Skiing and Singing
This past weekend was yet another trip to Borovetz to ski. We left Saturday morning at 7:30am and skied all day – from 9:30am until the lifts closed at 4:30pm. I lost count, but since there were relatively few people skiing (and no lift lines anywhere) I got in at least 20 runs. By the end my legs were so tired I could barely keep my skis straight. However, I only had an hour or so to relax when I got home because Saturday evening was a jam session with my coworkers hosted the my company director’s house.
My director’s house is in Dragalevski which is one of the neighborhoods “on the mountain” (Vitosha mountain is on one side of Sofia and several neighborhoods are on the side of it). The houses “on the mountain” are for the most part pretty exclusive. Most diplomats and ambassadors live in one of the three neighborhoods on the mountain. However, the infrastructure doesn’t really fit the house quality. The only way to get to my directors house, for example, is to drive down a small dirt alley. The houses on each side of the alley are small mansions (in fact, an ambassador lives next door to my director), but the alley is crap. Many of the houses on the mountain are located down crappy little dirt roads that turn to mud pits in the rain and are nearly inaccessible in the snow.
Anyway, back to the jam session. The session consisted of about 12 people. Three of us brought our guitars and one of the guys brought an assortment of hand-held percussion instruments. The real highlight of the jam session was a guy named Vlado who is friends with one of my coworkers. Vlado has a lot of energy. Vlado also knows a lot of songs, but only the chorus and maybe one verse from any of them. This does not stop or even slow Vlado down. He knows a song should be about 3-4 minutes so he will sing the chorus and the one verse over and over again until he is satisfied the song has gone on long enough. Before anyone has a chance to suggest or even start another song Vlado has already started playing his next song. However, since there was plenty of alcohol to drink no one seemed to mind singing one verse over an over. Eventually Vlado slowed down a bit and Nasco and I were able to squeeze in some songs.
The night finally ended around 3:30am. After a full day of skiing and a full night of partying I slept very well for a good 10 hours that night.
