Traveling!

So today I was supposed to give a presentation on a 5 page outline that I had typed. This pretty much meant I was teaching for today. I was kind of nervous and when class was supposed to start, our professor said that it was such a nice day that we were having class in the bar/cafe out the university building. On top of that, she decided to postpone my presentation until after the break. So instead of a nerve wrecking speech, I got to sit outside and have a beer (which she paid for) and listen to her talk. What a great class.
I was also talking to a friend of mine who is now studying in Barcelona and I think I might go visit him seeing that this is the best time for me to go seeing that I am so close. I am going to Greece on friday and Istanbul some time after that. The next two months are going to be as much traveling as I can handle along with my schoolwork. I am up to 20 countries and I'm going to do my best to keep the number of countries ahead of my age for as long as possible.

What a weekend

So I left on thursday night with Kiro. We got to Sofia around 8:30 and went to his dad's house to eat dinner. After some really good chinese food, we left and got on our train at 10:30 to Russe. We arrived in Russe around 6:30 and found out that the next train to Bucharest left at 1:35pm, so we went to the bus station. After looking around for awhile, we found out that the bus at 8am was already full, so we walked into town. An interesting fact about Russe, it is the first place in the world where a McDonald's has gone bankrupt. We came back around 9 for the next bus. It was a romanian company not affiliated w/ the bus station, so when it didn't arrive for awhile, we had no way of knowing whether it was coming or not. Finally, at 10:20, it decided to arrive. After packing into a minibus with a bunch old men and women, we were off. When we got to one side of the border, we had to get out of the bus and go through immigration one by one. We then crossed the bridge and had to do it again on the other side of the Danube for customs. When we were finally in romania, we found out that the old ladies we were with were "smugglers." They had brought enormous bags full of stuff to bring over the border. After we arrived in the town of Gorgiu (spelling), we had to get out and Kiro got on a different minibus going to Bucharest. As soon we started driving, all Kiro and I were doing was praying to get off the bus. This driver was insane, besides the fact that we had to listen to Chalga music all the way there. When we were finally in Bucharest, we just wanted out and told them we needed the closest hotel. Then we began walking around in the direction of the train station, eventually taking the metro. After buying our tickets for a train that left at 10:30am, we needed to find our concert tickets. We asked the taxi drivers and they said it would cost 50 Lei! That's 5 times more than we paid when we walked away from the train station and got an honest driver. He spoke german, so I got to practice mine. This guy was so nice that he told us how to get there by metro if we didn't want to take his cab. We made it to the ticket place, which was on the 6th floor of a bank building somewhere. There was a nice Morgan outside, so I took some pictures. We got our tickets and decided to get some coffee. We walked into a cafe, and I noticed that there was a door in the back to somewhere inside, so we checked it out. This landed us in probably the biggest mall in the city. I finally bought some things. After that we went to the concert hall, 3hrs early. We walked around and went to the bathroom, but had to leave because security was bugging us. We got some "dinner," bread, sausage, and beer.
We came back at 7:30 and saw that a small crowd had formed outside, so we stood for the next hour and half, waiting for the doors to open. When it did open, we made it to the front and did not move. It started with 4 warm-up DJ's, one hour each. The first 3 were good, and the last warmup DJ was DJ Vania, a romanian DJ. When Vania began playing, these 4 romanian guys came out of nowhere and began being incredibly rude by forcing their way in front of me and screaming Tiesto's name while other DJ's were playing. It was really hard to enjoy the music with them dancing on top of me. We were standing way in the front, right in front of the wall of subwoofers that provided the bass for the entire concert. We didn't really notice this until Vania turned up the bass as loud as it could go, and Kiro and I could not believe what we were feeling. EVERYTHING was shaking, my lungs vibrated when I took a deep breath, my feet were having a wonderful massage, my voice was even distorting it was so loud. Needless to say, I probably lost a year of hearing from those few hours. Then Tiesto came on, it was pure madness, imagine a goal in the last seconds of the world cup final to break the tie in injury time in the team's home country. That's about how loud everyone was. Tiesto began playing but didn't turn the bass down, so we moved too the very back. It was a completely different show. We were upset at first because he wasn't playing any of his good songs, then we realized that he was playing his old songs, he had just remixed them all. He played a few songs in their original form, and the crowd went crazy. I get goosebumps just thinking about when he played Adagio for Strings. Towards the end we moved back downstairs to the back of the crowd after resting in a seat in the back for an hour or so. The end was actually the best part because he played a lot of songs we knew, and we went crazy.
After it was over, we made our way back to the train station and had to wait for 4 hours for our train to leave. While in the Mcdonald's bathroom, I met someone from the concert and gave him my Skype ID, hopefully he will contact me. Kiro was out like a light, so I had to stay up to make sure that we didn't miss our train and that it wasn't delayed. Eventually we got on and I slept like a baby, which is incredible considering the train. We got to Sofia around 9:30 and the only thing we could do was take the train back to Blagoevgrad, so we did and finally got home around 12:30, right at the end of the Halloween Party here. We went out for a little bit, and came back to sleep. This morning I got well rested and Kiro slept until 2:30pm. Now that I am nice and full and have some things out of the way, I have to read something and write an outline for my presentation on Tuesday. I hope this was a sufficient account of the weekend for those who wanted to know what Tiesto was like. I took several video's of the concert, so if you would like them, please ask.

The time has come

So after I posted my last entry, we had a romanian speaker read the emails I received and found out that I had to pick up my tickets 5 days after I ordered them. Needless to say I was furious, not only because I had lost my tickets, but because I was in Bucharest at the time and could have picked them up. So after cooling down, we decided we would call them and find out. The call center was closed this morning, and we had the wrong number, we were never going to get through this. We found the right number and called them only to find that they spoke perfect english and that there was no issue, we were going to see Tiesto. After years of listening to his music, pissing off my family for watching the same concert 4 times in a row and listening to tracks over and over, it's finally come to this. The funny thing is that the problem in between only makes me more excited because I fully expected not to go. We will be leaving for Sofia right after class, and then take the train to Bucharest and hopefully get there in the morning. We'll walk around the city for a while and I'll probably buy some things if I can. Then off to the concert, we might get there nice and early seeing that we're there for one reason, and one reason only. I'm expecting it to go into the wee hours of the morning, so after it's done, we'll try and catch a train back and try to make the Halloween party that the American students are hosting. All in all, this is going to be really fun. I'm bringing my camera, so I'll be sure to take a lot of pictures and videos.
Happy 20th Birthday to my wonderful Carolyn tomorrow, I'll be thinking of you when "In my memory," etc. play tomorrow night.
Seeing that no one told me any specifics regarding presents, I'm going to try and find some Romanian things while I'm there.
Good day to all, I'll be back sometime on Saturday!

Can't wait for tomorrow

Tomorrow I leave for Bucharest for my Tiesto concert! Needless to say, I'm excited. It was a fun-filled weekend with birthday parties and anniversary celebrations. I finally managed to mail Carolyn's birthday present yesterday, so it will probably get there in a month considering the mailing system here. When we went to mail it, we asked what the difference between Priority and regular mail was. To our surprise priority mail takes longer than regular mail, how or why, I don't know. Trains here also take longer to get to destinations than buses do, maybe it's not coincidence that Bulgaria and backward have the same amount of letters. I also sent a postcard to my highschool german teacher thanking her for her teachings. I managed to make my schedule for next semester, it's not a hard schedule, but I have a 9am class on fri. All my classes are right across the street for my old dorms, Towers, which I really don't want to end up in, but would be perfect location-wise. I am hoping that I can find an apartment for next semester instead of ending up in the dorms because I really don't want to have the meal plan. It might be tough finding one for just one semester though.
It's midterm time here and everyone is stressing out and studying. Haha, not me. Not because I'm lazy, but because I unknowingly already took one midterm, and I have my science midterm next week. I actually have to go to a study session for that midterm tonight at 9:30. My other two finals are after fall break, Falsifications and German. I fear that german is going to be my toughest final, so I'm going to have to study hard for that one. So far the school work is going well, I'm enjoying all my classes and keeping up to date on hw, etc.
I decided to buy the jacket I wanted, because it would have been awful if I had decided to buy it and it was gone. I bought it fully expecting not to use it for a while. But that night it was like someone flipped a switch and night time here is now freezing cold. The weather during the day is bright and sunny, but no clouds means a cold night. I'm glad I bought the jacket, and I'm sure it will serve me well for a long time.
I was searching on cnn.com for news, etc. and decided to type in Deloitte. Of all the things to come up, it was listed as one of the be places to get an internship. I was looking into trying to get an internship this summer at the office nearby, so hopefully I can do something. All the interns in the article were senoirs from yale, etc. though, so I'm not sure if they will accept me. Hopefuly I will have set myself apart enough to qualify for the internship because I know how invaluable it would be in the future.
Well, gotta run off to German, hope all is well with everyone!

Qlique really is good for me

The past few days I have been going back and forth with the computer guy from Qlique trying to make it work on my computer. After many emails and sending Java logs, etc., the problem was finally fixed and I was happy that I could finally use Qlique. When I checked my email the next day, I found an email from Allen (computer guy) saying that all the thanks was owed to me and that I had helped fix a big bug within qlique. Then I saw that he was sending me a check for $100 for the time that I had lost and for helping them w/ fixing the problem. Needless to say I was very happily surprised. I'm finally using qlique now and I'm happy to say that it is working really well in the way I thought it would. I've already talked to a few people from different universities, and I've only been using it for a day.
The other news is that I finally booked my trip for fall break. I'm going to Greece for a few days, and then spending 4 days on the island mikonos(spelling). It sounds like it is going to be a lot of fun and it's going to be cheap, $120 for the all the accommodation, and then transportation on top of that. The downside is that I am going with Preston and James. Preston is pretty much the only person at the entire university that I would rather not be associated with. He is the embodiment of a loud, obnoxious american. All he does is yell "f*** yeah" to absolutely everything. It has come to the point where people are removing f*** from their vocabulary as to not sound like him. Hopefully he is not as loud and annoying on the trip. He seems to be ok when not surrounded by people he feels the need to impress, and he did organize most of the trip. I am also going with Trent and hopefully Josh, who I went to Bucharest with. It should be fun, as long as we can get passed the differences and act like adults.
I got a 90 on my Marketing midterm, and I'm happy with it. I only have to get a C in my classes to get the credit, but it's not like I don't want good grades. School is going well so far, I'm handling the workload well, and the books that i've had to read have now made me want to read constantly. I just finished my second book for the class today and I'm already looking for something else to read. For anyone who wants something specific, please tell me before next thursday when I leave to go to the Tiesto concert in bucharest. There's a lot of nice stuff there and it's really cheap. I don't want absolute specifics, just an idea of what you would like, clothes, decorations for the house, bags, whatever. I just need an idea.

Wet Weekend

So I had my trip organized by the school over the weekend. The weather was bad for a vast majority of the trip. We left early in the morning on sat and went to a village up in the mountains. It was interesting, but I'm sure the view would have been great had we not been surrounded by clouds. There is a church there from the 13th century. It doesn't look like a church at all from the outside, but the inside was different. Every surface of the church inside was covered w/ paintings, fresco's, etc. I think you could stay in there for a few days looking and studying all the portraits of saints and scenes from the Bible. We weren't allowed to take pictures though. The artwork was very well preserved because it is a small church and the smoke from the candles covered the walls, protecting the walls. After that we went to a small town were we had lunch in the only place open because it was the weekend. It took almost 2hrs for us to get all of our food. It was ridiculous. After the long lunch, we went to the Dancing Bears reserve. This was a sanctuary for bears that were forced to dance in the streets. It was very depressing because all the bears dance back and forth non-stop when they see people. The just walked back and forth without stopping. I could only watch for so long. We walked into the woods on one of the trails and it was very pleasant. The trail followed a river that was flowing really well because of all the rain. We saw a black and yellow salamander on the way back. After that, we went to Bansko, a place that is pretty much a ski resort town. It is supposed to be gorgeous when there is snow there, but everything was wet and closed while we were there. We went out to a bar-like place because we arrived in the town at 6pm and had nothing to do until we left the next day. I got soaking wet walking around trying to find somewhere to go. My shoes are just drying out today. I managed to catch the very end of the Gran Prix on sunday, actually just the interviews, which they viciously voice over in bulgarian. Around 12 we left to come back to the dorms. I finished reading the lie that wouldn't die, which i think we have a quiz on tomorrow. I still have one more book to read, but it's short and shouldn't be too hard. It was a good weekend, even if it rained a lot. I got some good pictures and had fun. I'm not sure what's in store for me next, but hopefully I am still going to the Tiesto concert next friday.

Free Day

I have no class today because my teacher is away at a conference. Unfortunately that means we have time to read the 2 books we have to finish by the end of next week. I'm almost done the first, so hopefully I'll be OK. I have a test in Marketing tomorrow, so I have to study for that.
Two nights ago I came into contact with the biggest cultural difference since I've been here. The funny thing was that it had nothing to do w/ Bulgaria at all. We had a BBQ and we all brought our own stuff to grill. To my surprise I found my steak on the same grill as hamburgers and hot dogs. I almost felt ashamed. I marinated my steak in what I thought was normal wine, but it was so crappy that it just tasted like grape juice. I cooked my steaks after I finally convinced everyone that I knew what I was doing. I cooked mine and Kiro's but because they cooked so many different things, I had to keep my food warm in the oven. The oven was way too hot so by the time it came to eat the steaks, they had gone from med-rare to almost well done. And this was on top of the fact that steak here is nowhere near as tender as it is back home. So the steak wasn't so great, but I was in need of real beef so I ate the whole thing w/ my hands. Kiro's steak was worse than mine because he wanted it more cooked, which ended up being a piece of leather. We had other food that the girls had cooked, ie mashed potatoes w/ cheese and some other things. The dinner was good and everyone was very loud. At the end we appointed two guys who hadn't done anything towards the dinner to clean up. We left them to do the work, only to find out that they had just rinsed the dishes and clogged up the sink. Needless to say, those of us who had already done work and had to clean up after them were not too happy. One girl, Oksana, who had told them to do it and had done a lot of work got really mad and eventually told them that they weren't allowed to eat with us again.
The concert is getting closer, but the only thing that bothers me is that Tiesto has been sick since Sept. 19, and there has been no update as to whether he will be playing or not. I really hope that he gets better because this is the only chance I have to see him for a long time, and I don't want to think about how hard it is going to be to get my money back from the Romanian ticket office.
I'm going on a trip on saturday to a bear reserve and some other places on a school sponsored trip. It sounds like fun and hopefully there's some interesting things to see. So far the only person I know that is also going on the trip is Rasika, my other roommate and RA. I probably know some other people, but it is impossible to recognize people just by their names here.
I am trying to start my involvement in Qlique again, but it is proving very difficult because it refuses to run properly on my computer and it's going to be hard to find 50 people to recruit with no face to face contact. Everything is just working against me right now, w/ the required time to sign on being b/w 4 and 8am my time, along with some other complications. At least I got my letter of Achievement for my previous work. Well, I need to get back to reading and maybe even planning out my trip for fall break, whose plans have changed again.

Enjoyable trip

I had a really good time going on our trip this weekend. First we went to Veliko Teranovo, which used to be he capital of Bulgaria. We took a bus there and ended up missing our stop and kept going for another 100 km. Eventually we figured things out and after wasting 4 hrs trying to get back, we arrived. We walked around, had something to ate and saw some of the sites. At night there is a light and laser show at the old fortress. This place is absolutely enormous and they run the show every night. It was spectacular. I'm really glad we went because I have never seen anything like that before. I have a short video clip in addition to the pictures that I took. They are blurry because it was quite a distance away and the shutter had to stay open in order to absorb the light. After that, we got on the train to Bucharest. After getting on and off a few trains and losing a lot of sleep, we made it to Bucharest around 6:30am. We walked around and drew some money. Their currency is very odd because they both the old currency, which is in the 10,000's, and the new one, which is the same thing w/ 4 zero's off the end. The actual money is great because it's the plastic kind, so it doesn't get dirty, torn, w/e. Bucharest is weird in that it feels like it is made up of little parts of other cities. It was designed like paris, parts looked like Rome, others Vienna, and etc. It brought back a lot of memories from the eurotrip. It was almost creepy how similar some of the things were, but I guess a lot of people have gone through that part of the continent during history, so there's a lot of different influences. The second biggest building in the world is there, the first being the pentagon. This building was absolutely monstrous, along with the city itself. We walked everywhere, and by the end of the day, I couldn't wait to just sit and rest. The weather was really good, which made it much better seeing that it the weather was crappy, we wouldn't have been able to get lost and find some weird/interesting things. Everything in Romania is really cheap, so i'm asking whoever wants something to tell me now so that I can go crazy when I go back in 3 weeks for the Tiesto concert. I really wanted to buy a lot of things when i was in both cities, but the same dilemma of having to carry it around w/ me arose. On the trip back our bodies finally gave in and we managed to fall asleep on the bus and the train, something we couldn't do before because it was so uncomfortable. We got back around 10am and spread to our respective rooms so that we could get clean and rest. It was a really good trip and I had fun with all 3 of the other people. The funny thing is that they're all seniors, so they were 21, 21, and 22.
Bucharest is definitely up there on my list of favorite cities that i've been to, if not the best. The other thing I accomplished this weekend was that Romania is my 20th country that i've visited. So I have now been to more countries than I am years old. I'm hoping to keep this accomplishment for as long as possible, but it of course won't last forever.
I'm glad i finally went somewhere, i didn't really miss anything here, not that I expected anyone to do anything besides drink and party. There is a trip organized by the school next weekend, I think I'll go on it because it's cheap and easy.
P.S. I didn't need anything extra visa-wise, my bulgarian ID card worked just fine.