Joan Bondakov
As a first-year AUBG student, Joan Bondakov hopes to hatch right out of boyhood and find his truth. “I have just gone through the classical metamorphosis of the young person where one starts as an idealist and then becomes a nihilist, and I hope in the coming years to mature on the whole and to have something in which I believe”.
For now, he admits to procrastinating, a tool him and his friends use to ground themselves firmly in reality. “We have plans for life that our sometimes too out of bound with reality and to cope we spent time doing mundane unproductive stuff.”
Joan is not without ambitions, however. He longs to work someplace outdoors where he can be the master of his own fate. His parents are a key influence when it comes to career prospects, he says proudly. “I think they have quite a big influence because my mom and my dad work in an office environment. I have gone a few times to their jobs and saw what the situation was, and the situation is not pretty.”
Joan’s grandad is another source of inspiration. He describes his life with visible emotion. “He had a sweater with one sleeve ripped out or completely worn out. He left his wife and house in the village, temporarily, to go make some money in Sofia for a while. When he came back after a period of absence and of working and working, he had bought an entirely new house and, of course, now, his sweater had two sleeves”.
Under the surface, Joan reveals himself a deep thinker with quirky interests. “I like to read about weird stuff or very specific subjects. I read about plants and herbs and their properties.” He tells laughingly how he has experimented with vegetables in the past. “I have tried to marinate some veggies, or let the roots grow a certain way”.
Of all things, it is his mastery of English that led him from Sofia to Blagoevgrad and ultimately to AUBG. He says he is equal parts self- and school-taught. Still, his love of languages does not stop there. Joan says he would have liked to tackle French, “because it is one of the best sounding languages, to put it bluntly. But in the end, I have never found the time and motivation to take it more seriously”, he sighs.
