so yesterday was our little excursion to salamanca, about two and a half hours west of madrid... our language institute place provided a bus for us, but that meant if you weren't going to return at 4:30 that afternoon, you'd have to pay your own way back the next day. our plan was to stay the night, so that was kind of a bummer, but some of us did eventually decide to stay. the city itself was quite nice, and the university of salamanca is the oldest in all of europe. its a student city, like boston, so the night life [View Full Entry]

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i´m gonna have to cut this short, since im about to head to the city celebration of spain´s victory as world champions in basketball, but yea, i´m alive and well. madrid is magnificent, but that of course goes without saying. i´ve already had my fill of paella, jamón serrano, el corte inglés, and all of the other wonderful things here. my residencia is very nice, though i have yet to meet my roommate. apparently there´s a kid from zaragoza (2 hrs from madrid) in my room, but he´s gone for a few days and will only be here until the end [View Full Entry]

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well its been a while since my last update, but as of yesterday afternoon I have made my triumphant return to glorious spain so that morning in sofia i ended up hanging out with this Bulgarian guy from myspace. those of you over 25 probably don´t know what that is, buts its basically a big online friends database. he actually helped me out with my project a bit considering he lived in macedonia for 9 years, but is ethnically bulgarian. he´s the same age as i am and goes to the american university in blagoevgrad, so his english was near-perfect. had [View Full Entry]

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well kids, i'm back in sofia after my adventures in macedonia. seeing as my bus got in before 6am this morning, i've been quite bored or the past couple of hours. after some coffee and pretending to understand the bulgarian newspaper at the bus station, i dropped off my bags and headed out for a morning stroll through the city. its quite peaceful in the morning. we'll see what i end up doing for the rest of the day before my flight to warsaw... so yesterday morning i think i finally felt like part of the family, which was unfortunate considering [View Full Entry]

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well after listening to my mother scream in my ear about not calling/emailing/updating before we got cut off, i suppose its time for an update. i did try the other day, but the connection at this place sucked really bad so i just left... basically i'm an adopted member of the family here in ohrid. we sit and sip coffee, smoke cigarettes, watch balkan music videos, eat home-cooked meals, etc. etc. life is pretty good, albeit slow compared to anything i'm used to. my second day here i awoke to coffee waiting for me at the breakfast table. 'mom' asked me [View Full Entry]

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well i certainly am happy to be out of skopje. parts of it were really cool, but overall i just felt unsafe and being alone certainly didn't help...probably the best part was being able to sit in my room in my underwear in front of the air conditioner... this morning i was a weirdo and was up and out of my room by 9 to explore what i could in skopje before noon. the main center square, ploshtad makedonija, is really cool and lined with cafes and shops and whatnot, but i think i already told you that. i continued up [View Full Entry]

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so yea ive had quite the issue updating this blog, seeing as i've come across only power outages and shitty internet.... saturday afternoon i left veliko turnovo after a ridiculously crazy night and a tearful farewell. i can't wait to come back next summer. a bunch of us headed for sofia where i spent the first night at a hostel and the second night with a friend from switzerland who works in sofia. we spent saturday night at a nice restaurant followed by a cool bar behind the national art gallery and then a club called 'my mojito'. naturally, i had [View Full Entry]

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i just wanted to let everyone know that today i had what i'd like to call a "language seizure" that happened as a result of my speaking catalan, spanish, english, french, and bulgarian all within a 2 minute period. i literally started shaking and sweating. in other news, i bought a cell phone yesterday, but as of now there aren't any minutes on it so i have to go buy a voucher. i'm keeping it in bulgarian which is pretty sweet, plus no one will be able to get into my phone unless they know bulgaria or cyrillic, i suppose. also, [View Full Entry]

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so this past weekend was spent at the black sea, right outside of varna. after quite a bit of drama with the directors not wanting us to go, aka they don't trust us because we're american (despite the fact that our friends from denmark, ukraine, and romania were going as well) we departed by bus. once in varna we searched for this restaurant, kushtata, and qute a bit of searching finally were able to find it. the food was quite good, though having to wait like 45 minutes for manuela's tripe (of all things) to come was a bit ridiculous. our [View Full Entry]

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so basically i'm having the most amazing time of my life and i never want to leave... bulgaria has turned us americans into alcoholics and chain smokers, so i don't think i'll be able to elaborate much on our fun times in this blog, lol. but just so you know, we're all totally in love with this place and don't want to leave anytime soon. luckily it hasn't even been one week yet. yesterday i had this "excursion" at 9am instead of class all throughout the city. significantly exhausted and hung over after another night of fun and 2 hours of [View Full Entry]

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