Bulgaria with Noodles

Yes, you should be very careful when you pick wild mushrooms, whether in Bulgaria or anywhere else. You should be even more careful when you cook and eat them. They were very tasty, with a lot more flavour than the standard (and rather dull) ones you buy in the shops.  About an hour or so after lunch, I started to have a bit of a tummy ache and then Irena came downstairs and she said that she had been sick. As you can imagine, this was not good news and I started to feel a bit worse. By about five o'clock, I had also started vomiting and Irena was in a very bad way, shaking and hardly able to stand up. The ambulance was pretty quick, considering that it came all of the way from Veliko Tarnovo. The medic who came with the ambulance driver seemed to know his stuff and straight away he gave us both an injection and some horrible black liquid to drink. It mostly seemed to be a mixture of charcoal and water. Irena went to the hospital in the ambulance, while I drove our car, at breaknec...

Tina in Kalotina, contemplating the workings of the boiler I started writing this in the kitchen of our house in Kalotina. Every so often, there is a little “tinkle tinkle” sound. No, it is not that naughty little doggie, Tina, peeing again. No, it is the sound of the wood pellets falling down into the central heating boiler’s combustion chamber. Very clever, really. I wonder how it knows when to feed in some more pellets. The boiler also makes a golden glow, an orange light that bathes the room. It is like having your own pet dragon in your kitchen. The bad news, of course, is that the whole damn house is so blooming cold that it is going to take ages for the central heating system to warm up every room. Well, that is the main drawback of a pellet boiler, of course.  The boiler uses wood pellets (and lots of them!) The boiler itself takes ages to get going properly and then it takes even longer before the house starts to warm up. But when is the house going to war...

Yes, here it is. A real Russian visa! With the news about the poisoning in Salisbury still making the headlines, I was a bit worried that the Russian authorities would not allow British citizens to go to the Crimea, but hey ho! As well as the hassle of getting the Bulgarian residency cards, the Russian visas cost us 100 euros each, plus two trips into Sofia and the medical insurance (in addition to the medical insurance we already have for Bulgaria). In order to apply for the visas in the first place, Papa (my father-in-law) had to complete (and pay for) a special invitation and then we had to fill in two very long online visa application forms and print them out. When we get to Moscow, we will have a long taxi ride between the two different airports and that will not be cheap either! On the subject of fruit, a neighbour from across the road heard Zlatka complaining to Irena. It seems that I may have broken the window of her old Lada three years ago, when she gave me a l...