Bulgaria with Noodles

Years ago, I tried to read The Trial by Kafka. It is not a cheerful book. The title is German is Der Process and at the moment I am going through a very Kafkaesque process. Yes, I have a new teaching job, at St. George's International School in Sofia. That is the good news.  The bad news is that I need a Police certificate from the copshop in Shenzhen, to say that I was a good boy while I was in China.  The good news is that Alicia, the wonderful HR lady at GOS, has replied to my e-mail and she has  promised to help me get this certificate from the SZ Fuzz.  The bad news was that first I had to get the Power of Attorney document translated from Mandarin into English and Bulgarian. Then the three documents all needed to be stamped by a notarius , after which the documents went to the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry. The BFM told me no, go away. The Ministry of Justice will stamp them for you, Mr Hill. I found the Justice Ministry behind the Ivan Vzov National The...

Irisha, my dear wife, loves second-hand clothes shops. She was very pleased to discover that there are rather a lot of them in Sofia. Yes, the smell is usually pretty horrible, but the bargains you can find are just too good to miss. (Bring a clothes peg if the stink really bothers you.) On Friday we had yet another visit to Sofia, as part of my ongoing battle to get my Chinese Police clearance certificate sorted out. The woman in the microwave oven at the Justice Ministry did not charge me much for the official stamp or apostille or whatever it is that they are going to put onto my documents, only 6 leva, but she told me to come back the following week. This meant that we had the rest of the morning before us and therefore Irena decided that we were going to visit some second-hand clothes shops. First we found a very nice (and very warm) anorak with a fur-lined hood. It fits me really well. Then we had the discovery of the morning: an excellent and very snazzy ski jac...

Red peppers, mushrooms and pieces of sausage There is one bad memory that I have that is to do with China. This bad memory is to do with the Chinese Embassy here in Sofia. The first time I went to get our Z visas, more than five years ago, it was a disaster. I queued for ages, but they would not even let me into the building. Finally the guard sent me away and told me to come back on another day. Great! It took me about an hour and a half to get to the Chinese Embassy from our villa in Kalotina. Eventually I did manage to get inside, but I had to queue up at five o’clock in the morning. There were already seventeen people ahead of me in the queue and some of them had been there all night. Finally, I did get into the building, at about eleven o’clock, and the Chinese official who looked at all of my papers scrutinised every line of every document. When she had finished, she went through them all again.  The petchka in action I did, however, score one or two little point...

I promised you a big piece of news and here it is: I have a new teaching job in Sofia, starting in January. Yes, yes, I do know that I am supposed to be retired and in many ways I was looking forward to being retired. Now, however, I miss the buzz of school life and there is not much for us to do in Kalotina in the winter. Blogger in interview mode On Monday I went for what was supposed to be an “informal chat” with the headmaster of St. George’s School in Sofia. The photos on the school website make the new school building look quite posh (and huge) and the head also has quite a posh name, Justin Kilcullen-Nichols. The salary is not quite so impressive, alas, but the important thing is that we are going to get an apartment in Sofia as part of the deal. There is no way that I can commute from Kalotina each day. (It is at least an hour and a half’s drive from our house to the far side of Sofia.) The not-quite-finished-but-still-amazing theatre at St. George's School ...

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...

Walnuts, for a special Russian salad Our dining room in Kalotina is one of my favourite rooms in the house (or anywhere else). All around the walls are pictures, mementoes and souvenirs of our various wanderings and foreign peregrinations: Romania, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kenya and China. The dining table and the chairs are from England and we brought them with us in the van we hired and drove to Bulgaria, a few months after we bought the house. Originally the dining room was just going to be a rather dark and gloomy store room when Penka and her husband originally built the house, but we had part of a wall knocked down to connect the dining room to the kitchen. We also had a new window put in, giving us a view of the garden. These things made the dining room a much brighter and more interesting room. Beetroot and walnut salad The best thing about the dining room is, of course, my dear wife’s cooking. Here are a few photos of some recent highlights.  The c...

We have now been back in Kalotina for about a week, having returned from Veliko Tarnovo rather earlier than we had planned. (Yes, there is a big secret attached to that one, but you will have to wait a bit more before I reveal it.) The weather has been wonderfully warm and sunny, even though it is nearly the end of October, so on Saturday we decided to go for a walk along the river.  The River Nishava is really not much more than a big stream when it flows through the village of Kalotina. A lot of the water comes from the springs in Berende Izvor and so the river has kept flowing, even though we have had hardly any rain for the last few months. First we went along the road and then turned right by the fishing lakes. Then we came across the field to the river. On our way across the field, we said hello to a couple of friendly horses. Next time, we must remember to bring some carrots with us. Of course we had to stop quite often on our walk, to rummage a...