Bulgaria with Noodles

It really started about two years ago, when we had insulation stuck onto the outside of the house. Tako and his team came to our villa in Kalotina and they started sticking large polystyrene blocks onto all of the exterior walls. Then they put a plastic mesh on top of the blocks and covered that with the yellow-coloured plaster. It looked so much better, as the old white paint was decidedly shabby and, much more importantly, it made the house wonderfully cool in the summer and, we hope, warm in the winter too. The insulation also made the house much quieter inside, as external noises were muffled. The middle of the house could be bitterly cold in the winter, as heat escaped under or round the front door. The solution to that problem was to fit another external door. As well as keeping in the warmth, the second front door makes us feel much more secure and it is a deterrent to anyone who is thinking of breaking in. Another important step when preparing for winter’s icy...

Our apartment in Veliko Tarnovo has quite a few air conditioning / heating units, installed by our friend Ivo, the Bulgarian engineer who lives along the street from us, but we also wanted to have a woodburner in the sitting room. As well as giving us the usual warmth and the pretty flames, we felt that a woodburning stove would be a good idea because we would still be able to have some heating if there was a power cut. (In Kalotina, power cuts happen quite often and the electricity sometimes does not come on again for an hour or so.) This is why we went to the Prity factory a few years ago and bought our rather smart Prity woodburning stove. There are, however, one or two little problems with woodburners. First of all, you need to connect the stove with the chimney flue. This meant a trip to Praktiker, to buy the metal tubes that go from the back of the stove to the round hole in the wall. I also bought a heat exchanger, as I thought that this might perhaps cool down the temp...

If I am feeling good and charitable, then I go downstairs, first thing in the morning, and make a mug of tea for my dear wife Irena and also one for me. Well, yesterday was one of those good days and so I duly went downstairs, in my quest for early morning cuppas. I also lit the woodburning stove. This meant that the kitchen was warmy and toasty when we came downstairs for our breakfast. I was feeling that the world was actually a pretty good place as the eggs and the slice of ham sizzled in the frying pan.  I was just about to pour myself a cup of coffee when Irena announced that the kitchen was on fire. The paper that some silly idiot (yes, alright, it was me) had put under the stove had caught light and there was a danger that the large of pile of firewood that someone had put underneath the stove (yes, alright, me again) would also catch fire. So there was quite a lot of smoke and noise and and a nasty smell and general confusion.  Eventually the flames were extin...

When we tried to order some more firewood from the builders’ merchant in Dragoman, they said there was a problem: they have too many customers. Oh dear! I do feel sorry for them. This meant that we had to drive to Slivnitsa to order the wood. This morning we went into the Secret Garden, as usual, and collected the walnuts. There were more than usual, as it was quite cold during the night and that meant that more nuts split their green shells and had fallen down onto the grass. After breakfast we cleared what was left of the old firewood from under the concrete steps. Some of that wood is destined for the Einhell, as I can probably cut it up and it can be used in our woodburners, either the cooking stove in the kitchen or the smaller one in the sitting room. Some of it is just too big to cut up with the Einhell and I do not have a large and powerful chainsaw. Another problem was that some of it was rotten, so it all had to go to the Secret Garden to be burned. Yes, it is a bit wa...

It's done. Yes, it is finally finished, complete and done, but maybe not yet dusted properly. (In fact, my dear sweet wife had one or two sharp things to say about the dusting – or the lack of it - when she returned home from the Crimea today.) The new central heating system is something that we have been talking about, planning and intending to get done and now it is actually done. So all we need to do now is to work out how to switch it on. Of course, it does not help that the instruction manual is in Bulgarian and there is no electrical socket next to the main boiler. The control panel is really a little computer and you can understand what it tells you if you have a PhD in Computer Science. In Bulgarian. The engineer chap who came yesterday, to give the system its final adjustments, tweaks and fiddling, did not speak much English, but he did get it all working and boy, it was hot! The flames were pretty and the electric fan certainly does its job, making those ...

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...