Bulgaria with Noodles

A few months ago I wrote a piece for my blog about learning Mandarin, Character Building . Now I am going to write something about learning Bulgarian. I remember that I had a CD and a little book called Easy Peasy Mandarin . It probably is part of a series: Easy Peasy Brain Surgery , Easy Peasy Rocket Science and Easy Peasy Quantum Mechanics . Well, compared to learning Mandarin, learning Bulgarian really is easy , but then again learning just about any language would be easy, compared to Mandarin. So what makes Bulgarian (relatively) easy? Well, first of all, there is an alphabet. Yes, okay, some of the letters are not the same because an H in Bulgarian is X, whereas an N is an H! The “ya” sound is made by a letter that looks like an R but it is the wrong way round, while the Bulgarian “S” sound is written like a C. While the Bulgarian alphabet is supposed to be based on the Greek letters, some things have been changed a bit over the years. So, yes, the alphabet is a bit of...

 Pancakes with Stefan & Poli My post about buying property in Bulgaria, Why buy BG , seems to have collected more "hits" than any of the other pages of my blog. In the interests of fairness, I am therefore going to write a few lines about why you should NOT buy a property in Bulgaria. I will try to be as objective as possible. Yes, I love my adopted land, but even a Bulgarophile like me has to admit that this country does have its downsides.  An abandoned house in Kalotina If you buy a property anywhere outside the capital, Sofia, then it is not going to appreciate in value. Silly Brits have this idea that buying a house is always a good idea because it must go up in value and this is not true in BG. A country house in Bulgaria is simply NOT a good investment. It will not go up in value and, if you do try to sell it, then you probably will not be able to get back what you paid for it. (That is, of course, assuming that you can find a buyer at all!)  The...

You will, I am sure, be glad to know that I am not an estate agent. Yes, I have done some silly things in my life, but I have never worked for a real estate company and no, I am not sponsored by the Bulgarian government. Go to the Med, turn right. Now the first question that many of you may have is this one: where is Bulgaria ? Well, it is tucked away in the south-eastern corner of Europe, bordering Serbia , Greece , Romania and Turkey . The capital is Sofia , which is in the western half of Bulgaria , and the second city is Plovdiv . To the east is the Black Sea coast and there are the ports of Burgas and Varna .  Veliko Tarnovo is more or less in the centre of Bulgaria and it was the old capital, before Sofia became the capital. Greece is just around the corner and there are overnight trains to Romania and to Turkey, so you can go to bed in Sofia and wake up in Bucharest or in Istanbul.   In Bulgaria , the main language that most people speak is –...