The first feeling is like in Big Brother ... i haven't been watching the bulgarian one, it's very vulgar and savage ... but i've watched many times the italian one (not that it isn't low level), i'm not ashamed of saying it ...like many people who say "i don't watch those things" but in fact they watch it, comment it...it sounds to me like "i haven't voted for Berlusconi" but the truth is that he won many elections...but whatever....
Why do I feel like this? one by one the semioticians, antropologists, advertisers arrived in the Vip zone (doesn't sound like the big bro?), in Bulbank and in the houses around. We check in. The first night we are still on the loose, we still aren't part of the school, we got time to think twice. But it doesn't happen in fact. We go out quietly, we walk around, take a drink or two and decide not to stay up late for two reasons - gipsy and pocahontas were veeeery tired of the past two nights and 10 long days and night were ahead of us, so we went sleeping a little earlier.
In the morning, the whole semiotic community gather at breakfast. We enter slowly, suspiciously (Bad).
I gotta be honest and say that last year i was uneasy at the beginning, i didn't know anyone, didn't know what to expect. But this year i'd say i felt a bit like Leonidas, leading my little army breaking through the semiotic limits. This time I was with my colleagues, we were a well formed group which turned out to be a great team.
And i knew part of the other students and professors ... so it's 10 o'clock, the opening of the school, every single one is there ... remember this moment, it won't happen again :) they explained to us what it's all about, what we should do, they wished us good luck, etc... and from that moment on, a chain of events was unleashed, circumstances, meetings, interesting lectures and presentations, some not so exciting, eating from the swedish table (that's how we say in bulgarian), but there weren't swedish people, drinking a white wine whose quality hmmm...never mind! looks, laughs, shooting, photographing, singing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjsXo9l6I8 (and not only), shots with olives (some of you were amazed by it), bulgarians, italians, spanish, greeks, estonians, finlands...i certainly miss someone ... we walk the streets among the must points of town, we closed a few bars, only Malkata stayed and we filled it...we remained without palachinki at the end...but that's all part of this amazing experience!
Some things will stay that way, intact in the streets and the glasses of Sozopol, we will remember them like this, as they were, like a polaroid, we won't change them, still images in our minds. Though, while time passes by they will fade a little and other spontaneous and unique images will take over our choosy and capricious consciousness, in our not so instinctive reality, in which sometimes the cognitive feeling (rings a bell?) is stronger than everything.
Sharing the same places, things, situations, emotions with a group of people, closed in one same perimeter, transmits a unique taste to all that happens. Sure, everyone will describe things in different ways, the perceptions and sensations are different but they complete each others.
I could write so much more, but we let some things stay unspoken ... and next year we could meet again in Sozopol or somewhere around the world....
