oF sUMMER

I have a new house mate.

We go for walks every day and play games a lot.

Her name is Mira.

The kids in the neighborhood love her and come to my house every day to ask "Can we play with Mira?"

She's pretty hairy...more hairy than me even!

She likes to chew on furniture and slippers and your hands and anything she can get her little teeth on.

She also likes to eat her poop, but i won't mention that part ;-)

Some fellow PCVs and i found her and four siblings in the trash in Tzarevo, where we helped out with a Multi-Ethnic Camp. Apparently, the owner of our hotel had had puppies and, not wanting to be a dad to screaming, hairy creatures, put them in the trash to die. Well, our collective conscience couldn't let us leave them there, so we used an abandoned building by the seashore to take care of them during the week and turned them over to dog-lovers after we left, except for Mira, who came home with me, and is making my apartment into a war zone. I'll eventually have to find a nice house/yard for her to be able to run around outside, but I wouldn't give up the experiences we've shared together for the world. Thanks to my fabulous sister, she has a toy snake, a squishy ball, and a beaver to chew on. She keeps herself pretty well occupied most of the time.

In other news...I was really happy to have both my mom and my dad and my aunt in fabulous M-grad this summer. They got a chance to meet my friends and colleagues and see the surrounding mountains, rocks, the paintings of my boss, Kamber (which are pretty much part of the landscape!) gardens, buildings, cafes, etc. We walked, we talked, we played with Mira, mom and I got sick at one point and practiced our 'synchronized barfing',(one day we'll perfect it!) dad and I walked around a bunch of rocks and sat on something that was once a throne, but now looks a whole lot like a rock. One day my sister will come too and one day i will put more pictures up on the blog, to trail the adventures of this summer and beyond.

After going to an international seminar in Macedonia, I can successfully juggle (for about 5 seconds, but that's a minor detail), make a balloon sword, flower, dog, lion, and other assorted things, and paint palms on people's faces. These things may sound trivial to adult beings, but they're absolutely magical when working with kids...especially when teaching kids how to do these things and they feel a sense of accomplishment when they make a balloon doggie and start biting you with their balloon doggie.

Now i'm back in M-grad with a real biting doggie and trying out ways to apply everything I learned this summer, in the camp, in Outward Bound, and in Macedonia to my work here with the kids, so that it makes for a meaningful experience for all involved.

My best friend, Nejda, got married on July 9th and is now living a totally different life in Bursa. I'm really happy that she's with the man she loves, but gosh darn it, i miss her! My wonderful site mate, Cynthia, also left in July, to go to grad school in Ohio. I miss her too...been feeling lonely for female friends. To top it all off, i lost my gsm about a week ago while playing with the kids and Mira, so I'm pretty disconnected from the world outside of M-grad right now. Someone's picked it up, but they're not giving it back. So it goes...

Enjoy the dwindling days of summer, dear readers...