This is all that I am taking with me when I move to Sofia: two suitcases, a carry-on and my backpack.  It means that I am frantically downsizing my life and the things that I can't bear to give away I am sending home to my parents.  They should expect a couple of US Postal Service flat rate boxes and two more boxes of books (thank-god for these two mailing options especially the mass media rate which makes shipping my favorite books home affordable).  What's not affordable however is shipping things to Bulgaria because they charge 25% of the value of the contents. So I am taking only what I can wheel and carry.

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I am however soliciting suggestions and advice for this big move.  What follows is a list I've put together from friends and family.  Really though I've just cut and pasted from their emails.  Some are suggestions for what I should bring with me and some are what others wished they'd had when living abroad and you'll quickly see that some of the suggestions are serious and some are plain funny but for the most part they all seem spot on. Oh yeah and MacGyver watch out for me --I am clearly going to be a force to be reckoned with in Bulgaria.  After making the list, I decided to add my commentary as necessary this can be found in the parenthesis.
<ul>
	<li>pack more warm clothes than you think you need (too bad I seem to own only one wool sweater these days in the easiest to care for of colors: cream.  I know what I am going to be buying come October).</li>
	<li>refried beans (yes this was the sole suggestions of one of my friends and yes it was a male who gave me this advice.  I don't think I am going to weigh my suitcase down with cans of refried beans.  I may try to eat so many before I leave that I get sick of them for an entire year.  But, this may be a bad plan so I'd like to apologize in advance to my roommates).</li>
	<li>peanut butter, Oreos, Bisquick and maple syrup (Sure! nothing says America quite like these items.  I may miss peanut butter to start with but I am going to make up for it by eating lots of <a title="Nutella" href="http://www.nutellausa.com/" target="_blank">Nutella</a>. You can also look up the delicious Nutella fact of the month at this site but even better is the Nutella locater.  Wow the closest Nutella to me right now is on Corcoran St NW!).</li>
	<li>ziplock bags (These showed up on a lot of different lists.  Luckily the group house I live in just made a trip to Costco so I am probably packing the entire case we bought--that works out to something like two bags a day for the entire year.  Now that's some good consumerism.)</li>
	<li><span style="color:#000000;">silicone brush for spreading oil (or I could just use my fingers).
</span></li>
	<li><span style="color:#000000;"> bring a copy of your computer's installation cds or whatever you use to fix it if it crashes (This is great advice and the cds are in my to pack pile as I write this.)
</span></li>
	<li><span style="color:#000000;">little packs of tissue (This is important because it can double as toilet paper because apparently TP doesn't exist the same way in Eastern Europe as the US.)
</span></li>
	<li><span>bring</span> a roll or two of duct tape (I am not really sure what this is for but it seems very insightful and I probably don't want to imagine the situation that made one my friends suggest this. And  I do know that duct tape can fix <em>anything </em>so I'll give it go.)</li>
	<li><span style="color:#000000;">Sudafed, the real thing, though, you can't buy it any where in Russia because of the whole
speed thing (However, this is also now true in the US as well...gerr... illegal drugs being made with over the counter cold medicine...gerr...  So I guess this means that we are all going to be sick and under-medicated now; it's a shame really).
</span></li>
	<li><span style="color:#000000;">BRING GOOD HAIR RUBBER BANDS. it's hard (nearly impossible) to find anything but scrunchies here (Check.  Even though I do love a good scrunchy).</span></li>
	<li><span style="color:#000000;">anti-diarrhea medicine (Absolutely. I know no where near enough Bulgarian to want to try to track down this in my first few days in Sofia.)</span></li>
</ul>
So that's it.  These are the greatest "to pack" hits.  I hope that once you've read this post if you have thought of anything else I should take with me that you'll add via the comment function.  And thanks in advance for this.  All I do these days is make list after list and I am beginning to think that I am going to leave something really important off of it.  Rest assured everyone tells me that I'll be able to get whatever I need in Sofia but what if they don't have <a title="Orange Tic-Tacs" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic_Tacs" target="_blank">orange tic-tacs</a>!?!