12-21-07 Employment

My job search has ended relatively quickly. I've been offered and accepted a position with an environmental consulting firm called ENSR, and I'm excited to start working. I begin January 8th. Environmental consulting is an amorphous field, and I'll be working on a variety of projects. Environmental impact statements and assessments, pre-construction planning, pollution reduction, and various compliance and permitting work. The job is in Long Beach, CA, which is only about 45 minutes from my parents house in Whittier. Long Beach is the 35th biggest city in America, according to the Wikipedia. Now I just have to find a place to live and buy a car, and I'll be all set.

The job search process was tedious and a test of patience and self-confidence. I sent out plenty of resumes for jobs that I KNOW I was qualified for, and never heard a thing in reply. If there's anything I learned in the Peace Corps, though, it was to work hard, but relax and trust that things will work themselves out for the best. This seems to have come true, as it always does.

Christmas in California

I took this picture the other day in the Orange County coastal city of Laguna Beach. Note the Christmas lights and wreath. This is how people decorate in this sunny, hot, and surreal corner of the world.

12-12-07 What it's like

Second only to "what are you going to do now?", the question I seem be asked most often is "what is it like being back in America?" After being home for about a month, a satisfactory answer still eludes me. What's it like being back, after two-plus years overseas? That's a difficult question for me to tackle. It's even harder to compare my former life in Svishtov or Dupnitsa, to my current life in suburban LA. I've moved from a small remote community at the fringe of Europe, to one of the biggest metropolitan regions in the world. These communities could hardly be more different, and finding a balance to my daily life, bridging my old life and my new, is challenging.

Maybe the hardest thing for me to adjust to is the scale of life in Southern California. Our closest grocery store is probably two kilometers away. I sat in my car for more than two hours last weekend to visit a friend who lives 30 or 40 km from me, which is of course still in LA county. Yet at other times, I've been driving at 80 miles per hour and still been passed by other cars on a 10 lane LA freeway. Our small suburban house seems huge, and the genuinely big houses make me gasp. It's an impressive feat, when you think about it, to design an entire urban region, home to 15 million people (or more) and completely eliminate the need to walk anywhere. Has there ever been a worse invention than the auto-dependent American suburb? And the prices seem sky-high, even though it's relatively cheap compared to Western Europe. There are still some nice places in Southern California (see picture of Laguna Beach above), yet I could never even dream of being able to afford to live there. These are the things that have not been easy to adjust to.

On the other side, one great part about returning to America is how genuinely nice and friendly everyone is. This is cliche, I know, but I never thought about it until I went to Bulgaria, where it's, um, not so common. People ask me how I'm doing, help me find what I need, wish me a good day, and genuinely mean it. And of course, the best part about being home is family and friends. This needs no explanation.

The strangest part of life right now is that I'm still in transition. I refuse to stay in Southern California, but I haven't yet decided where to go or what to do. It's like the readjustment hasn't even really begun, because I'm still moving. I can hardly start processing my Peace Corps experience, adjust to a new life in my suddenly-unfamiliar native land, because life for me is still temporary. There are a few places in America where you can replicate a European lifestyle - walkable cities, public transportation, liberal minded stylish people, minimal environmental impact. When I get there, then the readjustment process will begin in earnest. Until then, I'm going to hole up in the house and do Sudoku.

Plus, it's too damn sunny and hot in LA. It shouldn't be 20 C in mid-December.

Burned bus

This is the back of a school bus that got caught in the fires in Green Valley Lake. I like the color of the license plate, a pale, dirty yellow, set against the blackened, bubbling paint of the bus.

Chimney and ash

All that remains from this cabin is the chimney.

11-26-07 Fire season

For the long Thanksgiving weekend, my parents and I went up to our family’s cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains, southeast of LA. Our cabin is in the tiny resort community of Green Valley Lake, in the forest between the larger towns of Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead. Green Valley Lake has an idyllic name, and the place holds a lot of good memories for me. But during September and October, massive wildfires swept through the San Bernardino Mountains, including much of GVL. For a few weeks we didn’t know if our cabin survived, until my aunt went up to check. Fortunately, there was no damage to our cabin or any on our street. Many others, sadly, weren’t as lucky.

The fires essentially burned a ring around the community, and most of the cabins that burned were the ones on the edge of the forest, though a few further in-town also burned. Like all natural disasters, the damage seemed fairly random – some cabins were reduced to ashes, while neighboring places were left unscathed. Walking along our favorite hiking trails through the forest was a surreal and melancholy experience, as nearly all of the forest surrounding the community has been burned. Giant pine trees stand blackened, and the undergrowth is entirely gone. The forest floor is ash and dust.

Southern California is in the middle of one of the driest periods in recent history – it has rained four inches in the past year (the “rain year,” in local parlance), and not at all since early spring. The mountains and hills surrounding LA (and down near San Diego) burn nearly every year, and I know fires are a natural part of the ecosystem processes. But the scale and severity of the recent fires has been worse than ever before.

I have posted many pictures from the fire damage on my flickr site, linked from this page.

11-15-07 Stranger in a strange land

Oddly enough, I find myself writing this from my parent’s living room in Whittier, California. I’ve cut the trip short (way short, considering the original scope) and returned home to the US, home of big cars, friendly people, and an incredible selection of cereal. I swear, just the cereal aisle in my local supermarket is bigger than the biggest store in all of Svishtov. But I digress.

I’m home for some personal reasons which I won’t get into on the public forum. All is well, but I just needed to be at home right now with my family. It was a quick decision, but not one I took lightly. Trevor, my former travel buddy, is valiantly continuing on the journey.

So, 27 months after the grand Peace Corps adventure began, I find myself starting over again. The readjustment has been going about as well as I could have hoped for (aside from coming down with a bad cold). The process has certainly been smoothed by having a loving and caring family to return to, who feed me well and at least pretend to listen to me when I drone on about life in the strange little corner of the world that is Bulgaria.

The wonderful American writer Bill Bryson once wrote a book about returning to life in the States after many years abroad, entitled “I’m a Stranger Here Myself.” This is how I feel. 27 months is a long time to be gone, and much has changed. I'm having to relearn how to live in my own country, just like I had to learn how to live in Bulgaria.

Social norms, customs, habits, well, I didn’t realize how much I’d changed until I came home. In every store I enter, I have this feeling that the female employees are hitting on me – but of course they’re not, it’s just called customer service, something I’d practically forgotten about in Bulgaria. It’s awkward for me to be in my house wearing shoes, but that’s just how it’s done here. Prices are shockingly high – today I paid $15 for a haircut! And I have to remember that that is a really cheap haircut from Supercuts. My last haircut in Dupnitsa cost me 2 leva, which seems appropriate for 10 minutes work. Most delightfully, I bought a new pair of running shoes, size 14 – a size which was in-stock, and the clerk didn’t even bat an eye bringing out to me. 14 in America is a normal size. In Bulgaria, I was once laughed – yes, laughed – out of a store for requesting a shoe that size.

Now I have to make some plans and some decisions about what to do with myself. It’s wonderful being at home with Mom and Dad, but Southern California is not where I want to be. It was 90 degrees today (32 C), and I can’t stand this heat. I need to be somewhere where I won’t sweat in mid-November. Though, we did go to the beach last Monday, no complaints about that.