Bulgaria with Noodles

After we drove back from Greece, we had a few days to get things ready. On the Sunday we had lunch at the cheap but rather good Chinese restaurant next to the church. Dave and Beth Kanelos of IBC had been running a Christian camp in Macedonia, so they wanted to say “thank you” to their co-workers and we were invited to the lunch as well. Lunch after church, with Dave, Beth and lots of IBC people My old friend from our teacher training college days, Peter Adams, has come to stay. Peter arrived on the Tuesday. I collected him from Sofia airport and we had a late lunch, followed by a wander around the huge park that is just across the road from our flat in Ulitsa Kozyak. Then on the Wednesday we went to see my school, St. George’s. Peter was suitably impressed by the amazing gym and the penthouse suite, complete with the fully-equipped bar and spectacular views of Mount Vitosha, but my security card does not give me access to the theatre and the swimming pool. Bother! Out on

I finally managed to persuade Irena to take a day off and to go somewhere more interesting than IKEA. She had been somewhat less than enthusiastic when I told her that I had bought the Itiwit kayak, but she was a bit more positive when we arrived at Lake Iskar. The lake is just south of Sofia's dreadful ring road and really it is a reservoir. Sofiots flock there at the weekends to go fishing, picnicking and they even get out onto the water. The Itwit inflatable kayak really is well-designed and it takes about six or seven minutes to get it ready for the water. (No, this blog is definitely NOT sponsored by Itiwit or Decathlon, just in case you were wondering!) The double-action pump works really well and you do not need any special knowledge or expertise. How you get from the land into the kayak is a bit awkward and you might just have to resign yourself to getting a bit wet and / or muddy. The bad news about paddling is that if you keep changing sides, first on the ri

It was, of course, the Water Rat in Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows who says what is probably one of the most famous quotations in the English language, the one about how enjoyable it is to be messing about in boats. (While I was in the Crimea, I re-read the book twice and was struck by its neo-paganism, especially the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”.)  Anyway, Peter and I took the Water Rat’s advice and went off to Decathlon, on Sofia’s ring road, to buy a three-man Itiwit kayak. It is excellent! (I wrote about the joys of kayaking in another piece for this blog, You can't have your kayak and heat it .) Just south of the ring road is Lake Iskar. It is really a reservoir for Sofia, but it is also a place where Sofiots go at the weekends, to get away from it all with some fishing and a picnic. We managed to find somewhere quite close to the lake to park and it took us about ten minutes to pump up the different parts of the kayak. Although it does

Oh dear. Right, no more silly kayak jokes. I have been looking at inflatable kayaks on the Decathlon website and it looks as though you can buy a very good two man inflatable kayak for about two hundred euros. The pump, the paddles and life vests will cost a bit more.   “But why buy an inflatable kayak?” I hear you ask. Well, an inflatable one can of course be deflated and packed into quite a small and convenient backpack. Solid, non-inflatable kayaks are a complete pain when it comes to transporting them. A car's roof rack is not really secure enough, so really you would need a trailer. With an inflatable kayak, you just deflate it, put it into the backpack, put the backpack into the car and drive home.  I have watched a YouTube video about the Itiwit inflatable kayak and it only took six or seven minutes to inflate. Stability is also very good, as there are two main air pockets, one on either side, as well as three small keels on the bottom. Probably it would als