Can you hear me now?!

I am sorry to bother most of you with what should be a private message...but there seems to be no other way:

Galia, where are you?! Your work email is on vacation mode and your personal one seems to be completely out of whack. Get in touch with me! I don't want to miss you!

If you know my friend Galia, who seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth, and you happen to be reading this...please ping her. :)

Sisters are forever

A couple of weeks ago, my little sister added two more letters to her name: B.A.



Ena rocks in so many ways that you can't even imagine. She also makes the entire blonde community proud. A couple of years ago...:

Me: Ena, when was the last time you felt like a dumb blonde?
Ena: Dad told me a blonde joke and I didn't get it.

I totally adore her.

Hot hot hot

I'm sweating my butt off. And, honestly, have no idea what to wear so that I don't feel drops of sweat run down my legs. That kind of thing is only appropriate under very special circumstances, if you know what I mean.

How do you keep yourselves cool? What do you eat, drink, wear? Any advice is more than welcome.

She said she wanted a cigarette

A Roma woman stopped me on the street yesterday and asked if she could bum a cigarette. I said, 'Sure,' because if you know me you know very well that nothing gives me more pleasures than supporting other people's bad habits.

Any regular Sofia dweller is already clicking their tongue knowingly. I should not have stopped. She didn't really want a cigarette, you see. She wanted to read my palm or whatever, tell me about my love life and stuff. By the time I had taken my lighter out of my bag, she had already managed to tell me that I will be traveling abroad a lot, that I have recently cried for a man, and that I should try to keep some of my secrets to myself. I'm thinking, 'Keep secrets to myself?! Woman! I blogged my way out of heartache!!!!!'

As she was finishing her little speech, a sane-looking young guy approached and told me that if I needed peace, I should be in church right now. He also said that I was being sinful for listening to her.

***

Dude! The woman said she needed a cigarette!!!

Family battlegrounds

Being back in the mothership is nice. I'm on vacation mode, which consists of sleeping in, eating out and staying up late. You may call it jetlag, I call it being home. It's a generally pretty awesome way to be.

Sometimes, however, the pleasantness is interrupted by the fact that every single member of my family is a person of strong opinions. Staying true to all things Bulgarian, we are very much involved in each other's business and for one reason or another, feel like we have the right and authority to give advice regardless of what the issue is. On top of that, we are all extremely verbal people: talking is what we do best. None of that ever used to be an issue when we lived together. Now that my sister and I have been away from home for a while, we are starting to bump heads a bit more than usual. I, for example, have been away for seven years. I've got my own personal agenda with all kinds of weird personal habits that, for better or worse, have helped me do just fine on my own. Same thing applies for my little sister, who being not so little anymore, has also developed her own little ways of doing things. In our absence, our parents have drawn new rules of the game that seem to work for them. Nothing unusual.

The problem is that we all seem to think that our own rules are clearly the ones that everybody else should follow. Needless to say, people's expectations are being vociferously disputed by the rest. All of a sudden people's dinner choices, sleep schedules, beauty routines, and reading material is up for debate. We've argued about what I need to wear to work, whether my sister should go to graduate school, how much cheese one must eat at dinner, which consulting company my dad needs to contact, what kind of birthday present we should get for my cousin who just turned 20. Important things, you know. It's been a week of a whole lot of voice-raising, door-slamming, and polite fuck-you's.

Sometimes I get really pissed off. I am old enough to take care of my shit. And I don't need to know what everybody else thinks about my stuff.

The rest of the time, however, I love it. Door-slamming included. It only shows how much we care for each other. And as much as the whole thing sometimes reminds me of a Kusturica film, it's why I came home.

Returning

I apologize for not mentioning this earlier. I also apologize to many friends who should have already heard about this in person. I owe many of you long-due emails, which I will start working on soon.

To make the longs story short, after a 7-year stint in the United States, I've returned to Bulgaria. Permanently. Or whatever that means these days. Getting my MA seemed to be a logical endpoint to my stay and here I am, typing on a keyboard where the cyrillic letters have been used so much that many of them have disappeared.

As you can probably imagine, there are many reasons why I made this decision. Some of them were professional, many of them personal. Mostly, I was tired of feeling alone. Not homesick. Not lonely. Just alone. It is a difficult thing to explain since it sounds like I'm saying that I didn't like living there or that I didn't have friends, none of which is true. I have loved almost every single minute of my stay in the States. I loved what I did, what I learned, what I saw, the places I visited. I know I could have never done it if I didn't leave Bulgaria. Also, many of my closest friends are people that I've met in Sewanee and State College (hello, you know who you are!) and god knows how much I love each and every one of them. But I had to leave.

It had nothing to do with being sick, miserable or unhappy. I don't have anything particularly stable to fall back on now that I'm here. I don't even know if it was a good decision. In moments of doubt and panick I think I made a mistake. But most days it somehow feels right. And I know it sounds terribly corny, but there's just something about this place and its people that make you feel right at home, whoever you are and whatever it is that you do.

I'll keep you posted how things go.

Webencounters 2: Peio

Peio is an awesome guy. He narrates comic strips like he observed them in person. Facial expressions, voices, and all. He also happens to know the best tea-place in Sofia.

It is when I meet people like him, that I remember why I love doing the blog thing.

***

For those who've cared all along: more of He said, She said is on its way.

Is there a pilot on board?

My plane from Paris to Sofia was late. Given we were in the fashion capital of the world, I thought it was only right to be appropriately late. That's fashionable, you know. So, we waited, and waited, and waited. Until we got on board. Where we waited, and waited, and waited some more. As soon as the plane finally took off, about two hours after our scheduled take-off time, massive clouds of what appeared to be smoke started coming through the windows. People panicked. And screamed. And yelled. And whistled. We thought that the plane was on fire. I didn't make a sound. Simply put my hands on my eyes, which is what I usually do when I'm scared. I don't want to see. Actually, that's what I did on an especially sharp turn during my first driving lesson which led my driving instructor to say: Why did you let go of the steering wheel?! Idiot!!! You will never be a driver! I'm sorry to report that I have not driven since. Anyway.

So..,smoke, screaming people. Panick. Finally, the stewardess, without even bothering to show her face, announces on the speaker in a very strict voice:

Everybody please be quiet and get back to your seat.

People, still having no clue what the fuck is going on continue to scream and plead for somebody's attention. Stewardess gets the microphone again and announces:

Everybody please be quiet and get back to your seat. The steam you're seeing is coming from the air-conditioning. Everything is ok.

Oh, I'm thinking, so you've known about this all along?! And couldn't be bothered to tell us before it happened so you could actually save our poor jetlagged souls from a panick-induced nervous break-down? Well, that's ok, I suppose. It got everybody's mind off the shitty food you served us later, fuckers.

California dreaming

I've been trying to think of a clear, concise, honest yet witty way to talk about my most recent trip to California. But how does one talk about bliss without making it sound trivial?! So I won't talk about it. Maybe some other time, who knows.

Instead, I am showing you a picture that perfectly summarizes how I felt throughout the duration of the trip. Here's a very happy Petya, dancing on the streets of San Francisco, making a fool of herself and not caring one bit.


Hope everyone is having a nice and relaxing summer.

***
Photo by Prof. Grady.

Fashion note

If you keep your sunglasses on after you've entered a dark bar, you should know that everyone's thinking you're trying way too hard.

Italy vs. Ghana

So, yeah, I cried after Italy's second goal. Am I too naive to always cheer for the underdog or are the Italians really just as arrogant as I think they are? Plus, the referee should have called that penalty kick for Ghana during the second half. God damn it!

Soccer Football is a good game to watch. The time difference makes it all the more fun. Can't beat beer in a dingy Irish pub at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

I didn't fall off the face of the Earth

Simply got on a plane and landed in paradise. I am in California. San Francisco, in particular. And it is all that and more. I had started to think that perhaps maybe dreams don't come true. But they do. Oh, yeah, they do. Will be back with stories soon.

On today's agenda: Big Sur.

:)

Hello, my darlings!
I'm happier than I'm tired. And I'm TIRED!
How've you been?