Bulgarian Folk Dancing
Last week, the Plovdiv Branch had a folk dancing activity. I'm so glad they had it this month, so we could go. I'm not a great dancer, but some of what we learned was easy enough even for me. It was...
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Kitchens
Shortly after arriving at our rented house here in Plovdiv, I heard some of the kids getting very excited to find a ladle in one of the kitchen drawers. "Look! We have a ladle!" someone said, and there...
View ArticleVideo tour of our house in Plovdiv, Bulgaria
The house is not at all clean in this video, but it's also not as bad as it sometimes is. So this is what you might see if you just dropped by sometime! And you're welcome to do that. :) As I'm posting...
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Изгрев, Пловдив (Izgrev, Plovdiv)
Изгрев (Izgrev) is a neighborhood of Plovdiv. Some people call it a “Gypsy” neighborhood. On the surface it looks like the poorest neighborhood in the city. There is no hard dividing line from the...
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Бачковски манастир (Bachkovo Monastery)
Бачковски манастир / Bachkovo Monastery, founded in 1083, is the second-largest monastery in Bulgaria, and is said to be one of the largest and oldest Eastern Orthodox monasteries in Europe. Those two...
View ArticleSounds of Plovdiv
Every day at about 8:00 am, 8:35 am, and 5:00 pm, the bells ring at Sv. Nedelya, the Orthodox church that is almost right next to our house. I can tell that someone is actually ringing them, because...
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Views from the terrace on a sunny December day
Tomorrow we leave for Sofia. Early on Friday morning, we have a flight from Sofia to Paris and then a flight from Paris to Salt Lake City. It's hard to believe that we'll be in the States in a couple...
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More graffiti
There's a lot of really cool street art in this pedestrian underpass in Plovdiv, but unfortunately, I don't have pictures of much of it. Somewhere in Plovdiv. This is a swimming pool on top of...
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Plovdiv Ethnographic Museum
The Plovdiv Regional Ethnographic Museum is really close to us. Like it takes less than five minutes to walk there. So I don't know why it took us so long to go, but we finally did, and it was cool....
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Husův sbor / Hus' house, Vinohrady, Prague
Near the end of our stay in Prague I came across this interesting Hussite columbarium in the Vinohrady area of Prague. I wasn't familiar with the term columbarium, which is an indoor graveyard of sorts...
View ArticlePlovdiv Bogoroditsa church bells ringing
Here I happened to be walking by as evening began and the bells were ringing at the Church of the Holy Mother of God in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (църква Света Богородица, Пловдив, България):
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Кърджали, България / Kardzhali, Bulgaria
About a month ago I went on a day trip with my friend Иван Чакаров (Ivan Chakarov) to the south-central Bulgarian city Кърджали (Kardzhali), which is about a 95 km bus ride from Plovdiv and which lies...
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Pine Creek Pass snow hike
During the week or so we've been back in Teton Valley, Idaho, it has snowed a lot. And then the last two or three days it started melting. Yesterday (Saturday) was beautiful and sunny.I took the kids...
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Priesthood guys
The other day while visiting Jon's parents, we realized that we have one of each of the most common Priesthood offices in our family. Seth is a Deacon, Phin is a Teacher, Jacob is a Priest, Zed is an...
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Wind River Range Little Seneca Lake
This past Friday and Saturday, Jacob and I backpacked in Wyoming's Wind River Range. It took 2.5 hours to drive from our house to the Elkhart Park Pole Creek trail head, near Pinedale, Wyoming. On the...
View ArticleThe Age of Discretion by Simone de Beauvoir
Is there such a thing as a "long story"? Because this seems like one. My experience reading it was a little odd. I had never read anything by Simone de Beauvoir and this was in a collection we've had...
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Plovdiv, Bulgaria Memorial complex Hillock of fraternity
Plovdiv was a Thracian city before it became a Greek city around 340 BC. (See the Wikipedia Plovdiv page for more history.) There is an impressive Communist-era concrete monument in Plovdiv which I...
View ArticleThe Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley
Even though we home school, I found a lot of fascinating stuff in this book that looks at public education in the U.S. and in three countries whose 15-year-olds test much higher than ours do: South...
View ArticleMy Final Ride by LeAnn Bednar
I thought I'd have to push myself to read this book about a Teton Valley man's ride along the Great Western Trail after he's diagnosed with cancer. I was wrong, though. I found it fascinating. Written...
View ArticleAdvertisements during the Pope’s Funeral
Václav Havel, Washington, April 9, 2005Yesterday I watched the pope’s [John Paul II] funeral on television. It was a grand and moving spectacle. I knew the pope, and I’d even dare say that we were...
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