Bulgaria with Noodles

So tasteful and artistic The honeymoon is over and so we have to get on with the trials and tribulations of married life. No, I am not talking about Irisha and me. Bulgaria is my subject, especially what is so blooming awful about this country. First moan: graffiti. Young Bulgarians feel an irresistible urge to spray paint both the new and the old. The Bulgarian state railways bought some smart and modern trains, so let's spray paint them with stupid slogans and rubbishy "street art". There are heaps of crummy crumbling Commie concrete buildings around Sofia, so let's spray paint them and make them look even worse.  Falling to bits   Next whinge: alcoholism. BG has a serious booze problem. At Dragoman station today, I noticed vodka and beer being bought before 8am. Not surprisingly, the faces of many people in Bulgaria are unpleasant, frowning, miserable and darkened by alcohol. Hard booze makes people's facial expressions horrible, like the faces of ...

Our apartment is full of bags and suitcases. The wardrobes, walls and the bookcase are looking decidedly bare. AGS are supposed to be coming on Thursday afternoon, to take all of our stuff to Bulgaria. 14,000RMB! Well, we thought that it might be a lot less than that. Oh well! The other day our landlady asked us to take some photos of the apartment, as she wants to find a new tenant asap. I am including the photos as part of this post. So do you know anyone who wants to rent a two-bedroomed flat in the centre of Shenzhen? T he good news is that it is central, right in the heart of Shenzhen. We love living right next to the park. Lianhuacun MTR station is a few hundred metres away and the Children’s Palace MTR is only a bit further away. It takes me about twenty-five minutes to walk to school in the morning. The bad news? The smells are dreadful. Sometimes there are ghastly sewage smells coming from the drains and sometimes horrible cooking odours come under the do...

Just over a week ago we had the World Scholar’s Cup at Green Oasis. For most of this semester I have been coaching the twenty-four students in Years 5 and 6 who were going to take part in this competition. It is a rather academic mixture of general knowledge quiz, essay writing challenge and debating competition.  All of the students who took part in the WSC were given an alpaca. They had to promise to be good alpaca parents, to look after their alpacas properly and not eat them. I was also given a small alpaca, but it looks as though he is going to be left behind in China. I know a little girl who would be a good alpaca parent. Judy and Wyatt, two students from my own Year 5 class, did rather well and of course I was very pleased about that. What was not so good was that it went on (and on) and in fact I did not get home on the Friday night until 9pm. After a long week of school, that was tough. Yesterday the man from the AGS freight company came to our apartment, t...

A photo of the Pirin Mountains in Bulgaria. Well, why not? Ever since I started writing one myself, I have become an avid reader of other people's blogs, especially if they are in any way connected with Bulgaria. Auntie Bulgaria, otherwise known as Claire Ruston, has been writing an excellent blog for quite some time now and you can read this blog by going to www.auntiebulgaria.blogspot.com Recently Claire was excited because her little lemon trees have at last started to produce lemons for the first time . (Gin and tonics, here we come!) Here is my comment and Claire's reply. A lemon tree, my dear Watson! I am very impressed by the citrus surplus that you are about to have, Claire. Lemons usually cost a fortune in Bulgaria. Did you bring your lemon tree into the house during the winter? Or did it somehow survive in the wonky polytunnel? What about the asparagus? Does it really take FOUR years before they start producing a good crop of spears? Any special asparag...

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...

No blade cuts blade - a forlorn lawn is waiting for me There are now 45 days to go, to the end of my teaching career. Well, it has been quite interesting: the UK for about twenty years, followed by my misadventures in foreign parts: Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Romania, Qatar, the UAE and now China. On Thursday, 14 th June, 2018, I shall be teaching my last-ever lessons at Green Oasis School and then on Monday, 18th, we will be flying to Bulgaria. "The Tear", one of the Rila Lakes As you may have noticed, this blog is called “Bulgaria with Noodles” because Irena and I are still in China, but in many ways our hearts are already in BG. But what will we do, once we have settled down in Bulgaria? A lot of travelling is fairly high on the list of priorities. The Rila Lakes (there are supposed to be seven altogether) A Church with a View, aka Asenovgrad The truth is, we really do not know most of Bulgaria. Sofia, Kalotina and a Veliko Tarnovo: that is abou...

Today it is exactly three months to go before I retire, so of course I spend a lot of my time crossing off the days and thinking about what I am going to do once I have come to the end of my teaching career. No more boring meetings, for one thing – three this week – and I will not have to check that the alarm clock is set to go off at 5.30am. In fact, I might even give away my alarm clock and not bother having one at all. There's no boredom with a snowboard. However, one of my main pleasures is thinking about what we are going to spend our money on over the summer and when we return from the Crimea. (That is, of course, if we actually go to the Crimea. The British government and Mr. Putin are not the best of friends at the moment.) I once tried skateboarding, when I was about 15. It was fun, but falling off a skateboard onto concrete or tarmac is probably a lot more painful than falling off a snowboard onto snow. How difficult can snowboarding be? Okay, so we do not ...