Bulgaria with Noodles

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...

What has been happening in Downton Abbey ? Well, the youngest of the Crawley girls, the one who married the Irish chauffeur, has just died. Now on to more serious matters. I forgot to mention one of the weirdest things about the main station on the Sofia MTR. It is called "Serdica" and there are archaeological exhibits on the MTR platforms. In large class cases, there are bits of Roman architecture, statues and so on. Rather strange. Most of these Roman artifacts were found when the new MTR stations were being built. Just in case you were wondering, the Serdii was the local tribe who were living in the area when the Romans came along. In fact, in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, the city of Serdica became one of the largest and most prosperous in all of the Roman Empire. You are also wondering what an MTR ticket looks like. Well, here we have a genuine MTR ticket from the Sofia Metro.  Note the price: 1.60 leva. It is standard price, no matter how long or short y...

It was my hero Michael Palin, in his classic BBC series Around the World in Eighty Days , who said that railway stations do not intimidate and dehumanize people in the way that airports do. Well, we have been making so many train trips into Sofia over the last two weeks. The time-consuming visits to the notarius and the Microwave Woman are now over, but our dealings with the Russian visa office and the Nissan dealer are continuing. No sign of Hercule Poirot That means catching the train from Dragoman just after seven and arriving in Sofia's central railway station after eight. The main station has been transformed from the gloomy, pigeon-and-pickpocket hole that it was when we first started travelling in BG. With two years of teaching in Bucharest and a house in Bulgaria, Irena and I got to know this dark and dingy transport centre rather well. Nowadays it is a very different place, no doubt thanks to a generous dollop of EU money. It is much brighter and cleaner, ...

Lunch on the balcony of our villa in Kalotina is a multi-sensory experience. You can only have lunch out on the balcony when the weather is good. Well, we have had more than a week of rain and grey skies, so yesterday it was such a pleasure to have our lunch on the balcony, as we usually do in the summer. Firstly, my dear Irisha's Clavinova will be playing some piano music. It is not quite the same as having a live pianist playing a selection of different tunes, but it is almost as good. It is nice to listen to the Cla vinova tinkling away, while sipping a glass of wine. Then, of course, there is the food, as well as the wine! My Chinese friends will want to know all about the food, of course. We hardly eat any rice when we are in Bulgaria, but we do scoff our way through mountains of new potatoes and yummy Bulgarian bread. And the salads! The onions are big and sweet, the tomatoes are cheap (the other day Irena bought three kilos for one lev - or 4RMB, is you are in Chin...

Getting our new Bulgarian residency cards from the Microwave Oven Woman Rejoice! Let's celebrate. Hallelujah! At long last, the Microwave Woman has given us our new Bulgarian residency cards (BRCs). As a special treat, just in case you do not know what a BRC looks like, here is my old one.  My dear wife suggested that I should "black out" certain bits, as there are lots of evil people out there on the Internet, all gathering my personal and financial details in order to swindle me or involve me in some dreadful scandal or some such nonsense. Of course, no one who reads my blog could ever do such a nasty thing!   Getting our new BRCs means that we can go ahead with our applications for our Russian visas. Then, maybe two or three weeks later, our passports will be returned to us, with new Russian visas stuck into them. The other good news is that the insurance agent in Dragoman did not lose my car registration document. When she had finished giving me my new car ...

Boys, of all ages, love to play with trains. This blog has become rather negative. After two “Bad BG” posts, it is time for something positive. Yes, it is true that life here in Bulgaria has been very busy and rather stressful since we came back from China, just over a week ago. There has been a great deal of fuss about documents, copies and translations, plus lots of visits to the office of the notarius (the Bulgarian equivalent of a solicitor) and various dingy and run-down government offices. We need to do all of this in order to get our Bulgarian Residency Cards (BRCs) and we need these silly cards because we have to apply for Russian visas. Yes, I know it all sounds a bit crazy and this Kafkaesque nonsense seems to have been going on for ages. You cannot do much about official documents in Kalotina, so we have been traipsing into Sofia I do not know how many times. Usually we drive to Dragoman and then get the train into the city. Well, that is a...

Now it is time for some good news. Or maybe not. Art or just vandalism? On Monday morning, we woke up early once again and we took the train from Dragoman. Then we arrived in Sofia and went back to the notarius. First, we had to wait in the glass waiting room and then - guess what? Yes, we had to wait some more. It rather reminded me of my experiences in a Chinese bank. Then, eventually, we were told that we could come out of the greenhouse and go into the Inner Sanctum. There the assistant gave us the stamped and signed document for our Bulgarian residency cards, but he said that he could not do this for the other two documents, the ones for our freight company, AGS, because they did not have parallel English translations. (Oh, the joys of Google Translate!) Sofia station, yet again   AGS should really be called a "fright company" because it was such a shock when they told us how expensive it would be and giving them all of the documents is a nightmare as ...