Orphanage (July 27)

When my alarm went off this morning, I jumped out of bed to get ready for my orphanage visit! I scarfed down some food and soon enough we were on the buses on our way.

When we got there, we got a tour of the orphanage and talked to the women who run it. Then we got to play with the kids! We all brought a lot of toys for them, so they loved that. It was interesting observing the kids in an orphanage, without any parents in their lives. Some were very well behaved, but others had major discipline issues. One boy ran around hitting people…he slapped me across the face for no apparent reason, then ran over to Michelle and smacked her across the head. He went around bullying the other kids too, but they just had to suck it up and deal with it.

The little girl I bonded most with was Alex. She was so sweet! I took some pictures with her, so I’ll post them when I can. :) It was a good experience!

In the afternoon, Brittany wanted to get a tattoo for her birthday (that’s today). We all went out to find a place, and she got a small heart on her foot. Before she went, there were some people getting piercings and I had to leave the room! SO many people got tattoos and piercings in Bulgaria. If they took a poll, I bet it would be well over 10% of the students on our ship. And no, Mom and Dad, I won’t be coming home with any new piercings or tattoos! On the way back to the ship, we stopped at a mini market to spend our last Bulgarian leva (lev for short), so I naturally got chocolate…and some of it didn’t make it back to the ship. Well, technically it did but it was in my tummy.

The ship left Bulgaria and we were headed for Istanbul now! Because they were so close, though, we just dropped anchor (while in view of Varna) for the whole next day. At night, we had a nail painting party again and watched a romantic comedy, of course. :)