Spring Break, 2012

April 15, 2012

Baba Marta Day is long past, the storks have been here for a several weeks, and I hung my martinitsi on the budding peach tree in our yard.

My landlady told me she was having someone come to work up the garden so she could plant vegetables. I assumed someone would come with a garden tractor of some sort. I was fascinated when a man showed up with a horse and plow.

Last year I celebrated Easter with my host family in Borovan. We went to the Orthodox Church on Palm Sunday and lit candles. That was all; there was no service. We colored eggs, the first one always red, then chose one to bash with others in the family to see who would have the most luck through the year. (If you hit your egg on another, and yours doesn't crack, you are the winner.)

Bashing eggs last year with Nikolinka in Borovan.

On Easter weekend we went on an excursion and visited two monasteries in the northwest part of Bulgaria. If you are interested, I returned to last year's post of May 7 and added the photos I tried to show then.

This year, I spent Easter in Vienna, Austria, with another volunteer. When we made our plans, I didn't realize the rest of the Christian world (including the Catholics in Rakovski) would be celebrating the week before the Orthodox, and we booked our flight for Easter Sunday. I wanted to go to church with my landlady on Easter, but visiting St. Stephan's Cathedral in the middle of Vienna was a good substitute.

We saw the architecture that makes Vienna so unique and were amazed at all the details on practically every building. 

We toured museums of art and art history and the Schonbrunn Palace where we walked through 22-plus rooms including the hall where President Kennedy met Khrushchev in 1962. 

We attended a concert and listened to the music of Mozart and Beethoven played by a group of 5 stringed instruments, a piano and a flute. We took a bus tour into the Vienna Woods where we drove along a path that Mozart walked and was inspired to write his Sixth Symphony. 

We toured a church that contained the coffin of some princess before or of the Habsburgs and an abbey that was incredible for its stark beauty. 

We glimpsed the Alps and the little towns that are tucked into the wooded hills.

 I took off on a walk our last evening and happened across the Hundertwasserhaus which is an unusual but fun apartment building that has become part of Vienna's cultural heritage, according to my guide book.

 We were proud of ourselves for mastering the subway system. I had always imagined subways to be a frightening, filthy maze where the worst of the worst hung out waiting to steal old lady's purses, but this system was clean, easy to understand, arthritic-knee friendly and creep-free.

Now I'm back in Bulgaria where even the above ground trains send you down treacherous steps into tunnels that leave you guessing where you're going until something familiar pops up. Then you ascend with trepidation and hope that you're on the right side of the street because, Lordy, you sure don't want to go back down those stairs and have to climb back up on the other side. Visiting Vienna really exacerbated how backward some areas of Bulgaria are.

Just part of the Bulgarian scenery.

Spring vacation is over. I go back to school tomorrow. It's amazing that now there are only two more months of school left. I guess I had better hurry up and teach these kids to speak English!

Thanks for reading!

Peace, love and happiness,

Joan