This isn't a story that starts with me daydreaming about St George slaying dragons or girls dancing the horo. This story doesn't start with a rising lump in my throat the first time I drove in from the Sofia airport in a Lada with all four windows down my new 70-something landlords jabbering at me in a language I didn't understand. Although this is a part of it. This story doesn't start with the fall of the Berlin Wall although this particular moment in history is fundamental to it.

No, this story starts with disappointment.

I turned 21 in the middle of May. I'd just finished taking junior year final exams. I was happy but exhausted. Many of my friends were going to Germany for the summer to study but I was going home to work. Realistically, I had no money for travel let alone for college. They went to practice their German, to eat nutella and ritter sport chocolate, to discover curry wurst, and to make friends with the Turkish donner kabob stand guy in German. Although they didn't know this at the time.

I went home to work, tired but happy, with a little bit of a sore throat. I figured it was the stress of finals and the copious amounts of alcohol I'd consumed over the course of a number of days celebrating my birthday. Only instead of getting better, it got worse. Then one afternoon instead of being given another round of antibiotics, I was being carted to the hospital for an emergency tonsillectomy.

Tears came. My mom told me: Don't worry. There's nothing to worry about the surgery. You'll be fine. It's routine. I managed to sputter out a response: It's not that. I have the two best summer jobs I've ever had and it's going to take me three weeks to recover. That's why I'm crying.

I went back to university in the fall tonsil-less and with a new determination to spend a year in German after graduation. Before class, I listened jealously to my friends rehash and relive stories about their hijinks in Germany and then I returned to my dorm room to work tirelessly on my Fulbright application.

The Fulbright application is a two step process. The first stage is that the university sends your application forward to a committee to which reads all of the applications and this committee selects a certain number to be forwarded to the host country. Most applications get cut at this stage of the process. The second step is that the host country reads applications and selects scholars, alternates and then they reject the other applicants.

In the winter, amid the hustle and bustle of senior year, I learned my application had been forwarded to country. My German professor told me then that no applicant from our university had ever been forwarded to country and not ultimately won a Fulbright. At this point, in my mind, it was settled. Germany after graduation.

Of course, many times things have a way of failing to work out the way we planned. This was one of them. Late in April right before graduation, I received a second letter from the Fulbright. I'd been named an alternate. An alternate. I was crushed.