Tag: Bulgaria
dear john – no trespassing
Dear John. I arrived at the rescue house last night and it was full of girls, like me. Some older. Some younger. But, all of them wear the 'for sale' sign in their eyes. We don't shed our price tags easily. You never asked me how old I am. 15. Do you remember 15? [...]
balkan beauty
Amidst the goodnight chatter of JJ and Emma preparing for bed, the teeth brushing and the hugs, and the last minutes of coloring a picture crayon red, I post a photo of Sara and I smiling in the Zagreb sunshine. Jay writes 'Balkan beauties' in the tag line and my heart swells likes the bread [...]
Sunday unplugged
Tonight, the world shares our doorstep. Argentina, France, the Czek Republic, Bulgaria, Romania - they sing and dance and for a moment forget that wars rage, and people die, and bills plague. They have come to watch the World play futball on a tiny screen on a big planet, but this corner of Razgrad has [...]
the church must dance
Lazarus danced a jig. Well, he did. Sometimes our scripture imagination becomes a myopia of what we see on the written page and we can begin to think that the entirety of Jesus' life were the bullet points we find in the Gospels. Now, they are the authoritative version, verified by ancient counsels of Godly [...]
lazarus dancing
All of us want to see Lazarus dancing. On June 14, our family begins a journey that will last until August. We will be continuously on the road : from our home in Budapest to Romania to Bulgaria to Moldova to Poland, to Denmark, back to Hungary, back to Bulgaria, and then home to [...]
a face in the trash
It was Christmas morning 2000 and the apartment was quickly filling with people. There were gifts under the tree, two sweet toddler cherubs waiting for the big event, tummy tickling aromas coming from the oven, snow picturesquely falling in a gentle haze. All was as it should be. And, I? I was half submerged in [...]
a matter of shoes
Her screams tore through the night pulling us from the peace of our dreams and like dominoes down a corridor, blurry eyes peered around doors to encounter a woman deposited in the middle of the hotel’s corridor, like someone’s bag of trash. She glared back at us from a defiantly misplaced heap. “What is [...]
no tourists please
Paradox: I am a tourist in a city where I live. Today with camera attached to my arm, I have chosen to drink coffee on Vaci Utca with other tourists. Snapping photos, gazing at the 18th century architectural wonders, dodging baby carriages, and sniffing forbidden Hungarian spiced wine, I am blending. The city with its [...]
turkish toilets
I have heard it recently related that the wife of an important person was hesitant to visit our part of Europe where the toilets may be Turkishly challenging and life is a little raw. She preferred the westernly ordered, pristine shopping boulevards of our European neighborhood. I have to smile at her loss as I [...]
teanna sunberg 