Ok all, well I'm finally in Bulgaria! Philadelphia was very cold but I was lucky enough to arrive a night early and decompress before the majority of the volunteers arrived the next day. My roomater also arrived the night before, but not until about 1am when I was getting ready for bed. His name is Abtin, and I couldn't have been luckier in my roomate placement. He was born in Iran and lived there through high school before moving to San Fransisco for college. He is now a U.S. citizen of course(you have to be to be in the Corps) and he is proudly, very Americanized. As he said, "his life started 10 years ago when he came to America". He remembers being a young kid during the Iran-Iraq war and having to take shelter from bombs and missiles. I find his risilience amazing, as he is a very funny, sarcastic and total West Coast kid at heart. We get along great. Here he is taking some pictures in our Philly hotel room doing some packing reorganization:

The next day at noon, we met our entire group of 40 volunteers in the conference area. We have a great group of volunteers mainly in two age groups from 22-32 and then 55-65. I am the second or third oldest in the younger group. After an orientation day of information and team building activities, we were given some cash for dinner and then to bed. The next day was the start of 17+ hours of traveling(2hr bus to JFK, 2hr wait, 7hr flight to Munich, 2hr wait, 1 and 1/2hr to Sofia, Bulgaria and then a 2hr bus ride to our mountain retreat in the Rila Mountains for a 4 day training retreat). Here are some pics of our travels, etc:

About to leave Philly. My awesome roomate!

Our arrival in Bulgaria...As soon as we landed we were greeted by current volunteers from last years tour and the press, which was a very warm welcome.

Views of some Bulgarian towns on the bus ride(above and below).

 

We arrived at our retreat location at the ski area of Panichyaste where we were to spend five days/four nights with preliminary training before leaving for our 2.5 months Pre-service training/homestays(official service doesn't actually start until after that in June). In any case, it is beautiful here:

The Lodge

Greeted the traditional way as you enter, with bread you dip in either salt or honey(reminding one that life is savory and sweet). 

Stray dogs are common in Bulgaria, but these ones that live outside the lodge were well fed.

We've been here for only three(три) days, but nonetheless I'm having a blast. The training is difficult but tons of fun. We work all day long on beginning language training, learning rules/regulations, teambuilding activities and yes, eating! The food is really great:

Anyway, We leave tomorrow for Vraca(our HUB site) to meet our families for home stay. We will each be with different families in language training groups of 5 volunteers in a town or village surrounding Vraca. Every so often we'll come together to work on larger projects together, but it seems we'll be spending most of the next two months with 4 other volunteers and our host families.
Thats it for now, I know I promised the rest of the history but I think I'll have to finish that in a few weeks when I've read the information they gave us for study.  In the meantime,  довиждане и лека нощ (goodbye and good night)!