Bulgaria with Noodles

WALKIES for a naughty and fat little doggie Well, the Internet connection for ZOOM was not working properly on my birthday and this meant that I gave up on my online lessons with Grade 3. It was a sunny day, with a blue and almost cloudless sky. Instead of sitting in front of my laptop, I went for a walk in the beautiful Bulgarian countryside, with my dear Irisha and Tina, that naughty little dog.  Along the River Nishava With all of the roadworks still going on in the road outside our house, we went out the back way, through "the Secret Garden", the little bit of land that is next to our garden and between our garden and the river. The Secret Garden does not seem to belong to anyone, so we have taken it over. Mostly we use this piece of land for bonfires and of course we gather the walnuts from the big tree.  A View ON a Bridge, not From It Through the Secret Garden and then along the River Nishava we went. Most of the water for the "river" co...

This morning we went for a lovely walk in the woods, not far from our apartment in Veliko Tarnovo. Veliko Tarnovo (or "VT", as we usually call it) is quite a small and compact city, so you are never far from the countryside.  Our apartment is in Assenova, the area down the hill from Tsaravets and over the bridge. This means that our apartment is just on the edge of the city and so in a few minutes you are out in the countryside.   We went along by the River Yantra and then up the hill to the spring next to the road. There is a quite a good path that leads from the spring and up into the woods.  The autumnal colours of the trees were wonderful: reds, greens, browns, oranges and yellows.  For most of our walk, the sun was shining and it still felt like summer, but it is nearly the end of October. Soon the temperature is going to fall and winter will be with us again. The spring water tasted delicious, but it was very COLD. I ...

If you have read the book, then you will know that Holes is really a lot of metaphors. Yes, there are the literal holes that are dug by the not-so-happy campers at Camp Green Lake, but just about all of the characters in the story have holes, flaws or gaps or something missing from their characters. The palindromic hero of the book, Stanley Yelnats, is missing a lot of things: luck, friends and then his family, after he is sent to Camp Green Lake. Zero has a huge emotional hole: his mother has disappeared from his life. Even the evil Warden, a sort of latter-day American Cruella de Vil, has an emotional hole, the desire for the outlaw Kissing Kate Barlow’s missing loot. (KB also had a hole in her heart, after her black boyfriend was murdered by the lynch mob.)  And there go your shockabsorbers. But the biggest hole in the whole story (no pun intended!) is one that the novel touches on again and again, but does not really fill in properly: what do you do with “bad” ad...

Kalotina and Berende Izvor are two villages in Bulgaria that I have come to know quite well. They are only about one kilometre apart, yet they are rather different. I suppose the most important difference is that Kalotina is a village that is dying or almost dead now, whereas Berende Izvor seems to be pretty much alive. Why is one village so full of decaying and abandoned houses, while the other one still seems to have some life in it? In Kalotina, there are some houses that are still inhabited, but even they look unkempt and neglected. Raina and Rangel's house in Kalotina Both villages are on the map because of the River Nishava. In Berende Izvor, the Nishava is really still a stream, as you can jump over it, but by the time it leaves Kalotina it is a river. “Izvor” in Bulgarian means “bubbling” and, sure enough, there is a spring that bubbles up from the rock and then it flows away to join several other springs that eventually form the Nishava. Our Bulgarian friend ...

The back garden Yesterday’s walk in Lizhi Park here in Shenzhen was enjoyable. The sky was absolutely blue, without a single cloud, and in the Sun (and out of the cold wind) it was as warm as toast. At night, our apartment is so cold, as the windows are not double-glazed and you can feel the cold air coming in. But shivering at night here in Shenzhen made me think of the winters in Bulgaria. We have only experienced part of one BG winter, so how are we going to cope with the real thing next year? Walnuts from our trees It all starts with Autumn (or Fall, if you are an American). This is a wonderful time in the Bulgarian countryside, with walnuts and mushrooms to be found. Here are just a few of the walnuts we collected from the trees at the end of our garden. Our villa is next to an abandoned orchard, so we are going to follow Auntie Bulgaria’s example and have a go at making lots of cider. Even by the middle of October it can be chilly in Kalotina, as we discovered ba...

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 –...