summertime

Summer up to now has been going great, and I have been keeping nice and busy. The week after my big dive trip I got to play guide and translator for a Dutch tourist that was backpacking across Strandja park. We were gone for six days, and for the first three days we had expert guides to lead the way, but on the last few days it was just me and the tourist, so it was just me in charge of trail finding, locating camp, and translating everything for him. I was actually kind of impressed with how well it went, and it gave me some quality time out in the park. The Dutch guy was pretty cool, but it was kind of a pain to translate for him sometimes since he was always changing his mind on what he wanted and would make some rather picky demands (compared to what I'm used to I guess). Overall it was a great time though and hiking in the mountains beats working in an office any day.

The next week after hiking I went up to Burgas and my friends took me out for dinner and drinks to celebrate my 24th birthday. It was pretty low key, but I had a great time, and the next day we went down to a town called Sinemorets and met a big group of volunteers for some quality time on Bulgaria's southern beaches. The beaches down along the southern coast are nice since they are much less developed and not as crowded as the beaches by the cities, and we spent the days lounging around in the sun. It was a good time, and a nice way to spend my birthday weekend.

After that it was back to the office for a bit, then off to the far side of Bulgaria to help with a training session for the brand new group of Trainees that just recently arrived in country. I only had to do a short seminar with them, but it gave me an opportunity to head out to that side of the country for more than just a two day weekend and see people. The new group seems cool, and I'm glad because most of the people that I'm good friends with here now are from the group that will be getting replaced. Hopefully some of these new trainees are place close to my sight so I will still have people to hang out with every now and then. Either way, life is going to be much different for me after the older groups leaves this October.

Anyway, until that happens, things will continue on as usual. Last weekend was the 'Spirit of Burgas' concert, the first of what will hopefully become one of the biggest annual music festivals in all of Europe (www.spiritofburgas.com). The concert lasted three nights, from 6pm to 6am on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and had music spread across 6 stages all night long. I have to admit that I wasn't familiar with any of the bands going into this thing, but turns out that a lot of them are really good, and very popular in Eastern and Western Europe. The concert totally rocked, and during one of the headline shows Friday night there was even a partial lunar eclipse. With the success of this years concert I'm hoping that next years will be even better!

Now its back to the office again for the next few weeks. I had been planning a short weekend trip up to Romania to see Bucharest and Brasov, but it kinda fell through so now I think I will be sticking around here for a while. Which is ok by me, since the beach is only an hour away and there seems to be something going on in Burgas almost every weekend. Also, now that its late summer all the fruits and veggies are in season so everything is uber cheap and delicious. I gotta get my fill before winter comes and the only thing I can find is potatoes and onions.