Owen is shown above with his passport ready to re-enter Serbia. Owen was the ball boy of the girls’ MS soccer team. He faithfully attended practtices and really helped me out by retrieving balls, cones, among other duties. It was really nice to spend time with him alone. He loved the swimming pool at the hotel so that is about all I saw of Sofia besides the school. We were not in Bulgaria for much time, but I have a few impressions. It was surprising that Bulgaria seemed a bit less developed than Serbia, despite the fact that Bulgaria is part of the EU and Serbia is not. There was a lot of construction on the “ring road” going around the city and the school is located on the outskirts. It was a beautiful, new school situated on the base of the mountains surrounding Sofia. The Bulgarians were defintiely different from the Serbs, as they looked more Turkish, Armenian, than Slavic. Owen was a good boy during the trip! We drove over on Friday and came back the next day. It was also great to win the game on Saturday and have the girls play so well during the weekend.
On Sunday, Oliver and I attended the Belgrade Book Fair. The Serbs are readers and the convention center was packed with people buying books. This was the last day of the seven day fair and I was impressed with the number of book stores and readers buying books. There must have been close to 5000 people in the convention hall. My only complaint was the cost of books. The two books I wanted to get, very few in English, cost 7,000 dinars and 5,000 dinars. That is over $100 each. I did by a biography of Tito for $18. From the Blic web site, the director of the book fair gave these statistics:
About 135,000 tickets were sold, while 4,800 people worked on stands on daily basis. There were 1,180 accredited journalists, which is, according to Trpkovic, the greatest number so far. About 4,000 invitations and 2,000 tickets were handed over, so altogether 147,000 people visited this year’s Book Fair. The greatest number of tickets (31,500) was sold on Saturday.
We hosted Janna’s and Abby’s birthday party at our house. Paul, Abby’s father and our IT person at the school, worked the BBQ. We have a beautiful stone oven in our yard. We had a really nice time. Once again, the tempation to use Alkohol, created a fire again. Alkohol is a flammable spirit that is used here to begin fires. Think of a super-charged lighter fluid. Paul threw some on the coals to get the new ones going, and the result was a massive flame shooting up through the chimney and catching the vines covering the opening on fire. Paul acted quickly however, and put out the fire with our garden hose.
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