change of seasons

can you believe it? it actually hit me with surprise yesterday (january 29th!!!) when i realized that finally all the christmas decoration has gone. no more shiny trees. no more red and green blinking lights along the bulevards. thinking about it now, maybe this is the reason why the whole xmas season started so much later here than in germany....i mean, if you keep all the deco up until more than a month AFTER xmas.... :-P well, don't worry, even now that the blinking lights are gone, the bulgarians are already preparing some new decoration, so the city will stay colourul: just a moment after i had noticed that the lights on tsarigradsko shosse (correctly it should be spelled "chaussee" but that is hardly recognizable anymore as in cyrillic it is spelled "шосе") had disappeared, i saw that the small kiosks that sell bus tickets, magazines, fashion jewellery and shampoo - everything you may need - started putting out the "martenitsas". a martenitsa is the little red-and-white band that bulgarians give to each other on the first of march as some kind of spring luck charm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martenitsa). let's just hope that spring will arrive just as quickly as the martenitsas increasingly appear in the kioks and stores around sofia.

yesterday, i went to an erasmus party. it was just the second of that kind to which i went and i really enjoyed it. there was a nice mixture of people - old erasmus students (many of which are leaving around now, that's why the party), new arrivals and quite a few bulgarians as well.

here you can see me zipping from a typical bulgarian beer bottle. no, don't worry, i didn't drink the whole 2 litres by myself, nor did i continue to drink directly out of this bottle after the pics....oh, and to evade misunderstandings, there are also smaller 0.5 l - and 0.33 l - beer bottles in bulgaria, but if you if you stock up for a party you'll usually get the bigger sizes around here ;)

btw: this weekend i'll finally get out of the big city again. i'll to lakatnik in the stara planina mountains. sooooooo much looking forward to it!