Working In Bulgaria: Looking Back, A Year Later

Photo captured by Metti. This is how I’m usually seen by my friends from Bulgaria, happy and smiling. Haha. Excuse my redness. I blame the tequila. :|

Just recently, I read an article that just gave me a beautiful insight. In simple words, it was able to make me smile and ponder on all of life’s moments that started out as crappy but only led to bigger and better things. The simple notion is this: “One of the most beautiful things in life is looking back and realizing why some things didn’t work out.” A simple sentence but it can spark the deepest of pondering over your past–Sifting through the things that have passed to understand how and why it had to happen to lead you to where you are now.

Alexander Nevsky church in city center. With ze pretty teal and gold rooftop! Loooove

Marie (from France) has been with me from the very start. Nicest but wildest party girl ever! She’s enrolled into the Erasmus program, and it was cause of her that we met other Erasmus people and get to go to their crazy ass parties. Haha

This is the same feeling I got as I was writing my “Working In Bulgaria” series. Starting out from the beginning made me cringe at all the times that I had cried over the frustrations and personal agonies of various things. Things that in the end, only ended up making me stronger as a person, and made me learn how to survive better. Things that were challenges that turned into lessons learned and applied to future similar situations. Things that turned out to be only little pests called “obstacles” that just helped me through a brand new way of thinking and living.

At one of the high peaks in Vitosha Mountain. Behind me was actually a deep ass cliff. Haha.

When this all started, I couldn’t count the times that I’ve ranted to my friends and family about my initial situation. Up until today, I could still feel the pent up frustrations that I experienced an entire year ago. Feelings of helplessness and irritation of having so little to work with and constantly being shut down as I attempted to nitpick and correct all the “wrong things” undoubtedly surfaced as I wrote this series. But strangely, as I recall it now… It is no longer with complete negativity that I felt at the time but rather with a sense of bemusement. Looking back, I now understand why all those things had to happen. After all, you can’t experience peace without war, you can’t appreciate silence without noise, and *insert all the other opposite things that you can’t appreciate without experiencing the negative first*.

Teaching my Bulgarian lovies how to do ugly faced pictures. Because.

After all my ugly cry sessions and depression over all the things that went wrong, I learned that a mindset change is really one of the best things to do to get a grip on yourself and start living better. Things won’t always go the way we planned… How many times have we heard that before? And when I decided to be proactive about my situation, it bore wonderful, amazing things for me. I started to have work from different jobs that really made me feel happy, accomplished and even loved. Those children from the orphanage are still the people who melts my heart the most and they inspire me to continue to be happy in the midst of any kind of hardship. That’s just one thing I learned from working there. As cliche as it may sound, everything was a great learning experience for me, and one that I would never replace for anything in the world. There was a reason that I met every single one of them, that I had all the work I did, that I had all the obstacles I got over. It was all for helping and developing me to be better and for learning more about the kind of person I was and could be.

With the Mexican twins: Adria and Ariadna!!! :D Ariadna was there before us and left shortly after Adria arrived. :(

I know that this is a series of posts that you might not care about, but I wrote it mainly for me. I don’t ever want to forget simple details of the most funtabulous time of my traveling experience. I wish to have an account of this that I can look back on and basically create an immortal (because let’s just pretend that the internet will exist forever haha) memory of “That Time That I Worked In Bulgaria”.

Goofing off with the girls before heading off to the Halloween Party at Tiki Bar

Second reason I wrote this is for all the people who are curious about what I did there. Yes, I wasn’t entirely useless. Haha. :)) And it’s also for the people who are looking for that little push of bravery to also dare to do that thing that they put off out of fears and doubts. I was scared, especially when shit got real, but I survived. Not to sound conceited, but if I can do it, then so can you.

WATERFALLS SCORPION. Because scorpion around the world. haha

The world is filled with adventure, and we are meant to take part in the zest of life and go all Nike on that shit and JUST. DO. IT.

Nature Excursion with Erasmus friends via Sofia Green Tour

To collate it all up, here are my “Working In Bulgaria” summary posts. And at this point, these were only a fraction of what it really is like. So go off, little kitten. Go off into the direction of your heart’s desire. :) And have your very own grand adventure!

Click HERE to find out how this all started!
Read on to find out about my Bulgarian experience on these posts:

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June 22, 2015 By Nix Maglasang Adventures Go Travel My Chased Dreams Personal Leave a comment

About the author

Nix is a bubbly kid at heart who’s intensely addicted to laughter & chasing dreams. Part time unicorn and full time weird, she hopes to inspire others to live their lives the Neverlander way with 2 simple rules: Think happy thoughts and No growing up!