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.

Tear 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 ever