The Leaving of Liverpool, Part 4

Goodbye, Jack and Rachel!

After church on Sunday, we had yet another wonderful meal with our dear Chinese friends, Bill and Julia. I love Turkish food!

Tomorrow (yes, tomorrow!) are getting on the plane tonight and it takes off from HK at about eleven. We get to Istanbul about six in the morning, hang around the airport for a while, change planes and finally arrive in Sofia at about nine in the morning. This means that we should finally get home to Kalotina at about eleven or twelve o'clock in the morning, all being well.

The Turkish restaurant in SZ, with Bill and Julia

I am writing this in our very, very empty apartment. We threw out loads of junk and of course we spent a fortune on the freight. 17,000RMB is about two thousand pounds. Ouch! Well, the alternative was just to throw it all away. We also gave lots of bits and pieces to our friends Bill and Julia. It is surprising how much clutter and how many possessions you can acquire in five years, but of course we cannot take it all with us on the plane tonight.

Yes, I am still keen on getting an Itiwit Kayak from Decathlon. I think that the “three man” kayak would be better than the “two man”. It is just a bit bigger and so there would be some more space, if you wanted to take lots of camping gear with you. There is also a huge lake / reservoir just south of Sofia, Lake Iskar, where Peter and I can test it! I have also been reading articles about kayaking on the Dordogne River in southern France. That looks absolutely amazing.

Queuing at the Turkish Airlines check-in

I think that I have already mentioned to you that we are supposed to be going to the Crimea at the beginning of August, but that rather depends on getting Russian visas. The political situation between the UK and Russia is not good, especially after the spy poisoning business in Salisbury, and of course the Russians do NOT want foreigners going to the Crimea. (This is because lots of countries, the UK included, think that Russia is “illegally occupying” the Crimea.) To make things a bit more complicated, we also have to get our Bulgarian residency cards renewed BEFORE we can sort out the Russian visas. Maybe this will just be a formality, like renewing your driving licence, or perhaps we will have to get lots of silly bits of paper and health insurance and all other kinds of nonsense, like we had to do the first time we got the cards.

HK airport, for the last time?

My blog is cruising to 14,000 “hits” and I have just finished my 60^th post. That is all pretty good going, when you recall that I only started writing it in October.

Any other news? Well, so far retirement has been tough. There are no holidays, no days off. It’s just retirement, retirement, every day. I do not know how I will cope with the pressure. My dear Irisha says that I am not retired, as I am just having my summer holiday, and I will not be properly retired until September. Yes, well, maybe.

Goodbye to the lovely Miss Yanee!

I must say, it did feel good to throw away piles of useless school junk. The deputy head at Green Oasis used to be a really nice Indian guy, Mr Percy, but he has been replaced by a not-so-nice person, and so I am very glad to be avoiding him! The new person is also a great fan of the Council of International Schools (CIS) Accreditation and of course I think that CIS is a Clever International Swindle or maybe just Completely Irrelevant Silliness. So, all in all, this person is yet another good reason for retiring!

Although I started off writing this in our apartment, we are now in the airport in Hong Kong. Check in and security was not quite so bad as usual and our dear Chinese friends, Bill and Julia, drove us to the Futian Checkpoint. From there, it was a walk across the bridge to the Hong Kong border, then the metro train from Lok Ma Chow to Sheng Shui, and then finally number 43, the airport bus to the HK airport on Lantau.

Now I am sitting in the departure lounge, having just changed the last of our HK dollars into USDs. In about an hour, it will be time to board our Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul and then on to Sofia tomorrow morning. They usually give you quite good food on the HK-Istanbul flight, but sometimes you do not feel like eating supper at nearly midnight.

When we arrive home in Kalotina, the first thing will be to get the water and the electricity turned on. This is not always easy, especially when the electricity company disconnect you for not paying that bill six months ago. While I am sorting out these problems, our neighbour Zlatka will inevitably arrive, in order to have a long natter (in rather broken Russian) with my dear Irisha and to tell her all of the latest local news. Then I will have to get the car back on the road, after recharging the battery and inflating a couple of flat tyres. After that, Dragoman will be our first port of call, in order to fill up the car with petrol and buy some engine oil and a vignette (a sort of road tax). Then we will go to the supermarket, to buy the ingredients for a triumphant homecoming luncheon. By tradition, this lunch will be eaten on the balcony, while we listen to some piano music being played on Irena’s Clavinova.

I am now in the departure lounge in Istanbul, waiting for our flight to Sofia. It is twenty past six in the morning, rather colder and wetter than China and I am just a bit tired, as our flight was about ten hours and I did not get much sleep. The food was, as usual, delicious and I simply had to scoff every bit, even though we did not have normal mealtimes on the plane. And I watched the end of Goodbye Christopher Robin.