First, thing first.

Happy Birthday dAd!

Also, thanks for being born in 1950--it makes it a lot easier for me to do the math and figure out that you're 59 today.  Wosa.  59.  dAd, you realize that you're a year away from 60 now (and that makes me a year-plus away from being 30)?!? Hope that you're having a great day and that MoM's chocolate birthday cake is delicious.

Anyhow, back to life in Sofia.  Somehow, it's turned into a beautiful day in Sofia. I woke up and it was rather gray and I was wondering which one of my new sweaters I should wear.  Now the sun is out and there's not a cloud in the sky.  It's blue, blue, blue.  I couldn't be happier.

I've been cleaning my apartment, I've washed some clothes, I am in the process of cleaning my bathroom and then I've got to mop my kitchen/dinning room/living room.  The floor is all tile which makes it easy as can be.  I guess that I'll just hang out in my bedroom as the floor dries.

Really it's been a great morning and it's barely 11am.  <!--more-->

I've done some Bulgarian exercises and worked on learning some new worlds.  The one other thing I've got to do at some point is to mark some papers but other than this I am just relaxing and enjoying the cool but sunny weather.  It's a wonderful change from the oppressive heat and the cloudy-dreary gray weather that we've had this last month.  It makes me think that fall is around the corner--or maybe, gasp, here.

I am having some friends over tonight to see my new apartment and to do some wine tasting.  For ages, I've been meaning to get my friends together and to make them taste Bulgarian wine--sight unseen--and to rank it.  First of all I am doing this because it seems like a really fun thing to do and second because I like to drink wine and I think it's a great way to learn more about Bulgarian wine.

I think that some good wine, at great prices, is being made in Bulgaria but I honestly know very, very little about it.  So, I am giving it a go tonight.  Little do my friends know that their opinions on the wine are going be featured on my blog later this week.  (Okay, I guess that if they are actively reading my blog they'll know now but for most of them I think they are coming because they don't have much else to do on the Monday night of our extra-long weekend. )

At this point, I've done a little bit of research on Bulgarian wine--but it's not really it's not so easy to find good information on the wines in the country.  I assume that if I actually spoke Bulgarian it would be a little bit easier but then again this whole adventure-experiment would be.

Here's what I learned.  Bulgaria has five main wine growing regions.
<ol>
	<li>The Valley of the Roses</li>
	<li>The Thracian Valley</li>
	<li>The Struma River Valley</li>
	<li>The Danube River</li>
	<li>The Black Sea/Coastal region</li>
</ol>
Yes, I realize that these five regions more or less cover the whole country.  Apparently grapes will grow almost anywhere in Bulgaria.  Maybe this shouldn't come as a surprise to me--it is said that Dionysus is from Bulgaria.  I just tried to confirm this "fact" on wikipedia and was unable to do so.  Anyhow, we've got plenty of land to grow grapes on and to make wine from so I can only imagine that we're going to have fun tonight!