Bulgaria with Noodles

We are now back from Sinemorets and the return drive to Daveri was not quite as demanding as the journey to the Black Sea.  The good things? Well, the apartment was really well-equipped and had just about everything. Veleka Beach was – well, a beach. Not really sand, as it was fairly small stones. Quite pretty, if you like that sort of thing. I suppose that this part of the Black Sea coast, not far from the border with Turkey, reminds me a bit of Cornwall, without the dreadful possibility of meeting Nicholas Armfelt (thank goodness). The land is actually quite flat and then you have quite steep cliffs, little sandy coves and the fishing villages. Irena, for some strange reason, loves beaches and I think that they are pretty boring. I did manage to get some reading done:  Round the World in Eighty Days  (Michael Palin’s book of the BBC TV series),  The Wind in the Willows  (for maybe the tenth time),  Homage to Catalonia  (all about the Spanish Civil Wa...

Dear Adam, I had to write and tell you how much I enjoyed reading  Kings of the Yukon . This book has a kind of watery, flowing quality to the writing. Well done!    Lone Wolf  seems to have attracted some very positive reviews. (Yes, I will be ordering a copy from Amazon.) Is it a kind of metaphor for Europe, I wonder? Although Slavc somehow managed to cross the Alps to Italy, human migration seems to attract a lot of negative comments. When we had a house north of Sofia, near the border with Serbia, my wife was out in the garden one afternoon and lots of the dogs in the village were barking. Then she heard a long, low sound, coming from the mountains. It was a wolf. All of the dogs were suddenly silent. She said that it was very weird. I daresay you collected quite a few strange tales while you were researching  Lone Wolf.   As for me, your old teacher and his wife are still in Bulgaria. We left China about five years ago and then I did about eighteen mo...

This morning, I received another email from Adam Weymouth, one of my old students at Norman Court. That is Adam, on the right, in the white shirt. As well as coming to the Czech Republic with a group of Norman Court students, I also remember Adam as my brilliant Mortimer in Arsenic and Old Lace and then he went on to Winchester College. He has become quite a talented writer and in fact he won the  Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year  award for his first book,  Kings of the Yukon . Well, yes, it is all about salmon, but it is certainly not the rather tame but decidedly yummy fish from Kaufland that goes so well with my wife's homemade mayonnaise and a glass of Chardonnay.  It is all about wild salmon in Alaska, in case you were wondering.  Adam's writing is really rather good and it has a kind of poetry, a flowing and liquid quality that fits in with the fishy subject. However, the book is also very much about the human / fish interactions along the way, as th...

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 is 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 probl...

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.