Bulgaria with Noodles

There has been a lot of nonsense on Facebook about water shortages in Bulgaria. It has been suggested that some villages always suffer from inadequate water pressure (or no water at all) every summer. Of course, it is difficult to say whether this because there just is not enough water in the reservoir or the spring or if it is because the pipes are so old and leaking all the time. I would therefore like to reassure anyone who is thinking of buying a rural property in Bulgaria and I will try to give some helpful advice. First of all, there is no official list of which villages are supposed to have water shortages and which ones do not. It is probably the case that many villages do get their water from local springs, not from the main reservoirs, so there are going to be some serious water supply problems in the summer months, when many Bulgarians leave their apartments in the cities and go to their summer holiday homes. Many villages (and not just villages) are going to have problems...

Despite popular demand, it is time for the Gardening Bore to make its 2025 debut. Only one artichoke has survived from last year, but it seems to be doing well in its new location.  The peas I planted are coming along quite well and Irena's tomatoes are thriving. Recently she has added some long poles, to support them when they start producing their fruit. (Yes, fruit. Tomatoes are not really vegetables, believe it on not.) As for the asparagus, that has been doing very well this year. With a glass (or two) of Bulgarian Chardonnay and some of my dear wife's homemade mayonnaise, asparagus is absolutely delicious. Yes, we have had it for lunch several times, but it is also good for breakfast with some scrambled eggs. Our soil is clay and so I suppose that it is a minor miracle that we can have any veggies at all. In the summer, the ground is like concrete. We now have four compost bins, but they never seem to make enough compost. Maybe we are doing something wrong. 

There is quite a good place to eat in Elena. It is a mehana , which is the nearest thing in Bulgaria to an English pub, I suppose. The menu is full of typical Bulgarian nosh and the prices are quite reasonable. Yes, a few tourists do come to Elena, but not that many, so the place mostly caters for the locals. As usual, for my birthday lunch we had the peppers stuffed with cheese and tomato. The cheesy chips were rather good too.  My dear sweet wife was doing the driving, so I had a rather generous carafe of red wine. After the peppers came the skara , the barbecued meat. It was pretty good, but perhaps not quite so good as the barbecued ribs in The Wine Club in Arbanassi.

Yes, I am now officially an OAP. Being 66 is not really too bad. It is a lot like being 65. As I shall soon be receiving lots of extra cash, courtesy of His Majesty's government, I have been thinking about buying a new car. Well, a new second-hand car. The second-hand car market in Bulgaria is rather different to the one in the UK. Most Bulgarians cannot afford to buy a brand-new car, so of course they buy a second-hand car instead. Furthermore, Bulgaria is the dustbin for write-offs and worn-out cars from all over Europe. Clocking is widespread and the Police seem to do nothing about it. This means that buying a second-hand car in Bulgaria is rather more difficult and expensive than it is in the UK. Yes, I am sure that a BMW might be more reliable than some other brands, but BMWs are more expensive and so are the spare parts, if anything goes wrong. I suppose that a Toyota Rav 4 might be the obvious choice, but I have not been impressed with the Toyota garage recently and there do...

Yes, we are now back in Veliko Tarnovo and of course that means that I am bored to death! There really is not much to do here. On Wednesday, I was doing some strimming, repaired the stone wall at the far end of the Secret Garden and cut the grass with my splendid tractor mower. All very necessary jobs that needed to be done. Here in VT, I can go shopping, take Tina for a walk and that is about it. The Great and Good Vincent has inspected our electric water pump and he says that it is knackered. Some seal or valve inside the pump is bust, so water starts coming out of the bottom of the pump as soon as you turn on the pump. Getting it repaired will probably cost as much as a new pump, he reckons. Electric water pumps do not like very cold weather, according to Vincent, so the sensible thing is to switch them off, disconnect them, try to get out any water that is inside and then leave them somewhere that is not too cold.   The other little problem is that the floor of the Reserved...

I HATE plumbing. Anything to do with fixing a supply of domestic water is something that I really do not enjoy. We have stopcocks at the bottom of Tina’s swimming pool, the square hole in one of our outbuildings. This hole always fills with water, so turning the stopcocks on or off is a pain. It is even more of pain when the lever rusts and comes off in your hand! Well, today the local plumber chap came round and he installed two new brass stopcocks. I actually bought new ones of the right size, to replace the old ones. I suppose that he was working for about an hour and he refused any payment, as he said that he was paid by the water company. I insisted on giving him 40 leva (about twenty pounds).   Then there was the flooding in the kitchen. Alan took his dishwasher with him when he sold the house, but there is still a waste water pipe under the sink, with just a plastic bag over the end! Last year I bought a sort of spiral wire thing with a handle at the end. If you turn th...