One of the great things about EVS is that it gives you the opportunity to have proper classes for learning the language of your host country. For us, this means at least 120 study hours over a period of a few months, and right now we've done exactly half of that.
We have lessons on Monday and Thursday mornings in Zazy Language Centre, which is located on Vitosha Blvd right next to the Palace of Justice. Quite a central place to have lessons, right?
This is the entrance to the building - okay okay, I know what you're thinking, but, if you get down to it, it's nothing more than a photograph of a public place! The relevant jokes one can come up with from the fact that the entrance to a fetish club is the same as the entrance to where we have our language classes are rather obvious and I'll leave them to your own sick imagination!
This is the place where we get our капучино (cappuccino) during our почивки (breaks). Did you notice that the shop is called "Kinky"? Are you noticing a mysterious pattern here? It's not just me, right?
On a completely unrelated note, in the class itself I'm always sitting opposite this map.
I'm sorry, this has very little to do with our Bulgarian, but I just have to get it off my chest. What is this map? I'm a big geography and map nerd so bare with me, but what's that... peninsula jutting out from the East of Finland towards Svalbard? What's that island to the East of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, like a hydrocephalic Puerto Rico? Oh! Maybe MacMillan accidentally revealed the true location of Atlantis, what mapmakers, satellites, Google Maps etc. have been meticulously hiding for millennia. Thank you, MacMillan! The truth is out there.
Sorry for that. I just wanted to share with this little thing that continually catches my attention during the Bulgarian class.
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| From left to right: Oles, Hanna, Zanda, Maria, Zlatko (our teacher), Vicente and Jeroen. Maria from Spain was absent that day but I really wanted to take the picture exactly then. Don't worry Maria, I haven't forgot about you! |
Now, this is our class. That's us, the Library volunteers and the guys from Smart Foundation. This is the place where the magic happens. We hope that in the following half of our 120 hours we'll learn just as much, if not more, than what we have learned already, and some day soon we'll be ready to walk up to any baba or dyado and ask them for directions, order properly at the underground cantina next to the library with the handwritten menu with the green marker (have you seen handwritten Bulgarian??), understand what they ask us at the supermarket after we say the predictable things, which usually leaves us like deer in headlights... maybe even read some Bulgarian books! Yes, that'd be great indeed.
So, until the next attempts to actually write a post in Bulgarian, довиждане! (dovizhdane)
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