Dear Peter, Part 1

Peter is one of my oldest friends. I am including a few photographs from 2018, when he visited us in Bulgaria (yet again!) We went to Plovdiv and came back with a naughty little dog.

Dear Peter,

How are you, old fellow? I have not had an e-mail from you for a while, so I can only assume that you are still recovering from all of the extra strain and the stress of overwork. I really am glad that I do not have to do any more of that online teaching nonsense.  

Well, in some ways I suppose that you should be grateful that you do in fact have a job, as lots of people in the UK seem to have lost or are about to lose theirs. Thank goodness you are not an airline pilot! However, I reckon that quite a lot of independent schools will have gone bust by the time this is all over.

But when is this Coronavirus pandemic going to be over? So far, there have been about 45,000 deaths in the UK and 140,000 in the USA. Some commentators think that in America the death count might be as high as 200,000 or even 300,000. (Only 60,000 Americans lost their lives in the Vietnam War, while about 400,000 died in the whole of WW2.)

The other day I had to go into Sofia and the Nissan X Trail was a joy to drive. With the new gearbox, it is much quieter and the fuel economy seems to be pretty good. Once or twice I put my foot down and the acceleration was great. As for the all of the work they are doing on the road from Belgrade to Sofia, you just would not believe it.

What other news is there? On Tuesday next week, Dimitar, Stefan’s nephew, is coming to Kalotina with his family. They will be looking around our house because they are seriously interested in buying it. Then we hoping to go to the notarius (a special sort of lawyer) and we will sign lots of documents, as Dimitar says that he is interested in buying our property for €40,000. This is a bargain, I think, as we originally bought it for €30,000. 

On the other hand, the price we paid included all of the

legal fees and Bulgarian Properties’ rather large commission. Penka, the old lady we originally bought the house from, only received twenty thousand! This leads me to think that even if we were to advertise the house for sixty thousand, we would have to pay a big fat commission to BP and higher taxes too (there is a property tax in BG, a bit like stamp duty in the UK). That is, of course, assuming that we could indeed find someone to buy it at a higher price. I am therefore not too bothered about selling this house for only forty, especially as there are very few foreign buyers here in Bulgaria at the moment because no one is flying anywhere. (Most Bulgarians are not usually interested in buying the more expensive properties.) When houses are not lived in, they deteriorate very quickly and they acquire a horrible mouldy smell, so a quick sale is what we want.

As I think I have already mentioned, we have signed the preliminary contract and it says that Allan, the vendor of the house in Daveri, must complete the sale by the end of August. However, we are hoping that he will get a move on and perhaps things will happen before then.

How are we going to shift all of our bits and pieces from Kalotina to VT? It is a major headache and at some point we are going to hire a minibus for a day or two. (No, we are not going to be driving all the way back to the UK, just in case you were wondering.)

We have already started moving some things from our apartment in Ulitsa Kozyak to our apartment in VT. We will be taking more stuff and making another trip to VT at the end of next week. (Thank goodness that our apartment in VT has a big loft and a loft ladder!) Most of our furniture here in Kalotina is going to be left behind because we really cannot be bothered to shift it all. Although Allan has promised that the house in Daveri will be “furnished”, that could mean different things to different people!

Sylvana, my lawyer in Sofia, has been working very hard and she has said that the whole process of selling the house will cost me somewhere between three and four thousand euros. This will include her legal fees, property tax (in Bulgaria that is 3 or 4 percent) and the fee for the notarius. We had a bit of a panic recently, as Dimitar was worried that the garage had been built without planning permission. (That would mean, of course, that the local authority could demand its demolition!) Anyway, I managed to find the document that says that Dragoman did in fact authorize the building of the garage (sign of relief). Having lots of papers that are all written in Bulgarian can be a bit of a headache sometimes.  

Whenever I watch the BBC news, it is all about the pandemic. Here in Kalotina, we can more or less forget all about it. It was much the same in VT, when we were there a couple of weeks ago.

Well, after we have finished our business at the notarius, we will probably be going back to Sofia for a few days and then I will have to go to school and hand in the keys for our apartment in Ulitsa Kozyak. We will be sad to leave it, as it has been nice to live next to a huge park and near to the MTR. Then we will go to VT and wait for Allan to move out!

Best wishes from Kalotina,

Simon