and debating, to name a few. I’ve gotten positive feedback from students, co-workers and managers and any issues I’ve had, I felt as though I was in a safe enough environment to work through them without being afraid of being thrown under the proverbial bus. And I had almost started to forget what a healthy workplace felt like.
In addition to working and teaching, I’ve also been singing with my choir(s) and made my way to Bulgaria for a trip during the Fall break. My friend Chad came to visit Istanbul from Oregon for a few weeks in November and we wandered around town, and out to the Princes Islands (see pics below) and headed north to Bulgaria, promised land of good beer, pork and fresh air. Chad is a glassblower by trade, but thanks to Obama’s extension of unemployment funds is currently allowed much more free time and actually more income as a laid-off glassblower. Time to travel.
After flying in to Bulgaria from Turkey - a quick 1 hour flight - we started in Sofia, capital of the country, and city of 1.3 million, which seemed like a small backwater suburb after the 16 million-person mania of Istanbul. With town walls that date back to the Thracian settlements of the 7th century B.C., Sofia is, like many Balkan and Eastern European cities, just recovering from Soviet rule and yet rich in the history of thousands upon thousands of years of conquerors.
Soviet Monument, Sofia, Bulgaria
We then headed south in our tiny rent-a-car to Blagoevgrad, a little town in the mountains where the American University of Bulgaria is tucked neatly into the former Soviet Headquarters. We walked around the university and grabbed some Bulgarian food (salad, soup, pork and beer). Around the town we took pictures and marveled at the ubiquitous “death notices” that are hung up after someone dies – wall after wall were covered with death flyers announcing townspeople that had passed away.
From there, we drove up into the green trees, fresh air and mountains in search of the Rila Monastery, where Eastern Orthodox monks wandered past ancient painted murals waxing philosophical on all matters of the soul. Along the way we got lost a good few times, as most of the signs were in Cyrillic script. This, however, provoked countless interactions with the local folk, as we would pull up at each intersection, say the name of the city we were looking for, point left, point right and shrug. Once they pointed left or right, we would head off in that direction, usually or almost always actually heading in the right direction. In this way, we passed small, abandoned towns, roadside chapels, honey and pottery roadside stalls, goats, cows and crumbling soviet block housing.
After visiting the monastery, we went to Plovdiv, home of the ancient Greek city of Philippopolis, then a major roman city, later an ottoman center of power, finally a soviet capital and now complete with ruins from all four, including a beautiful Roman amphitheater overlooking one of its main hills and a huge communist statue atop another. We stayed in the old town and managed to catch a concert with a Bulgarian open-throated chorus group.
Bulgarian Traditional Choir, Plovdiv, Bulgaria
At night we wandered into town to sample the nightlife with some of the other hostel goers and ended up in a trendy disco in town where everything was made of shiny plastic and mirrors and go-go dancers. Nothing says classy like eastern European discos.
After Plovidiv, we packed up the little car once again and drove north through flat farming fields and small, deserted little villages, finally arriving at the base of the Balkan Mountains that cut the country in two and the Shipka pass at 3900 feet – a steep, winding road over the mountains that marks the site of a famous battle of the Russo-Turkish war in the late 1800’s. This battle marked a defeat of the Ottoman forces that had ruled Bulgaria so cruelly during that period.
Our next stop was Veliko Tarnovo, an ancient city on a hill with a history of more than 5 millennia. Apparently, the oldest traces of human life there are dated from the 3rd millennia B.C.! With lovely restored castles, picturesque views, art museums and statues of the four horsemen, this was my favorite Bulgarian city so far.
At the end of January I’ll be in New York for a week seeing my brother John, and catching up with friends and family. Also going to stop by and check out some of the PhD programs for Educational Technology and Psychology in NYC – a new potential direction for 2011-2012….
After that, I am going to Ecuador! A friend I used to work with here has a friend in Quito who is working in the rainforest to create sustainable logging techniques, so we’re heading down for a few weeks to see him and to travel around.
It’s been 10 years since I left Ecuador. I was 20 when I went there to study at La Universided de San Franscisco. I was young, romantic, and a bit lost, not unlike myself now, but at a markedly different point in my life. It was my first experience living outside the U.S. and I am interested to see how it has changed, and also how I have changed.
More soon. XOXOXOXO
