I ended up having a fantastic time and making some wonderful new friends! Found a fellow UPeace alumnus through a friend and stayed/celebrated with her and her friends - and it was a great, great time! The best part was introducing international travel to a very close friend back home. NYE in Paris is not a bad first trip outside the USA!
I wish I could have stayed longer with my friend, but I have accomplishments to make in Bulgaria, where the holiday season continues! I returned in time for one of my favorite Bulgarian holidays, Йорданов Ден. This is the day, when all across Bulgaria, there is a religious procession to a lake, river, or sea; a priest hurls a wooden cross into the water, and the men of the village/town race to be the first to get it. Then they dance in the water. Participating in this event is supposed to bring good health throughout the year. If you've ever heard my 'frostbitten penis' story - this is the holiday that's responsible.This event is a bit different in different cities, and afterward, the rest of the day is spent celebrating everyone having a name derived from Йордан. As luck would have it, my landlord (and colleague) has this name, though I like to call him Данчо Манчо!
On a "Name Day" the person sharing the name of the particular saint is obliged to treat his/her friends. It's an interesting thing, and we have nothing like it in the states. It went something like this: a bunch of us went to Данчо Манчо's office and wished him life and health and many more years, while he treated us to snacks and drinks.
He's one of my favorite people here, and we had a really great time! In fact, my one-hour lunch break turned into a three-hour party!By the time I got back to work, I was kinda drunk. My colleagues told me I could go home, but for no good reason I insisted on staying until the end of the day. My paranoid mind told me that if I let the alcohol affect my work, it would be a sign of alcoholism. Of course I'm nowhere near to being an alcoholic, but the event inspired some deeper thought into drinking in this country. Upon arrival in Bulgaria, the Peace Corps made an attempt at introducing Volunteers to the Bulgarian perspective of drinking. It was more in the form of a safety and security presentation, which we all took to mean: Don't drink your brains out and do stupid things. From my stories and observations, one could generally conclude that Bulgarians drink a lot. From the average American perspective, it might sound like these people are alcoholics. While they do drink a lot, there are no more alcoholics here than there are back home, and I think it has to do with a difference in psyche.
Reasons for drinking are different, drinking culture is different, and judgment of drinking is different. Of course there are similarities, some stronger than others, some are exactly the same, but the overall perspective of drinking is simply different. Even though I'm quite unique back home, I still have an American psyche, and it's tough for me to understand the subtleties and complexities of these differences, much less try to explain them. But as you know me, you know I like trying.
In many conversations I've had about Europeans and their wine and drinking, it's often the conclusion that they're more mature than we Americans. I don't think this conclusion is entirely accurate. Generally speaking, while I think there is a difference in maturity, I think the main difference is in psyche. Alcohol is not looked upon as a dangerous tool that often inspires a good time; from what I can gather, it's more perceived as a supplement to health and good times.As the cold/flu season hatches, I'm hearing a lot about home remedies. I keep hearing the same stories, as repeating them seems to make them more true. One in particular is about a gal who was sick for days, and her antibiotics weren't working. Instead of fussing around with silly pharmaceutical medicines, she took some rakia, a dollop of honey, mixed them together, and gulped it down! The next morning she was fine! I can see my sister, the pharmacist, rolling her eyes at this, and I must admit, I do too, but the fact remains - no matter how much it may have been exaggerated, there seems to be some legitimacy to it. If nothing else, it's a perceived legitimacy and an expecting mind that brings a person to feel healthier after a bit of booze.
Ракия (Rakia, the homemade brandy) seems to be a cure-all for every kind of ailment. Headache? Indigestion? Drink some rakia. Temperature? Drink some rakia with honey. Bad back? How about a rakia sponge-bath? At one gathering, a colleague of mine was feeding a cat that bit her finger and made her bleed. Open wound? Stick it in a glass of rakia! At one of the other library Christmas parties, before we started drinking, I was sitting next to a gal I really enjoy and she turned to me and said, "For those who have died," and poured a bit of rakia out onto the floor. In the library! Ha!
I have yet to hear an adult Bulgarian talk about getting drunk, not even in jokes, yet I'm invited for a drink nearly every day. In Bulgaria, there isn't a goal of getting drunk. Back home, if you drink more than someone else thinks is reasonable, people say you're an alcoholic. Here, people don't really judge you in that way. I'm not saying there aren't alcoholics here - there are - but it's different. It might be too much for me to depict the differences without examples.
One weekend, during my first Peace Corps adventure, I went to a human trafficking conference with a group of 20 high school and university kids between the ages of 15 and 20. The teacher facilitated all kinds of ice-breaker games with sexual innuendos during the day and organized a party with beer and whiskey for her daughter's 17th birthday on one of the nights (legal drinking age is 18)! All that would be considered way inappropriate back home - but none of those kids acted inappropriately on our weekend getaway. It simply wasn't an issue. No one abused it, and no one got out of control. Was it because they'd grown up with it? Was it because their society doesn't over-react to every little thing? Or was it just another cultural difference?
Alcohol doesn't negatively impact productivity, from what I've seen. In fact, I've seen plenty of examples of how it improves productivity in the long run, as it brings people together and puts everyone on the same festive page. It may be read wrong from an American psyche, but one lady put it best, "In the summer, we work. In the winter, we drink." I think the translation is not literal. "Drinking" in English, is consuming alcoholic beverages. Although I know there's much more to it that I simply don't fully understand and can't possibly describe, near as I can tell, "drinking" in Bulgarian, is consuming alcoholic beverages with friends.
Some colleagues organized a hike to a lodge of sorts, one Saturday. The building in the forest was something of a retreat for politicians during communist days. Now it's a forest lodge with a scout camp nearby.
It was a short hike through the snow, and I got a nice chance to talk with people I don't usually see at the library. I kept saying how awesome I thought this was that they planned a weekend event with their colleagues. My impressions confused them until I explained that my colleagues back home didn't really do anything together after working hours. I guess that confused them even more. "We're all friends," they told me, "Of course we do things together outside of work." They couldn't understand being a part of a team, and not being friends. Frankly, I can't either.
It didn't take long for someone to break out the rakia on our hike. This was special winter rakia - mixed with sugar, lemon juice, and red pepper and heated! Pretty interesting hiking beverage! Ha! Once we got to the lodge, we continued with the rakia, and added wine and snacks! The "snacks" were different salads and pickled vegetables that go really well with rakia. We ate and drank for a few hours and then called it a day and headed back to the bus stop. Pretty great little winter outing. Pretty great little team!Who knows how much I really understand about drinking in Bulgaria. Sure, I have my keen observations and impressive reasoning skills, but it's possible that they're a bit skewed by my American psyche, wondrous as it may be. Drinking is a significant component of integration, which is one of my top priorities as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Even though I'm drinking more than I would have back home, it's not same kind of drinking, and I've always been able to heed the Peace Corps' disclaimer of not drinking my brains out and doing stupid things. All I can say with absolute certainty is that the world of drinking here is not the same as it is back home. If you're curious to know more, I invite you to come experience it with me! Next month is my other favorite Bulgarian holiday: Трифон Зарезан (A festival of wine)!
