Part 30: Natural Diasters May 22, 2012

Yesterday, I was thinking about how nice it was that I don’t have to worry about tornadoes this spring.  Living my entire life previous to now in Tornado Alley, gave me a higher than average exposure to the storms.  In fact, based on this list I found, I have lived in the states ranked 2^nd, 6^th, and 10^th for sheer tornado numbers. 

Tornadoes have the highest winds of any storms, some (guess where these happen) can have winds of over 300 miles per hour.  Luckily, the Midwest has sirens to warn us when they are coming and “committed weathermen” who literally get 2 full hours of TV time whenever one is spotted (I can’t help but think a tornado outbreak to them is like Christmas morning- not that it isn’t important information ). 

Over the years, I been in several basements, hallways, and closets waiting for the storm to pass, and while tornadoes can certainly kill you and/or flatten the building (or town ) you are in, I know what to do in a tornado and have become accustomed to dealing with it. 

However, last night at 3 am, I encountered my new natural disaster:  earthquakes.  I once met a guy from California when taking the train back to Iowa on a gloomy day in April, and he asked me when tornado season was.  I said, “Now,” and he looked completely panicked.  Then he figured I’d react in a similar fashion to earthquakes.  Turns out, he was right.

I was dreaming and then all of a sudden I was awake and very disoriented as my bed was moving around… a lot.  It was really disconcerting.  While I stayed in my bed (which as it turns out is the recommended course of action if nothing will fall on your head), my roommate apparently bolted down the stairs and stood in the bathroom door jam, although she insisted that she was concerned for my personal safety. 

It didn’t last that long, but I had such an adrenaline rush from being jolted awake that I could not go back to sleep.  It didn’t help that I was also thinking about the construction of my house (from 1929) because brick, apparently, is not good for earthquakes.  I took some solace in the fact that, since the house is over 80 years old, it has probably survived many of these. 

By 5 am, I gave up on sleeping and just graded some papers.  Then, at 6:30, I went for my morning run and was leered at and got kisses blown to me (lucky me) by some idiot in a car.  Gross. 

According to Bulgaria, it had a magnitude of 5.8.  Turkey claims 6.4, but I doubt it, seeing as how the most damage it did to our house was slant all of our pictures.  Luckily, no one was seriously injured (according to the news, most people were admitted to the hospital for blood pressure problems due to the stress) and most everything is still standing.   This is especially good since the 6.0 earthquake in Italy a couple of days ago had a much worse outcome, probably, based on my limited knowledge of earthquakes, because Italy’s quake occurred nearer to the surface than ours (5 km vs. 9.4 km). 

Part 29: Belogradchik May 19-20, 2012

On Friday we didn’t have students, but we had to go to graduation.  Longest graduation for 120 some-odd people that I have ever sat through.  It was almost as long as SME’s graduations that graduate nearly 500 kids.  Plus, since I only teach 11^th grade, I didn’t even know any of the kids.  I was a nice ceremony, but I wasn’t that invested since I have no personal connection to any senior.  Next year, I’ll know them all, so that should make it better.  Dimitar Berbatov, a Bulgarian player for Manchester United was the keynote speaker.  Of course, he spoke in Bulgarian, so I didn’t really get anything out of it, but he seemed to really win the crowd over and the kids were all really excited that he was coming. 

After graduation, we began our 3 day weekend!  S, A, and I rented a car and heady out of Sofia towards Belogradchik.   We took a rather windy mountain road on the way there that was fine, but gave me a headache from the back seat.  Although the scenery was great, we decided to take the main highway home.  A couple of hours late we were in Montana (no not that Montana, this Montana) and an hour later, we began seeing the first of the amazing rock formations that Belogradchik is famous for.

Challenge #1:  Figure out how to get to our hotel.  Our hotel was on a one-way street, so even though we found the street, we couldn’t go down it.  Challenge met:  We sent down a partially dirt, super steep hill that we’re not entirely sure we were supposed to drive on, to get there.  Hotel Madonna was really cute and had the most powerfully flushing toilet I have ever encountered.  If you didn’t put the lid down, it would splash out onto the floor (ewww). 

Challenge #2:  Find Belogradchik Fortress.  This wasn’t that big of a challenge as it had pretty good signs, but at one point we were confused.  However, a car we let passed us was honking and had every single person inside pointing up a road giving us directions.  Apparently, it’s a small enough town that it’s easy to spot the confused tourists. 

The Belogradhcik Fortress was first constructed in Roman times.  Only one side of the fortress had to be constructed as the 230 ft high rocks protect the back side naturally.  It was initially built for surveillance and not defense, but in the 14^th century it was fortified and became an important stronghold.  The Ottomans captured the fortress in 1396 and expanded it.  It was last used in war during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. 

The fortress is mostly cool because of the giant rocks that make up the entire back side.  These red sandstone rocks are found all around Belogradchik and are really impressive.  Plus, they have many stories associated with the shapes of the rocks (Wikipedia has a couple of stories at the bottom of this page)  After you enter the first gate of the fortress, you walk through a giant walled courtyard before passing through a second gate to stairs that lead up to the rocks. 

The thing about Bulgaria (and Europe in general, since they are less law-suit happy than Americans) is that you can go right up to the edge of these giant rocks (not that I’d recommend it).  You can climb and explore an area that in the US would be roped off and restricted.  It was great.  Other than when S almost couldn’t make it back over from a rock she had climbed onto.  From these giant rocks you can see mountains, the town, other giant rocks, and tons of cute little lizards!  J   

After we finished up at the fortress we hiked a trail that went all the way around the back of the fortress and the rocks.  We saw an old outdoor theatre and managed to eventually make it back to downtown Belogradchik, which is not where our car was.  So, we then hiked back up a set of stairs to the fortress parking lot.  We drove back to our hotel and then headed down to the restaurant for dinner. 

We ate a lot.  We also played UNO.  I got progressively colder as the night went on, but that didn’t stop me from getting ice cream.  I just put my jacket hood up and powered through. 

Challenge #3:  Find Magura Cave.  The next morning, we wanted out to visit Magura Cave.  There are signs pointing the way out of Belogradchik, but you drive and you drive and you drive and you drive a long way before you see a second sign.  This always leads me to believe I’ve made a wrong turn, but eventually we found it and climbed up the hill to the entrance. 

Magura Cave is 2.5 km long and supposedly has Neolithic cave paintings, although we didn’t see them.  Of course, we didn’t take the guided tour since it was in Bulgarian and my Bulgarian currently enables me to understand about 1 word per sentence, sometimes 2.  However, I could still appreciate that the cave was gigantic!  The ceilings were so high and it was really impressive and wet, which brings me to…

Challenge #4:  Do not fall on butt inside cave.  The path through the cave was made of some sort of limestone rocks as were the steps and since it is a cave, they were wet and slick!  We made extensive use of the handrails and walked like we were extremely old ladies and managed to escape injury.

The cave also had bats.  A told me she did a project on bats in the 4^th grade.  I asked her what she could tell us about them.  She said that she did a project on them in the 4^th grade. 

We emerged from the cave and could overlook Bulgaria’s largest inland lake, Lake Rabisha.  We then walked back to our car, which took awhile (remember the cave is 2.5 km long) and then headed back to Sofia.  We only had to stop one lady that was out walking for directions.  She instantly said, “Sofia?” and pointed us in the right direction.  Once again, apparently it is easy to spot tourists in that area (ok, and we were American, so that might have given us away as well). 

We made it back and had Monday to relax before school on Tuesday.