Life with my Brother

This October has been an exciting month! After a bit of frustration on when/where/how or if he would arrive, my brother finally showed up in Burgas on the 7th. He had just barley been able to convince his travel arrangers to get him a connecting flight to Burgas instead of terminating in Sofia (7 hours away) but in the process almost got tickets to Borgus, Spain, instead. Worked out in the end though and fortunately I was in Burgas (the Bulgarian one) at the time getting my new identity card and I was able to pick him up from the airport. We had two full weeks to hang out, see a bit of the country, catch up on news and he just left to go back to Kuwait this morning.

Kristen just finished her service on the 10th, and after that came out here to hang out with Braden and I. We went down to my place in Malko Turnovo for one big night with some other friends as sort of a farewell party for my buddy Tye who is heading off on a world tour. It was a good time, but Braden decided that he really doesn't like where I live that much. Way to boring for him. Shortly after he peaced out and headed back up to Burgas, where the action is (side note: my town is not that bad, it just has nothing to do in the evenings. Honestly though, if it did, I probably couldn't afford to do anything anyway, so it works out well this way) .

Last weekend the three of us took a short trip up to see the town of Velinko Turnovo, the old capital of Bulgaria. I had been there once before when I was in training, but it had only been for a day and there was still a lot of stuff that I wanted to see there. We had a good time and came back with some crazy stories. I got some pictures up as well.

http://picasaweb.google.com/justinrobarge

Since the trip though I have been back here working at site and relaxing. I have less than a week now before my big trip to the Middle East comes up and I still have a lot to do. I'm both really excited for the trip, and also bummed because once its over, Kristen moves back to the States. I am not looking forward to that part at all.

As far as work goes, its slower now than I would like. I have found it increasingly difficult to try and start projects on my own, and my counterpart doesn't seem to be a huge help. Right now he is looking into conducting another bat study for the winter, but other than that there is not a whole lot going on. I still go bird monitoring everyday to collect data on the importance of the local marsh for the bird migration, but I am ready for a bigger project that will have some sort of tangible outcome. I have a feeling though that if I haven't started such a project yet, its not going to happen in the middle of winter either. My problem is my organization I think (as far as working with Eco-projects and such). The good news is that my organization is so well run and funded that it gets lots of stuff done already and is working with several huge projects. The bad news, for me at least, is that because of this everything that I have come up with as a good idea has already been thought of, and many times started already. I have the feeling that I will be the last PC volunteer here in my town because of this reason. But, I suppose that's a good thing because the region is better off with a well run Park without a volunteer than a poorly run one with a volunteer.

Anyway, I still have till next week to see whats up with projects and then I take off for my tour of Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. I will post some sweet pics when I return. Peace