Commencement of 2012

This post should have been written a month ago! Due to the fact that we havent posted in a while…this post will, once again, be super long! And once again I apologize.

Our Bulgarian New Years. We met the new year up in the mountains, Vitosha Mountain, with a group of very wonderful people. We really enjoyed our time. It was very cold and there was so much snow!!! It was sort of a retreat for all the youth in the church's association. So half of the people were new to us. They were so friendly and accepting of new people though. We're really happy to have met new people and made new friends. Even though we will most likely only see each other on facebook. The weekend was filled with speakers and games and playing in the snow. AND very many fireworks, some of which we couldn’t see because they went off higher than the fog so it just lit up the sky in different colors. Still cool. Mike was very excited about the fireworks, particularly ones that are illegal in the states.

The last few weeks we did quite a bit of resting. Its been really cold and the church's missions have kind of slowed down a little. The orphanage trips were on hold due to the holidays, and there havent been any random projects assigned to us like in December. So we have been sleeping in.:) We hang out on the internet…I look up recipes and experiment in the kitchen, read up on health and nutrition, find new exercises for us to do on those days when we're indoors all day. (mike refuses to do pilates with me) Mike does a lot of reading; History, theology, news, sports. He's been playing with some video editing software he downloaded.  Just trying to keep busy. We should have used all that time to study Bulgarian. We did some of that but not enough. Its been really great to have so much time to just read and talk to each other. We spend every single minute of the day together…J that of course comes with its difficulties. Its really good for us though. Last week we had our first Bulgarian lesson. A lady from the church will give us weekly lessons. Sweet sweet lady! I plan to study really hard and make Mike do the same!

We have a personal tour guide, Yavor! He's taken us on a tour of the city and to a few museums. We did a historical tour of Sofia and also a modern one. I liked both but the modern one was a little more fun. There are very many interesting places here. Like this place called "the apartment". Its an apartment converted into a really neat hang out. Every room is decorated differently and in a very unique style. Kind of equivalent to what a hipster coffee shop would be but its not so focused on coffee. They have food and smoothies and sweets. They show movies every week or so. And the best part…all the workers I've met speak very good english! Anyway, that is my favorite but there were a lot that Yavor showed us. Vegan restaurants and cool looking music venues were among them. There is a lot to do you just have to know where to go. These unique places arent  very well advertized and I think its on purpose. But luckily for us Yavor knows!!

We've also been trying to deal with Mike's Hungarian citizenship stuff. Now that he's been officially accepted he needs to go do the swearing in. He got an appointment date to do the swear in…it was for a few days ago…in LA! He couldn’t really be there so he's been talking to all these different consulate offices and trying to figure out the best/cheapest/easiest/fastest option. He had to send a written request to LA to change the location. LA office will send his file to the Hungarian embassy in Sofia and he will swear in here if all goes well.  We don’t know what the deal is with me yet though. I need some sort of documentation that will let me stay here as well. What we were told when Mike started the process is that I get membership the EU. Well we discovered that is not the case. It looks like I'll need to apply for a spousal visa. I may have to apply for different visas for different countries which would require me to have documents that are back home. Its all very complicated and confusing. I hope we can figure it out soon so that I can stop worrying. Our allotted 90 days in Bulgaria is coming up really soon and we were hoping to have all the paperwork that allowed us to stay in order. I'm sure it'll be ok though. J

We were in Venice this past weekend!!! But I will post about that another day.