Bulgaria with Noodles

Recently there was some discussion on a Facebook group about why expat Brits would want to leave Bulgaria and go back to the UK.  In my experience, very few expats sell up and leave Bulgaria, although some do for family reasons or bereavement. Here is my contribution to the discussion. If your life in the UK had been so wonderful, then of course you would never have wanted to leave in the first place and you certainly would never have wanted to go and live in Bulgaria. Yes, it is true that learning the Bulgarian language is not exactly easy, if you really want to be fluent in it, but in reality Bulgarian is not much harder than French or German, once you have got over the novelty of the Cyrillic alphabet. In any case, why would you want to do something stupid like returning to the UK? Because you miss the fun of driving on the M25, aka the biggest carpark in Europe? Because the National Health Service is such a model of prompt and efficient patient care? Because all of the affordab...

If you do not count Metro, which is a bit like Cash & Carry in the UK and so you must have a membership card, then there are three supermarket chains in Bulgaria: Billa, Kaufland and Lidl. My dear wife, Irena, flatly refuses to shop at Billa. She says that it is way too expensive. This means that Irena and I are always going to either Kaufland or Lidl and sometimes we go to both on the same day. My dear wife loves the chicken and the pork at Kaufland, as well as the special offers, whereas Lidl rarely seems to have any special bargains. However, the cheese is a lot better in Lidl, she says, and generally Lidl is the cheaper of the two. I was therefore very interested in a video I saw on YouTube, entitled  What is the cost of living in Sofia? This video is on the YouTube “A Taste of Bulgaria” channel and here is the link, so that you can watch the whole video for yourself and then decide if you agree with me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdRkrNxfvX0&t=215s In order...

I do hope that my friend's mother finally received some medical treatment and that the problem with her ear has been sorted out. I have not had an email from him recently, so I do not know for sure. On a less serious note, we received a Christmas card drom the UK last week. Yes, the Bulgarian postal service is maintaining its high and professional standards with the delivery of a Christmas card in February. (Almost as slow as the NHS, in fact.)    It was a lovely card, except that it had a picture of a deer on it.  M y wife and I have some rather unhappy memories with regards to deer, especially the one that scared the **** out of both of us by jumping in front of the car and doing about two hundred pounds’ worth of damage. While we are on the subject of postal deliveries, this morning we received a letter from none other than the Greater-Footed Armfelt Bird. Nicholas took great pleasure in telling me that the “albino herons” that I had seen on the Yantra River, next to o...

Recently I received an email from my old friend and I was very sorry (and angry) to read about his mother’s ear problems. She has been in a lot of pain. Bloody National Health Service! What a flipping disgrace! You work hard and pay your taxes all your life and then what? When you really need the NHS, it isn’t there! Well, maybe it might be there, after you have waited three weeks to see your GP and then waited another year for an operation. Here in Bulgaria, the hospital in Veliko Tarnovo is not exactly ultra-modern. In fact, it is a bit tatty and could do with several coats of paint. However, Irena and I have always had fairly prompt treatment. Even if we turn up to our GP without an appointment, as we usually do, we do not have to wait more than an hour and sometimes we hardly have to wait. Just about every hospital in the UK charges about five quid an hour to park your car in the hospital carpark. In VT, I have never paid a penny to park my car near the hospital. I suppose, like mo...