Bulgaria with Noodles

In Around the World in Eighty Days , my hero Michael Palin famously described the city of Alexandria as being “like Cannes with acne". Maybe Yalta used to be like Bournemouth with boils, but it was very different when Irena and I went there for the day. I had not been back to Yalta since before Irena and I were married. In a few ways, it was much the same (the mountains frowning down on the sea, the cypress trees, the vineyards and the church that does impressions of a wedding cake). But really Yalta is now quite a different place. Yes, the beach is still a painful and pebbly Via Dolorosa if you want a swim in the murky seawater. (And, just in case you were wondering, the water in the Black Sea is not actually black.) Wedding cake church in Yalta On the busy streets, you can still buy kvas , even though I am not sure how to spell it. ( But why would anyone want a stinky drink made from fermented bread?) Twenty-five years ago, kvas was served in jam jars, but now ...

Most Russians live in apartment blocks these days and so many of the city dwellers want to have something that is peculiarly Russian: a datcha . If I said that this was a "country house", then you might think of a French chateau or an English stately home, whereas a  datcha is usually quite a humble affair, a small bungalow or even a hut. Some have electricity and running water, but many do not. Sometimes you get to your datcha by driving on a proper road, but in most cases it will be a rough, muddy track for the final kilometres. Fruit trees, flowers and vegetables are the order of the day in the datcha . Nothing very special or splendid, just a simple, rural home-from-home. Picking blackcurrants for Mamulichka. Although Mamuluchka also has ducks and chickens, this is not normal because many Russians only go to the datcha at the weekends and holidays. A datcha , therefore, is more like an allotment with somewhere to live, but the living space is sometimes not ...

It must have been about twenty-five years ago when I was first in Simferopol and in Kiev. In those days, the Crimea was still very much part of the Ukraine and it was the era of perestroika , or maybe just after that difficult time. What I saw then made a big impression on me. Those who are so quick to criticize Putin's "illegal occupation" of the Crimea should do a bit of research and find out how dreadful things really were back then.  I remember that in the summer it was 18,000 Ukrainian  kuponi to the pound; by Christmas, 24,000. I remember having to pay to use the beach at Yalta. Then there were valutni magazini , the well-stocked shops for those with foreign currency. These valutni shops had almost no customers at all and all of the prices were in US dollars. The local shops, by way of contrast, were full of empty shelves or there were maybe just a few jars with some mysterious brown liquid in them. A strange object could sometimes be made out, f...

Yesterday I received a couple of WeChat messages from Miss Yanee, who was my assistant when I was teaching at Green Oasis School in Shenzhen. She has been having a great time canoeing in Thailand. （ She was always "Miss Yanee" in class and she always called me "Mr Hill" in front of the students, but I insisted on her calling me "Simon" when we were alone. ） At the moment, I still do not really feel that I have retired. It is still the summer holiday and school will not be starting again for another week or two. When I come back from the Crimea, then maybe I will start to feel "retired". I started writing this piece for my blog in Terminal 2 of Sofia airport. Now I am in Vnukovo, located somewhere near the Moscow ring road -Russia's equivalent of the M25. And just like the M25, there were lots of traffic jams, but fortunately most of them were on the other side of the six-lane highway. I miss Miss Yanee very much. No, it w...

Just before breakfast, we received this WeChat message from Julia, who has now safely returned to Shenzhen from the USA. This morning, when I took Diudiu for a walk, she insisted to go to the direction of your apartment in SZ. I let her keep walking until the exit of metro station, but she still wanted to go downstairs and keep walking to your place. Then I told her Uncle Simon and Auntie Irena weren’t there because they went back to Bulgaria. She seemed like understood what I’m talking about and she looked very upset. I think she must miss you guys so much. We miss you too, Diudiu! And in case you were wondering what has been happening in Downton Abbey , it's all over between Lady Mary and Lord Gillingham, Carson has proposed, Robert has guessed that Marigold is Edith's daughter and Anna has been released from prison.

The Elephant Bookshop is going to be one of my favourite places in Sofia. Well, I have only been there once. It's welcoming, friendly, quirky and full of reasonably-priced and very readable English language books. Nothing by P.J. O'Rourke, alas, but I left my umbrella behind and so that means that I will have to go back there again. (That sounds a bit like throwing a coin into the Trevi fountain in Rome. There was also the curious story about the RAF pilot who left his brush and comb in a London hotel. Years later, when the war was over, he went back to the hotel and there was his brush and comb set.) English bookshops are few and far between in Bulgaria. Most of the BG bookshops do not have any English books at all or maybe a few worthy but dull classics. So why was I in the Elephant Bookshop? Because I am going to be spending 13 hours ( not 17, as I mistakenly wrote in a previous post) in an airport in Moscow. 13 hours instead of 17. It is a bit like telling a co...

A few months ago I wrote a piece for my blog about learning Mandarin, Character Building . Now I am going to write something about learning Bulgarian. I remember that I had a CD and a little book called Easy Peasy Mandarin . It probably is part of a series: Easy Peasy Brain Surgery , Easy Peasy Rocket Science and Easy Peasy Quantum Mechanics . Well, compared to learning Mandarin, learning Bulgarian really is easy , but then again learning just about any language would be easy, compared to Mandarin. So what makes Bulgarian (relatively) easy? Well, first of all, there is an alphabet. Yes, okay, some of the letters are not the same because an H in Bulgarian is X, whereas an N is an H! The “ya” sound is made by a letter that looks like an R but it is the wrong way round, while the Bulgarian “S” sound is written like a C. While the Bulgarian alphabet is supposed to be based on the Greek letters, some things have been changed a bit over the years. So, yes, the alphabet is a bit of...