Autumn In Bulgaria: September. 15, 1998 - February 15, 1999

Year 2002, Issue: 15, 33 - 40, 01.04.2002

Kenneth Rosen

Abstract

Having taught forty years at a minor state university constantly reinventing itself from affable mediocrity and teachers’ college-hood in a rural state with a similarly mediocre though less and less benign tradition of crony-hood and ragged administrative improvisation, I found the arrangements made by CIES in Washington, D.C., for my overseas orientation, and that of the Fulbright Commission in Bulgaria for on-site orientation and general support, irreproachable. I would describe myself as cheerful and strenuously easy to please. More eager to make the acquaintance of people and of my thoughts than of places, in Washington I left the Loew’s Lafayette Plaza Hotel that Fulbright had so presciently commandeered only once: the hotel had restaurants with large portions, a friendly and intrepid staff, an adequate exercise room and a rooftop swimming pool where informal tribes of children splashed and played under the languid, oblique observation of lovely mothers needlessly adding the sun’s cosmetic solace to their lithe beauty, protected from intrusively extended gazes by oversized husbands whose thickness of neck was accented by thin golden chains, their menacing mobile-phones, in those days still a novelty, nearby and ready to ring or be rung. I had visited Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, several times about a year ago. I could have blinked my eyes and persuaded myself that CIES orientation had already transported me, by magical carpet, from America’s capitol to Bulgaria itself, where Europe and Turkish Asia enjoy mutual interpenetrating territorial salients.

Keywords

Bulgaria, Autumn, February