Here's a run down of my on-going pursuit of Bulgarian:
<ol>
	<li>I track down a Bulgarian to teach me some basic Bulgarian in Washington DC. As luck would have it D. is one of the nicest people that I know and she graduated from ACS--where I now teach. She taught me my numbers, the alphabet, some basic verbs, food/drink nouns and convinced me that I was not in fact crazy to move to Bulgaria. That last part might not have been true but I've found everything else very, very helpful.</li>
	<li>Through the Fulbright I end up taking a four week (or maybe it was only three week) course for beginners at ИЧС--a language school which is part of Sofia University. I buy a very expensive text book and learn how to conjugate some verbs, tell people where I am from, what kind of work I do and I label all of the things in my apartment in the hopes of learning some new nouns. I earn a 6 in the course. That I'll have you know is the highest grade one can earn in Bulgaria! Only everyone in my class was given a copy of the test the day before the actual exam. We just weren't supposed to write on it. The next day surprise, surprise I knew everything on the test. I would have anyway.</li>
	<li>The rest of my first year in Bulgaria on the Fulbright, I studied a little Bulgarian willy-nilly and picked-up things that I needed for everyday life. I wasn't convinced at that point that I would be able to stay any longer than my Fulbright year so I didn't push myself to learn the language.</li>
	<li>However when I found out that I'd gotten a job at ACS and that I'd be in Bulgaria for a second year, I thought: I've got to really try to learn this language. I committed myself to this goal on my blog and that's how I found my tutor Ivet!! This was a very lucky moment indeed.</li>
	<li>At school I have two 40-minute Bulgarian lessons a week with a Bulgarian named Lora. She teaches all of the foreigners Bulgarian. I've been working pretty steadily through a Bulgarian text book with her. I am in chapter 14 right now. Probably next month I'll have to buy the second book in the series. But many of our lessons these days are just conversations now. That's pretty great.</li>
	<li>I also have two student tutors at school. I see each of them once a week for 40 minutes. They are really funny. I especially like when they tell me Bulgarian is hard.</li>
	<li>These days I also try to speak as much Bulgarian as I can. This tends to be easier said than done. I have the same conversation with the woman who cleans my classroom everyday, the woman who works in the snack-line, the woman who makes photocopies on campus and the campus guards. But I don't speak Bulgarian to my students which is the right thing to do considering the fact that I'm their English teacher but it cuts down on the sheer number of people that I can practice with.</li>
</ol>
In these pursuits I've learned a few things.
<ol>
	<li>I am shy when it comes to speaking Bulgarian. I am not very confident and really I hate making mistakes.</li>
	<li>Most Bulgarian text books are laughably bad. I guess that's because the market isn't very big.</li>
	<li>When you're blond and speak some Bulgarian you can really surprise people.</li>
	<li>It's often difficult to make people speak Bulgarian to you who speak better English than you speak Bulgarian.</li>
	<li>I kind of dislike it when Bulgarians tell me my accent is cute but at the same time I kind of like it.</li>
	<li>Always let your students think that you know more Bulgarian than you actually do.  And surprise them with this knowledge.</li>
</ol>