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I’ve just returned from a quick dash to Sofia to do some research in the National Library, celebrate my ex-mother-in-law’s 85th birthday, and write a little about how the country still celebrates 8 March as International Women’s Day. It was a very busy and over scheduled trip, with visits to three history museums, but I am always happy to be back in Bulgaria, even if only for such a short while.
The beginning of my spring break…
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, an annual American festival of absurd overindulgences and hyper-concentrated family time.
This late Autumn finds me back in Maine where I lived for fifteen years between 2002 and 2017. The crispness of the salty morning fog transports me back twenty years. I recall myself as a new mother and a freshly minted Ph.D. arriving on campus as a young assistant professor, suddenly transported from California to what seemed back then like the northernmost tundra of the contiguous United States.
I grew up in San Diego. Snow was only something you saw on TV or visited for a few hours around the winter holidays, either up in the nearby Julian mountains or at Sea World where they hauled it in refrigerated trucks and refreshed it with artificial precipitation machines. My parents, like the other locals with season passes, brought their kids to experience the sorry simulacra of sledding and snowball fights. I was one of those tweens wearing a bikini under my winter clothes so we could head straight to the beach after drinking our overpriced hot cocoa with little marshmallows in the faux Christmas village. Continue reading…
I was quite sad to leave Germany, but happy to be back in the Balkans.
So delighted to see my former Bowdoin College student, Julia Mead, who is now a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Chicago. She is currently doing archival research in Prague and we rendezvoused in Paris for the Gender and Materiality conference at Sciences Po. We found some time to enjoy the pleasures of the City of Light –embracing the numinous!
So I spent a day in a village in the northwest of Bulgaria, near the town of Vratsa. This is a very poor part of the country where people live quite close to the edge, and is probably one of the poorest regions in the European Union. But it is also breathtakingly beautiful, and it is in this part of the country that many people maintain an allegiance to leftist ideals. I am always humbled and honored to be a guest here.
