Highlights

sooooooooooooo, i guess it's time to write a bit again ;)

actually, i didn't feel like there was too much going on lately, so i decided to wait until a few things would have accumulated and i'd have more to tell.

my personal highlights of the past two weeks:

well, let's start with uni - last week on monday i had my last day of the handelsrecht (german commercial law) course and finished it successfully the following tuesday with a short oral exam. the same day i started another german law course - verfassungsrecht (constitutional law) - which is mostly repetition for me, but still interesting enough and after all i have wonderful classmates ;) that make up for any minute of boredom that might come up. besides, i need to complete a few law courses during my stay here as this is a requirement from the erasmus programme/my home university... i also started and finished another intensive course - "international conflict managemen and mediation" taught in english at the political science department. actually, it was a course designed particularly for erasmus students - i'll take part in two more courses like that (also political science) - and it's only a few germans, dutch and polish taking these classes.

and nightlife - yep, i finally did go out in studentski grad (in short "studgrad" which often sounds like "stuttgart"). for all who don't know what's so special about it a short explanation. studentski grad means "student city". it is the district at the outskirts of sofia where ALL the student residences are located. that means that there are living 20'000 students all in the same area and everything there is of course made to fit the average student's needs: bars, student restaurants, clubs, 24/7-shops and more bars, bars, bars... i went on friday to catch up with manolo (spaniard) whom i hadn't seen for a long time and two of his friends, ignacio (also from spain) and tuba (a really pretty turkish girl). we went first to one bar, then to another and simply had a good time :) i went again on saturday as rozi had asked me to come along to a concert of a group called P.I.F. - pretty good bulgarian rock! rozi, i and amélie who had joined us once again had a great time there. however, we didn't stay until the end as at 3'30 am we were still waiting for the band to come on stage for a third time that night (they started quite late and took kind along breaks inbetween) and we were all really tired ;) this week on tuesday, i went to studentski grad for a third time. this time i followed two of my class mates from the german law courses to a karaoke bar. don't worry, i didn't sing myself (so it's safe for germans to keep coming to bulgaria - at least it isn't my fault if bulgarians have a bad impression of germans :P ) but i did enjoy listening to some of the others interpreting bulgarian and international songs. especially hristiana: you've got a beautiful voice, girl!

and finish with so much more - first i've got to dedicate some photos to my dearest LeLe! also spatz, schau dir mal mein weißes sofia an ;) weißt ja, dass mir das gar ned gefällt, aber für dich musste ich das doch trotzdem festhalten.










well, at the moment the snow is gone again and i am quite happy about that. when i woke up last saturday and found studentski grad covered in snow it was somewhat of a shock, though ;)
anyway, besides the snow, i also received some good news last week: i finally got my erasmus money - that tiny scholarship from the european union - and as i got the whole amount for all of the ten months at the same time, i actually am "rich" enough to travel around again without too many worries. that's great! you can imagine that i've already planned my next trip: tomorrow night i'm taking the train to belgrade :o)
AND i also received an email from the person responsible for my bafög (money the german government half loans/half gives to students whose parents don't have enough, but only after a huge amount of completed paperwork). after more than half a year i have managed to send them all the papers needed and by december i should receive the first payment (covering the three months from october to december). that's great news although i don't yet know how much that money will actually be :P
to conclude my little story, a really nice highlight from last night ;) kalina, member of my former moot court team and a bulgarian freiburger, came to sofia to visit her family for a week. and yesterday she invited me to celebrate her birthday with her and her friends. it was kind of strange to see faces (kalina's and that of her boyfriend, or should i say fiancé?, henning's) that i only connect to freiburg in the middle of sofia. but much more than strange it was of course really nice to see someone whom i've known before my life in sofia - and i'm looking forward to see a whole lot more people who shall come round to visit and are always welcome to be my guest ;)


und hier noch etwas für deutschsprachige leser. ich habe diesen artikel heute während meiner arbeit bei der kanzlei gelesen und diese beiden sätze beschreiben ziemlich gut, was ich an berlin so schätze: es ist eine absolute multi-kulti stadt und JEDER kann berliner sein, egal wo er/sie geboren und aufgewachsen ist. und korrigiert mich, wenn ich da falsch liege, aber ich meine, dass ist in deutschland sonst an (fast) keinem anderen ort möglich.

http://www.spiegel.de/reise/staedte/0,1518,517166,00.html

Die Karl-Marx-Straße steht gleich für einen ganzen Stadtteil, denn Neukölln ist mit 163 Nationen einer der ethnienreichsten Orte der ganzen Republik. Das Patriarchat dominiert, und wenn man in den Geräuschfetzen andere Sprachen hört, dann sind es keine Touristen [...], sondern eben ganz normale Berliner.

H·A·L·L·O·W·E·E·N

i know halloween was already a few days earlier, but it was still enough of a reason to party and so i went. i was invited by one of my work mates. her boyfriend is american and workst at the american embassy in sofia so most guests were people connected somehow to the embassy and they kept asking me what i was doing there. well, in the end they still accepted me into their party crowd and we all had a lot of fun.
figuring out a costume for the party was quite a difficult task for an uncreative person as i am, especially because i didn't have many clothes and accessories to create something. a friend then gave me the idea of making a type of toga from a white bedsheet. so, i went to a second hand store, got a big white bedsheet and an old golden tablecloth and turned myself into an ancient greek...hmmm...something ;) at the party i even found my counter part in an ancient greek warrior - named tom - and i have to say, i was really satisfied with my outfit.

just a normal day

so what did i do today? what does a regular day of my erasmus student life in sofia look like? and anyway, what is a normal day here?
this morning i got up around half past eight. i had meant to be up earlier, but i just couldn't get out of bed :-P so, i dragged myself out of bed -- bed? well, i'm actually talking about a sofa here, since for the first few months in our shared flat the living room is "my" room and so i am stuck with a sofa as bed until february. then i'll move and the next one will be the "lucky" one finding out how it is to crash on an extremely ugly sofa ;) in any case, i got up, took a shower, had a quick breakfast...just the typical things you do before going out of the house. and then i headed towards CMS for yet another day of work. today, it was the day of education or something like that, which means that NO educational students are opened for the whole day. no classes meant more time on my internship. most of the morning and part of the afternoon today i did some research on tax law. how and what kind of taxes does a german company pay if it is the owner of 100% of another bulgarian company? uff, not too interesting really, but i at least learned something and i know now: in the end you might be left with less than 50% of your gains before you paid taxes. inbetween in proofread a german text. actually, it was a text that i had written and two of the lawyers went over it, made some changes and prepared it to send it to a client for approval. wow! i didn't think that i'd really do useful work like this! i don't mean the proofreading part, but that my original text had barely been changed. ready to be a lawyer??? i don't think so, but it still feels great to do a useful job. i also found out today how much i will get for this job. and...well, after all it's not a real job but just an internship so i should really be happy about any cent. still, when i heard the sum, i kind of thought, i could just as well not receive any kind of salary: i will get 3 bulgarian lev per hour! that is less than 1'50 €. ridiculously little, but hey, this is the salary of someone working at mc donalds here in bulgaria. so, i guess it's not too bad :-P
around 5 pm i decided that it was time to go. i've had done enough work for the day and i wanted to meet dessi (the first bulgarian hospitalityclub member i met in sofia) at 5'30. well, she was late but her boyfriend wasn't and on the way to a café she eventually joined us. in the café we chatted about this and that, i had a cinnamon latte and it wasn't long before i had to go again. as it was the first thursday of the month there would be a german "stammtisch" meeting at a german bar/restaurant this evening and two of my colleagues had asked me whether i'd like to come along. hm, there was quite an interesting and diverse crowd at the stammtisch. many bulgarians that spoke german, one half spanish half english guy who didn't speak either german or bulgarian, and then of course a bunch of germans that are currently in sofia for different reasons. at the other end of the table i saw the german ambassador and i even shook hands with his wife -- she actually came round to greet everyone at the meeting while his husband kind of seemed to ignore everyone except for the ones immediately around him. but i might have gotten a wrong impression, after all i only saw him from the distance.
eventually, i didn't feel like staying much longer and i left to meet yet another friend of mine. a bulgarian girl, who had spent two years in germany (in the first year she learned german and passed the german as a foreign language exam that enabled her to go to university in germany within only SIX MONTHS), but then she realized that she just wasn't made for life in germany, quit her medicine studies there and returned to bulgaria. good for me, cause back in sofia i've met her and it was really a nice finish for this normal day. we went to a pizzeria and i ate about half of my roquefort pizza (four cheeses with some pizza dough underneath) had "edna zagorka golyama" and walked home afterwards. so, here i am now, still awake though it's already 20 minutes to 2 and tomorrow, i will actually go back to work. again.
good night, folks!

Lake Ohrid - Езерoтo в Охрид

Beautiful Macedonia :) - my stay there was very brief but lots of fun and likely to be repeated. last weekend in rila, rozi mentioned that the only neighbouring country she's never visited is macedonia and thus gave me the idea to go. unfortunately, rozi ran out of money and couldn't come as well, but amélie and i still got our things together and took the bus last friday to go to from sofia to skopje and then on to ohrid in the south-west corner of the country very close to albania. it is a beautiful - though very touristic - town right besides a huge lake. this very same weekend there happened to be the 2nd CS Balkan Meeting going on, which, of course, we joined. more than 100 travellers from the balkans and some more distant regions of the world got together to have fun - attending the meeting as long as one could any time between friday morning and sunday afternoon. as the bus ride from sofia to skopje takes somewhat like 6 hours (including one hour waiting time at the border) and from there another 3 and a half hours to ohrid, amélie and i only arrived in the early evening. in the bus from skopje we stumbled over another three couchsurfers and all five of us arrived well in ohrid where we quickly found the rest of the couchsurfers in their various houses serving as quarters for the whole crowd. somebody must have invested a huge amount of organizational skills to get all of us together. so many people arriving at different times from different places. but in the end, i'm pretty sure, all of us had a wonderful time. there were couchsurfers from all over. all types of people between the age of 19 and something around 50 years. the biggest group came from greece (thessaloniki is after all only about four hours away), but then there were bulgarians, macedonians, serbians, austrians, italians, germans, french, americans, brits, turks, a canadian, a senegalese, lithuanians, a swiss and....probably some more that i can't think of right now. in any case, you can imagine that i liked it a lot and i hope that the next balkan meeting which shall take place in sarajevo will be still within the time of my stay in this amazing region.
from ohrid itself i have actually not seen too much. at least not during the day time. on friday we arrived too late, on saturday we spent most of the day in st. naum (a village with a bunch of churches about one kilometer away from albania) and on sunday it rained all day. still, i have enjoyed it a lot and i have seen what's most important: the lake.
our trip back to sofia turned out to be somewhat more adventurous than we had planned. until skopje amélie and i could ride together with a greek-serbian couple in the car of a macedonian. there, we still had a long time to wait before our night bus/train would leave, so we decided to have something to eat in the center. and, of course (!), we had only been walking for 5 minutes, when we saw 5 other couchsurfers in a restaurant doing the same (well, one of them was actually from skopje, so she didn't wait for any transportation, but the rest of us did). at 11 pm, amélie and i wanted to take the bus. we had bought an open-return round-trip ticket and this was the last bus leaving that day. at the bus station we even met yet another two couchsurfers who'd be on the same bus, so we prepared ourselves for a night on the road, when.....we found out that we didn't have the right tickets. for some reason this last bus of the day was of another branch from the same bus company and our tickets weren't valid. besides that, the bus was full and....shit!!! but, uff, we were a little bit lucky at least and still managed to get into the bus. don't ask me how, but the macedonian from the information office at the bus station organized us even two adjoined seats in the bus and we arrived back in sofia at 6 am on monday morning (local time -- there is one hour time difference between macedonia and bulgaria). we had an awful night in an uncomfortable bus full of people (one hour waiting at the border in the middle of it), but at least we arrived back home safely. and i even had another two hours that i could sleep before getting up again and ready to go to my "job".

oh, yeah, that's actually, something else i still haven't written about. i managed to get an internship at CMS Reich-Rohrwig Hainz, the austrian branch of a big international law firm, which has a small office in sofia. i had an interview last wednesday and could start right away. "whenever i have time" i am there, i have my own key card, my own space in the office with computer and everything else i could need and within the next days i should even have my own email address :-P i am even supposed to get paid, but i haven't found out how much that will actually be. anyway, i am happy to have the place, cause it is something else to do besides visiting the few classes i have here. the people there all speak good german except for two or three who "only" speak english. they're all bulgarian lawyers but half of them have studied in either austria or germany. and they are really nice! i really enjoy going there so much that i don't even mind to have a quite stressful week: 9'30-13 h at CMS and 14-20 h class (this week i have an intensive course in commercial law). instead, i plan on going there the whole thursday when i don't have classes because of some kind of educational holiday.
yep, as you can see, i keep myself busy - but only in a positive way ! and i really love being here :D

Kleine Bäume, grüne Steine

ja, es gibt mal wieder was neues zu erzählen. und soooooooo viele atemberaubende fotos, die ich leider ned alle hier hochladen kann. ich war letztes wochenende nämlich im rila nationalpark. zusammen mit rozi (die bulgarin, die uns bei der wohnungssuche so geholfen hat) und meiner mitbewohnerin amélie bin ich am samstag einer umweltschutzorganisation nach rila gefolgt. dort wird nämlich ein neues skiresort geplant und schon mit dem bau begonnen, obwohl die nötigen genehmigungen natürlich fehlen. protestierender weise haben wir also ein paar kleine bäumchen dorthin gepflanzt, wo die unterste station des skilifts schon gebaut wird, obwohl doch da eigentlich bäume hingehören. tja, sieben kleine bäumchen sind's geworden und ich bin mal gespannt, wie lange diese dort noch bleiben dürfen. anschließend an die aktion sind wir drei in begleitung mit noch ein paar anderen der protestierenden im schlepptau auf den berg hinaufgestiegen. es war ein langer weg nach oben, was jedoch hauptsächlich an unserer arg langsamen fortbewegung lag. trotzdem haben wir es bis zu der allerhöchsten berghütte/herberge hinaufgeschafft, wo wir dann auch die nacht verbracht haben. oh, es war ja soooooooooo kalt dort oben. die letze stunde unseres aufwegs wurden wir dann auch noch schön von schneeregen berieselt und....ach, ich hasse kälte, ich hasse schnee und nass und überhaupt, aber trotzdem: ich bereue keinen schritt, denen ich dieser atemberaubenden umgebung getan habe! in den fotos ist das leider nur schwer zu erkennen, aber die steine sind tatsächlich günlich-türkis!
die berghütte, in der wir übernachtet haben wird von einer alten bulgarin geführt, von der ich leider kein foto gemacht hab, dabei sah sie so niedlich aus mit ihren spängchen in den haaren. sie hat uns am nächsten morgen auch zu sich in das einzig wirklich warme zimmer eingeladen und von ihrem frühstück gegeben: haferbrei *grins*
ach, ich könnte so viel erzählen, aber worte beschreiben das alles eh nur schlecht. unser abstieg ging etwas schneller. innerhalb von drei stunden waren wir wieder dort, wo wir die bäumchen gepflanzt hatten und von dort mussten wir nur noch wieder nach sofia gelangen. leichter gesagt als getan. in dieser abgelegenen berggegend ist selten viel los und bei schlechtem wetter noch weniger. wir mussten mehrere kilometer laufen, bevor uns ein paar nette bulgaren mit in ihr auto gequetscht haben und in den nächsten größeren ort gefahren haben. dort sind wir zum ortsausgang gewandert und sind zurück nach sofia getrampt. wir waren nach weniger als 15 minuten erfolgreich und wurden bis nach studentski grad mitgenommen. dann ab in den bus und um 19 h am sonntag abend waren wir wieder zu hause. puh! ein langer tag. ein langes wochenende! aber vorbei war es damit noch nicht, aber dazu.....vielleicht ein anderes mal!


and now in english: "small trees, green stones"

so, once again only a short version for the non-german speakers. last weekend i spent in the national park "rila". together with rozi (the bulgarian girl, who helped us find the flat) and my house mate amélie i followed a small environmental organization to the national park, where we planted a few trees in order to protest agains the construction of a ski resort in the area of the national park. afterwards, some of us climbed the mountain, while the rest of the group drove back to sofia. rozi, amélie and i spent a wonderful though awfully cold time in the mountains. we hiked up to "the seventh lake hut", where we stayed for the night. on sunday, we got up quite early, had breakfast with the old lady, who kept the hut (and attended to the guests whenever there were some) and then started our way back down. actually, we arrived back at the place where we had planted the trees a lot faster than we had thought. the next problem, though, was to get back to sofia. we hitchhiked, but of course, in the mountains there aren't too many cars around, so we had to walk quite a few kilometers before somebody took us into their car and brought us to the next bigger town, where we soon became lucky and got a ride back to sofia. after this last weekend, i can't wait to get out of sofia again - maybe already next weekend - and discover more of the beautiful country side! words can hardly describe this beauty and the pictures don't even show half of the amazing nature that i have seen. but you'll at least get an idea...

Hot Water and Internet

wow, everything seems to be happening at the same time. last saturday, two french girls (amélie and stéphanie) moved into our new apartment in the city center, less than 10 minutes away from the university. it's really a nice place, furnished and with everything we'll need to feel at home for the next months....everything...well, after we'd moved in we had to learn that there were some kind of reconstructions going on for 10 days and so we wouldn't have any warm water. sh*t! i had so wanted to take a nice and hot shower the first morning in our new home, but.... oh well, no hot water until today. i can't believe that they would be doing such kind of reconstructions exactly when it's about to become winter and then not only for 2 or 3
days, but even 10!!! ha, now, finally we do have hot water and at the same day, our internet provider has opened our access to the www as well. how great! and as if this weren't enough good news already, our central heating also started working this morning. yeah! now, we are cozy and warm at home. we're only still lacking some nice decoration and a few covers to hide our
ugly couch and armchairs. but there's no hurry, we've only just settled in, after all.

Plovdiv und mehr

PLOVDIV

rock city - zweitgrößte Stadt Bulgariens - sonnig, schön, entspannt - 2 1/2 Stunden Zugfahrt von Sofia - am 29./30. September - mit Jamie, John und Arnaud - tolle Innenstadt, mit teilweise westlichem Flair (soll nicht heißen, dass Osteuropa nicht auch tollen Flair haben kann) - leckeres Eis nicht unter 300 gr in einer Waffel, geniale Falafel für unter 80 cent - angenehme Unterkunft in Jugendherberge - lange Spaziergänge durch die Altstadt - Amphietheater, Pflastersteinstraßen, grüne Parks, viele Statuen (Bronze. Poeten? Philosophen?) - Antiquariate fast schon wie Museen - Tourireisegruppen aus Kanada und Griechenland - Fußgängerzonen und Pflastersteinsträßchen - McDonalds in Kyrillisch - mein erster Restaurantbesuch in Bulgarien (hier werden die Portionen in Gramm angegeben) - viele Hügel, langer Fluss, nette Menschen, schöne Häuser und hässliche Häuser - viele Häuser von berühmten (?) bzw. historisch anscheinend wichtigen Persönlichkeiten (beschildert und teilweise sogar zu besichtigen) - nachts nicht viel los im Zentrum, tagsüber mehr: trotzdem Beschäftigung durch Kartenspielen - zurück zu Hause, ab ins Bett.