last night in our little town of ceptemvri- there were a lot of reasons to celebrate!

On wednesday, our community project, planting trees near the obshtina (local gov. building...think: the mayor works here), was a huge success! we had a lot of area youth present and they were laughing and joking around, so we're sort of assuming they had a good time!

Friday marked the first of the last for Pre-Service training for myself and my fellow volunteers. By 2pm on friday (while most of you were still fast asleep) we had to take our LPI, or, language proficiency interview! thankfully, we all made it out alive! it was quite a bit tougher than what we thought it was be. For example, I was asked to explain living on a cattle ranch in some other capacity than "working, eating and sleeping." Peace corps just doesn't understand that there's really nothing more to it than that... ;) but I guess I got easy because one of my sitemates had to talk about the conflict in northern ireland after she innocently mentioned that she had traveled to Ireland while she attended college. whoops!:) I think Peace corps definately had different agendas for this language test and the "optional" one we took during the midpoint of our training. After the first test, some of us walked away smiling, congratulating ourselves for our mastery of the language at the novice level. This time, however, the goal was apparently "scare" us into learning more langauge. At this point, most of us have sufficient "survival skills" in bulgarian, meaning that we can pay bills, eat at restaurants, buy food and stamps, find out when there are trains, talk about our families, why we joined peace corps, what kind of jobs we've had, and what kind of food we like! so espeically for those of us who live in bigger cities, its believable that someone, somewhere would decide that they speak the langauge pretty well, and they would decide to stop learning bulgarian. Thus, peace corps instills fear in the hearts of we "almost- volunteers-but- not- quite -yet!" so that we continue to study bulgarian. charming, isn't it?? but yeah, its safe to say that I passed the language exam, and even though I didn't pre-plan and memorize the kinds of conversations i wanted to have (like some trainees...), I think I scored pretty well!!

Also, this thursday was our teacher's husband's birthday! as per the tradition in BG, the person with birthday treats their friends to dinner and candy, and this was certainly no exception!! we had a wonderful dinner of lamb with rice and tomato salad- not to mention plenty of wine, champagne, and even a cigars ( i mean...of course I didn't have one...). all in all, we had a HUGE week and we're all SO glad that its over with! hooray!