On 3/13/2011 a bell-belted wandering bagpiper greeted my arrival at Bulgaria’s NDK Park – the big expanse surrounding the national cultural center in the heart of Bulgaria’s capital city of Sofia. The piper’s can contained a sprinkling of coins – a few levas, but mostly stotinkas – and next to it sat three CDs. I saw him throughout my week there; he seemed to show up in all of the city’s generous public green spaces. And I saw accordion players here and there. And even a clarinet.

My trip was to visit J.C. – my Fulbright-Award wife who is teaching and researching at the National Academy of Art: a highly prestigious, but dreadfully poor place for serious study of the visual arts.

I met students and professors – all passionately talented, and all very engaging with me and J.C. The Academy’s high-ceilinged and skylighted studio classrooms are deliciously cluttered with cast-off sculptures and drawings and paintings from past generations of students. Works in progress of current students rest on easels and pedestals and welding platforms.

I arrived after the March 1 national holiday – the day when people begin tying red and white braided strings around the wrists of their friends. Everywhere I went I saw wrists encircled by bunches of red and white strings. The strings symbolize the renewal of life (red for newly emerging lifeblood, white for death of past seasons) and express hopes for newly refreshed health and happiness. Each Bulgarian wears his strings until he sees the first stork of the season. Then he removes the strings and lays them among bushes and tree branches. They are then available for storks and other birds to use in their newly constructed nests. I came home wearing two, and am awaiting my next sighting of a Great Blue Heron.

Here’s to a continual refreshing of our Richmond region.