Hai from Bulgaria!
So, I'm in Varna, sitting in a cybercafe downtown called Club Frag. Internet access is $1.20 an hour, and the computers have all sorts of games and useful crap preinstalled. I was looking around for the Firefox icon, and found only a Big Blue E marked "Internet". I clicked it in resignation and it opened Firefox. :)
I've not had a chance to post until now because this is the first chance I've really had to go find a cybercafe.
Bulgaria is a fascinating and old country with a pretty tragic history. Varna is the old Greek city of Odessos; we visited Balchek, another city, which happens to be the old Greek city of Mesumbria. And so it goes; everywhere here has tons and tons of history. We also visited the old museum-town of Nysebar, which is a little peninsula that sticks out into the Black Sea; there are a ridiculous number of >1000-year-old buildings there, including a lot of churches built just a few decades after Constantine converted to Christianity.
The soil here is just ridiculously fertile. You can stick anything in the ground and it'll grow; one of Bulgaria's epithets is the Land of Roses, and it fits -- there are roses (and bright red poppies, and other flowers) everywhere. So it was a very wealthy country, but one on the way from everywhere to everywhere else... so they wound up fighting a lot of wars, and getting pretty good at it -- until they finally got overrun by the Ottoman Empire around 1350, who treated the people like dirt. The Russians finally threw out the Turks in 1878, but Bulgaria was at war off and on until they were assimilated into the USSR after WWII. The people have mixed feelings about the USSR, but as one lady said, "We can never bear ill will toward the Russians; they liberated us from the Turks." At any rate the last twenty years are, I think, the longest period of peace and independence Bulgaria's had for almost a thousand years. The people here aren't very wealthy, but they seem happy and proud; it's sort of what you imagine as an ex-Soviet republic. The literacy rate is 99%. :)
And that's not even a discussion of the older history here; there's Greek and pre-Greek stuff everywhere, and Bulgaria was the site of one of the world's oldest civilizations. They found a necropolis near Varna with the world's oldest gold; all that stuff, including a solid gold mallet (hey, it's easy to work and heavy!), is in the Varna Archaeological Museum, which is fascinating. All of Europe is full of history, but the history here goes allll the way back.
We've had a local lady with us as a guide for some of the stuff, and she's wonderful. I've gotten a chance to pick her brain about culture and history and archaeology some, and it's fascinating. Turns out she's a gardener as well, and once chopped some sticks off a bush and stuck them in the ground upside down to hold something else up. The next spring the sticks sprouted leaves from the wrong end. The place really is that fertile; there are more flowers and more cats around here than I've ever seen. (There are cats everywhere. I imagine they eat pigeons since there aren't too many of those, but there are tons of seagulls.)
I wish I'd had a chance to learn Cyrillic before I came here. Turns out a lot of stuff is cognate, if you can read the alphabet. :) I'm getting better at it. Lots of people here speak English or German, since the only place Bulgarian is spoken is Bulgaria and it's a small country.
Went to a performance of Aida. Pretty darn good, especially when you consider it was $5. Varna is a town of ~300,000 and they have an opera company that good... fantastic.
When Bulgaria was busy elsewhere in WWI, Romania helped itself to the town of Balchek. The Romanian queen (a Baha'i, one of the first) set up a summer home/garden there along the coast, and it's still around as a botanical garden. They have a big cactus garden, which is pretty hysterical, and a "strange foreign tree" -- Magnolia grandiflora. And more roses than you could ever hope to smell in a lifetime.
So the music: We're singing the German Requiem. There are four singers here with Sneed: Kristen Baskewicz, a guy she met in ~2005, and a pre-1997 UAH singer. There's about a dozen here from the University of New Orleans, and a huge pack from this private parochial college from Montana. Many of them joined the choir just so they could go; they're not terribly good musicians and many of them are kinda stuck-up-rich-whiney types. (That's not just my opinion; I find them more tolerable than some people.) We're singing with the Morski Zvutsi (Bulgarian: "sounds of the sea") choir, conducted by Marin Tchonev who's also leading the workshop; he's got two clinicians under him. Rehearsals are chaotic as hell since the singers understand a mix of English and Bulgarian, the orchestra only understands Bulgarian, and a poor lady has to constantly translate everything.
There are six conductors: the Rocky Mountain College guy, a Brazilian dude who's got a lot of orchestra experience, a military band leader from Australia, a guy from the USA that I don't know much about but who isn't really that good, another American who's pretty good, and Sneed.
I could write reams about how the music's been going, but I've got to go soon, so in short:
--The Rocky Mountain people are sloppy across the board: diction, rhythm, notes, intonation.
--The Morski Zvutsi people have big voices and sing in about as stereotypically-Slavic a manner as you can imagine.
--The New Orleans people are pretty good.
--The strings are pretty good, except for the concertmistress who puts in a ritard before every cadence whether the conductors want one or not
--The timpanist is awesome
--The brass can't count; the horns additionally can't play the right notes.
--The soprano soloist is great and a really nice lady, and has made me not hate the 5th movement (I used to, since I'd never heard that solo done well)
And now I go! Be back in the Land O' Lots O' Sunshine on 8 June!