There and Back Again

Sofia is a great city. It is nice to be back in a city that seems like it is in touch with the outside world The bathrooms are normal, and it seems like a more standard European city.

The weather is great, it had been raining all last night, which made for a wonderfully cool morning to walk around the city and do some shopping. and the internet cafe’s are the nicest we have seen thus far too. In response to some questions mel/megan asked. no, didn’t really see any princesses i think, but it is possible some of them were and i just didn’t understand it. We haven’t had turkey, but the one small village we visited cooked up some goats for us, that was interesting (but it was undercooked).

We visted some Alexander Nevsky cathedral the other day, and it was pretty cool, the only other real thing We have done in sofia is eat, catch up on our sleep, do a concert again last night, and do some walking around. The concert was a great one, and we felt like we got the best response back from the audience out of all the concerts so far.

Today we fly out and head to Hungary, the last part of the trip. so today is our last day being 7 hours ahead of time back home. I think hugary is only 6 hours ahead. Bye and ‘Slava Na Bogu’ (praise God).

Well, here we are, ready to embark on the third leg of our journey through Eastern Europe. It has been a fascinating trip thus far – and I hope to write a more detailed entry in the next few days to describe some of the things, places, and people we have encountered along the way.

Tomorrow morning, we take yet another bus ride. This time to Sofia, Bulgaria. We will have concert number 8 in one of the local churches, and then we leave early the next morning for a flight to Hungary. Tomorrow will come very early, I’m afraid, as we must wake up before 5 to get showered, packed, and on the road with the rest of the choir. That is why this entry won’t be quite as wordy as one of my usual entries =)

I’ll just list a few neat experiences before I sign off for tonight…
- learning two new languages in 6 days!
Thank you = faluminderit (Albanian)
Thank you = blagadarya (Bulgarian)
- coming within a few miles of the Greek border! i hope to go there some day…
- eating more meat than i ever hoped to for supper every night (usually at 10 pm)
- sweating, sweating, and sweating some more in every country we’ve been to so far, people have said, “it isn’t USUALLY this hot…” i think we brought the heat with us from lancaster
- seeing God’s Spirit speak through our words and gestures, despite the language barriers

- Written by Laura

Well, i said i would put some pictures up and now i finally have gotten the chance. We found out today that our host family has internet access at home, and so today (last night in their home) we decided to make use of it. It is quite nice really, they seem to have a neighborhood lan, which i guess is how most European cities are, silly USA, when will you learn?

Anyways, I don’t have any fancy layout for the pictures, the links are gonna appear below. All the pictures are cropped down to 800×600, which should take approximately 18 seconds on a 56k modem… more or less. The two video clips are both around 28 mb, so don’t try to dl them unless you have a broadband connection or think it is worth the long wait on a slower link.

The pictures are from all throughout our time here, both in Albania and Bulgaria so far. I tried to name them in a helpful way so that i don’t have to do too much introducing of them. (the first picture is of our tour guide Elvin, and his sister, from when we were in Albania)

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Well, we left Albania behind this morning, loading up onto the bus before 6am to head off on the drive to Bulgaria. It was quite nice to have air conditioning that worked well enough to actually make a few people feel cold.

The trip out of Albania was almost entirely through mountains, switch back after switch back as we climbed up and down the mountains, with almost nothing separating us from driving off of the road in many places. You will have to see some pictures of this. It was also quite beautiful.

After that we headed through Macedonia, which I only remember as being a time to sleep, do some reading (I am finally getting a chance to read that book you lent me Kristine, seeing the unseen, or whatever it is called, i really like it) and also eat a fairly nice lunch at a place along the road, where the owners ended up knowing english, and one of the even having a home in NY I think.

The concerts so far have been very unique experiences. It has been a blessing for me to realize the import of what we are doing, and I hope that we have been a blessing to those we have been interacting with. Our first concert in the Opera house in Tirana was fairly neat. The majority of the audience was young folks (under 24 I would say) which was quite suprising to me. After that concert we went out into the city square, and were impressed to see that the city actualy looked quite nice at night. Then on sunday we drove north of Tirana in the morning for a concert at a church up there, and then turned around and drove equally far south for another small church concert before eating a late supper and heading home. Those concerts were both unique too, the first one being interupted constantly by cars honking, presumably becuase of all the weddings happening that day (Albanians don’t get married in Aug, so that was the last day) and the evening one was a kinda outside church, which was pretty cool in its own rights. And we had one as soon as we arrived here in Dupnitsa Bulgaria. It was probably our best one so far, and we got quite the response back from the audience, which was very reassuring.

This is all for now, the next three nights we are staying as guests in homes, so I don’t know how long until another update, but by the next time i would like to get some of the best pictures up somewhere, as well as some contact info if you need to get in touch with the choir (I keep forgetting to bring it to the Internet cafe’s) So goodnight all, its a quarter of midnight now.