An Introduction

Hi everyone! For those of you who do not know yet, in August, Sam and I will be moving to Sofia, Bulgaria! This website, our blog, will be our main form of mass communication for everyone to stay up to date with our lives while we are overseas. In this post, I hope to provide a brief introduction for you, to give some background information, and answer a few of the most popular questions that we have received in the last few months. Questions that I intend to answer in this post include: 1) Where is Bulgaria? 2) Why are we going abroad in the first place? 3) What will Sam's role be while we are abroad? 4) How long will we be gone? 5) How can you follow us and our travels?

Firstly, Bulgaria is an average sized country located in the Balkan Region of Eastern Europe. The Balkans include counties such as Serbia, Romania, Greece, and many other countries. It is a beautiful region, and if you would like to learn more about it I have a link that provides more information in the "Adventure" tab on the top of the page. The capital and largest city of Bulgaria is Sofia; this is the city that we will call home. About one million people call Sofia home and much like many other major European cities, Sofia is a major cultural hub for the country. The official language of Bulgaria is Bulgarian (which has a close linguistic tie to Russian) a language which I am in the process of learning! With that being said, many of the citizens, especially in the younger generations do know English, so we will be able to get by relatively easily in the first few weeks of our stay.

Sam and I are moving to Bulgaria, because I recently acquired a job teaching history at the American College of Sofia, an 8-12 private high school that operates in the city and enrolls roughly 800, mostly Bulgarian, students in a given year. In the first weekend of February I attended the University of Northern Iowa's Overseas Recruiting Fair, where schools from all over the world came to fill their open positions. I was lucky enough to obtain two interviews, one with ACS. I was not however, hired as a full-time teacher; my official title at the school is Dorm Supervisor-Intern Teacher. ACS has a small dorm on campus, that holds 28 students at max capacity. My duties, as I understand them thus far, will be similar to that of College Hall Director. I will help the students with their homework when necessary, take them to breakfast and dinner, help them develop their English language skills, and just be a figure in their lives to provide assistance when needed. The other half of my job, will include teaching 1-2 sections of a history course a day. I do not know yet what I will be teaching, and I will find out sometime in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, what will Sam be doing? This question is complicated slightly, as officially we do not have an answer yet. The school's administration is more concerned with setting up my end of the job before worrying about Sam. However, it has been suggested that she will be able to serve as a part time tutor for students, but is still undecided. Obviously, this will be settled once we arrive, so while we wish we could share more, we simply do not know the answer to this question.

The question that we have been asked the most is probably the most important: how long will we be gone? Like the previous question, this has a complicated answer. For now, I am contracted to work for ACS for one year, until the end of the 2017-2018 school year, which will end in late June. However, the hope is that we like the school and country and the school reciprocally likes me as a teacher and wants to keep me on staff. If this happens we will stay longer, but once again, how much longer I do not know.

Finally, we intend to keep in touch with everyone back home through three different mediums. Both Sam and I will be writing in this blog as often as time and work allows us to, with updates almost certainly coming around major holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.) We will post about anything and everything we find and experience and will definitely talk about our travels throughout Bulgaria and Europe! Linked to this page are our Facebook accounts, where we will post pictures, and our YouTube page HistoryNerdsAbroad, where we will post fun videos highlighting the fun sites we travel to (this will be much more sporadic).

For those of you who made it this far, thank you! I apologize for the length of this one...I will try to keep them shorter from here on out. There was just too much to cover in this one. I do have one final thing to mention: if you come to Europe while we are living in Bulgaria, please contact us! We would love to meet up with you if we can!

Chris