Let's see how this works...

I am two weeks away from flying out to Sofia (and then to Blagoevgrad) where I will be for the next 10 months (or longer). At the urging of my mother and various friends, I decided to start a blog, not because I think what I'll experience there is necessarily worthy of being shared in the "blogosphere" but rather I'd like to have a storehouse for my memories...and to let my mom know where I'm at at all times.

I received this Fulbright grant back in March after applying last September. In a separate blog post, I plan to go over the application process because many of my friends have asked me about it, and I remember endlessly browsing through the internet for information about the application.

My official position is as an "English Teaching Assistant." What that really means changes from country to country as well as from school to school. I'm still not even sure what exactly it means for me. I know that I will be teaching English at a school called Езикова гимназиа "Акад. Людмул Стоянов. For those of us less inclined to the Cyrillic alphabet, that's pronounced "Ezikova gimnazia 'Akademik Lyudmil Stoyanov." Or just EG. Thank God. I also know that I will be rotating through different classrooms from 8th to 12th grade. I do not know much more than that, which is certainly a bit unsettling, but I'm having to adapt to the uncertainty of the entire experience. Learning flexibility is something I've always needed to work on, so why not go all in?!

I'll keep this post short by sharing a little information about the town in which I'm placed: Благоевград, or Blagoevgrad. It's a town of about 70,000 people located in southwestern Bulgaria, a 2.5 hour train ride away from the capital, Sofia. With two universities (the American University of Bulgaria, or AUBG, and South-West University Neofit Rilski) it's definitely a college town and, from what I hear, has a more international feel to it than some Bulgarian cities. What I'm most excited about is that it's located in the foothills of two incredible mountain ranges, the Rila and Pirin mountains. I hated leaving Las Vegas and its surprisingly gorgeous mountains (Mt. Charleston, I'm looking at you), but in Bulgaria I'll be a bus ride away from ski resorts and alpine hiking.

Below I've included a photo not just of Bulgaria but of the entire Balkan region, which gives a bit more perspective on where I'll be. Using my newly-found Microsoft Paint skills, I added in an arrow pointing to the general area where Blagoevgrad is.