Bulgaria with Noodles

You might therefore want to look at the area north of Gorna, around Polski Trambesh, or a bit further north, near the Danube. Well, sometimes things do not happen on time in Bulgaria, so don't get too excited about the airport... From VT to the airport in Sofia is about three hours in a car.  Maybe four hours. Driving to the airport, collecting someone and then driving back to VT or Daveri.... Yes, it can be done, but it's tiring and a long day. I paid our "danak" for our apartment this morning. This is a property-based tax and my wife and I had to pay 47 euros each. I also had to pay another 82 euros for our car. These taxes are annual, not like in the the UK where they are monthly. On the whole, properties in cities have higher danak and country houses are lower. If you have two properties, as we do, then of course you have to pay danak for both of them. Yes, it’s crazy how much lower the property taxes are there. Here, property taxes are many thousands of dol...

If you come over in March, of course there is no guarantee that you will find a house that you really want to buy. You may decide that you don't want to live in the VT region and so you might want to look at properties on the Black Sea coast or maybe near the border with Greece. My advice would be to stay flexible, with regards to location. Yes, you will need to be fairly close to a large town / city. At Daveri, we are about 50 or maybe 60 kms from VT and so it takes us the best part of an hour to get from our country house into the centre of VT. I would not want to be much further than that. Some country roads in Bulgaria have been upgraded and they make driving a pleasure, but some country roads are BAD. Yes, indeed. One of the reasons we really like the areas around and between Tryavna / Gabrovo, Dryanovo and Sevlievo... Then we can choose many options for towns to go for amenities while still being in nature. The Yantra? Or Danube? This is the Yakhovitsi reservoir, the ...

So many nice nature walks around VT... and Bulgaria in general! Even if you are looking at properties that are fairly close to each other, you probably cannot see more than three or four in one day. That would be my guess, if we are talking about country properties. Both to explore / look around / soak in the feel of the places... and to do serious property hunting. We likely won't be buying while we are there, as we won't have enough time to get everything checked properly... unless the perfect property falls into place! Yeah, driving around the mountains everywhere isn't going to make a lot of viewing possible Well, if you really like something, then you make an offer. If that offer is accepted by the vendor, then you proceed to the first or preliminary contract. The initial contract means that you put down a deposit (usually 10%) and the vendor takes the property off the market. He is not allowed to sell it to anyone else and you are not allowed to back out of th...

Lunch with the in-laws I am not quite sure why I married a Russian lady. It was just one of those things that happened. I remember reading War and Peace when I was about 12. At Oxford, in my final year, I lived in the House of St Gregory and St Macrina and there was a sprinkling of Russian Orthodox.  It was a few years ago, the summer of 2018, when I was last in the Crimea. After we left China, Irena said that I must go and see all of my in-laws and I said okay. When will I see them again? It has been more than four years since Irena saw any of her family and no one knows when this war with Ukraine will come to an end. Yes, she can talk to them over the Internet, but maybe for not much longer. The Russian government is trying to promote Max, their homegrown alternative to Skype, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In Simferopol, with Yevgenny, my brother-in-law My wife and I do not talk about politics. There is absolutely no point in discussing “the special military operation”. Ire...

Yes, you could go to a nice village and speak to the kermit (assuming that he or she speaks English) and ask, "Are there any properties for sale in your municipality?" The kermit might know some, but finding the kermit is not always easy. Different properties might be for sale through different agents, so you will have lots of different headches. (Some people spell it "khmet", not kermit, and he probably does not have a girl-friend called Miss Piggy.) Don't get me wrong. Some estate agents in Bulgaria are AWFUL. We have bought three different properties, so we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. Yeah, I know there's a lot of variance in the quality of agents. The biggest issue I've found is that, when you need to buy a lower priced house in particular, I really have no choice but to look at properties from multiple agencies to have enough options to work with. We need to find our forever home, not just one of multiple properties we will own. Un...