All I Want for Christmas is a Long-term Visa...

Happy Holidays, everyone. I hope you've all (all 7 people that read this, plus my mom) are having a joyous holiday season. I absolutely love Christmas, and it's nice to be home with my family (for the most part). But no amount of Christmas carols or homemade baked goods can quell my growing anxiety over my still-nonexistent visa.

To study in Bulgaria, you need a type D long-term stay visa, which requires about 30 business days to process. Theoretically, you have to apply in person for one at a consulate or embassy, which would have required me to go either to Chicago or NYC back in November. The NYC consulate agreed to let me mail them my application (and the fee and my passport and all the other documents that go with it) since I'm a full-time student and would have had to miss a lot of class to travel to a consulate. So I sent all of that in, but I still haven't received the visa yet. I don't know exactly if I got it in 30 business days in advance, since I don't know how much time the embassy has off for the holidays, and I'm a little afraid to try to calculate it since the result could make me more anxious.

I'm trying not to panic yet, since my flight leaves two weeks from tomorrow. The problem is that I am by nature somewhat of an alarmist, so the more I think about it, the more anxious I get. I sent the consulate a tentatively-worded email the other day asking if they could give me an approximate date of when the visa would be ready; however, a phone conversation with someone at the consulate a couple of months ago ended with me in tears, so I don't have high hopes for a helpful response. For the time being, I'm going to focus on trying to relax, pack, and enjoy my last few weeks at home. Hopefully, by the next time that I post, I will have in my possession a long-term stay Bulgarian visa...

My Class Schedule

This is my class schedule for the spring semester at AUBG. I'm sort of doing a mixture of general education requirements for Pitt and classes that count towards my certificate in Russian and East European Studies. 

So, the Introduction to Environmental Science is fulfilling my last Natural Science gen ed at Pitt (and will also be my first science class since high school...which should be interesting). The Introduction to Philosophy is fulfilling my Philosophy gen ed at Pitt, and I'm not really looking forward to it, but I'm trying to keep an open mind. Bulgarian Folk Music is getting me credit for a Fine Arts gen ed and for the REES certificate. The last two classes I'm taking because I thought that they sounded interesting: Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and Falsifications in History. They count towards the REES certificate and also I just really like history classes.

This will be a strange semester for me since I'll be taking no foreign languages at all. I've taken classes in 2-4 different languages per semester every semester that I've been in college, so it will definitely be a change of pace. I'm sure that there'll be plenty to keep the language nerd in me busy though...

Oh, and the best part of all? No Friday classes!

Miscellaneous Background Info

Now that my finals are winding down, I can put a little more effort into this. First of all, it would probably help to give some background information about where I'm going next semester. I'm enrolling as a student at American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), which is located in Blagoevgrad. AUBG opened right around the end of the communist era, in 1991. All of the classes and administrative stuff are done in English (thank goodness, since I don't speak any Bulgarian). The idea of it being American University in Bulgaria doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the U.S. directly. It just means that it's basically like an American-style liberal arts university. It has about 1,100 students, and about 60% of the students are international.

This is actually what attracted my interest to the school the most. 60% is an incredibly high percentage of the student body to be from other countries. It's almost the perfect study abroad environment- I can live and study in a country about which I know very little and get to meet people from a number of different other countries. It's like I get to have a little exposure to a bunch of different countries while actually staying in one country.

That probably wasn't the most articulate way of describing it, and I'm trying really hard not to sound like a brochure for the school, but I can't wait to get to meet students from all over Eastern Europe (and the rest of the world). Especially as someone who is interested in languages, I think that it will be really neat to be surrounded by multilingual classmates (many of whom will probably speak Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/Russian, languages that I have been studying).

There's also something appealing about the adventure of going to Bulgaria. Even a year ago, I would have been skeptical if someone had told me that I would be living in Bulgaria for four months. But then last January, I had a moment of curiosity that coincided with Pitt having an information session about AUBG. I skipped my last class on a Friday afternoon (not that it took much convincing) and went to the info session. As soon as it was over, I sat down with one of my academic advisers to see if it could even be possible for me to spend a semester at AUBG and still graduate on time. I can only imagine what my dad thought when I called him on the way back to my dorm and was talking a mile a minute about potentially going to Bulgaria.

Now it's almost a year later, and four weeks from today my plane will land in Sofia. It still hasn't quite sunk in though...

BTW, if you're curious, here are some links with more info about AUBG:
http://www.aubg.bg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUBG
http://novinite.com/view_news.php?id=122560