Bulgaria with Noodles

Each week, I still receive e-mails from teachers around the world, asking me about what it is like to teach in international schools. Here is a recent one that gives me an excuse for including lots of photos of China. Happy New Year from Co.Tyrone! I hope this email finds you, your wife and the dog well. Alas, we are locked down again and remote learning is now the reality for the foreseeable future. Ireland actually has the highest percentage of Covid cases in the world now. We are increasingly concerned about the news coming out of China and it seems there is a real chance we will not get into China in July. Currently no UK citizens or flights are allowed in. I have also read that dependent visas will not be issued even when things open up initially. To say that we are concerned is an understatement and it is hard to predict next week, never mind six months into the future. Would it be naive not to look for a Plan B?  Again, your advice is much appreciated. And here is my reply. ...

Tina is a naughty little doggie. She has a lot of energy and she is more than a bit disobedient. Irena and I took her for a walk this morning. For once, the sun was shining and we did not mind the cold too much. As usual, the Bulgarian countryside was beautiful, empty and huge. We simply must get a couple of sledges and all of the skiing gear. It is crazy to be in the countryside, with lots of snow-covered hills all around us for at least a month or so each year, and yet we have absolutely no winter sports equipment at all.

If you have been faithfully reading my blog, then by now you should be an expert on centralne tepline . (That is Bulgarian for "central heating", just in case you have forgotten.)  In Daveri, keeping our home toasty-warm is quite a time-consuming business. I usually go downstairs at about 4 or 5am and give the fire a good raking, so that lots of the ash goes onto the tray underneath the metal grate. Next to the fireplace we have an impressive-looking collection of tools to use. They look like instruments of torture from the Middle Ages.  Then I put some more wood onto the fire and, if I am lucky, there is soon a good blaze going once more. Then I go down again and put on some more wood at about six, when a naughty little doggie asks for her breakfast and she needs to go outside, to do her business at the bottom of the garden. Then I get another snooze until 8am or thereabouts when, if I am lucky, my dear wife brings my morning mug of tea up to the bedroom.  After breakfas...

And so we are coming to the end of what for many, many people all around the world has been a dreadful year. As well as the sickness and deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been the awful economic consequences: bankruptcies, job losses, bad debts and evictions. Here in the Bulgarian countryside, it all seems to be a long way away, but alas for many it is a present reality. Let's hope that 2021 is a better year for those who are hurting and who have lost loved ones. It was good to talk to my old friend Peter and his mother on ZOOM and we also managed to catch up with Julia on WeChat. Also on a more positive note, my blog has now had more than 70,000 "hits". My thanks go to all of my readers!

Well, actually it looks as though Winter is already here. We had not even finished November and the snow has arrived.   That naughty little doggie likes to sit right next to the fire.  The good news is that our wood-fired central heating system is working really well. (I suppose it ought to, after all the money we spent on it.) The bad news is that we are getting through our stock of firewood at an alarming rate - burning through it, in fact. My dear Irena says that it will be difficult to buy some more firewood in December. The sensible thing would have been to buy more in August or September, but we could not have squeezed much more into the woodshed.  

I seem to be getting more and more TES messages from teachers who want to teach in the ME. Well, this gives me an excuse for included some old photos of RAK. Dear Mr K, Yes, of course I will help you, as much as I possibly can. In fact, you could call me on SKYPE. You can also e-mail me. The Hilton Beach Club in RAK. No, I do not know anything about Al Yasmina. Generally speaking, I would want to avoid schools with Arabic names. I am sorry that if that sounds appallingly racist, but Arab-owned schools have a very poor reputation. H owever, let us be positive. The obvious place to start is the school's own website. That will give you some clues about what sort of school it is, how big it is and so on. My guess is that quite a few of your students will not have English as their first language, so obviously there might be some questions related to that. Then you could have a good old rummage around on the Internet, to see if you can find any reviews or anything that anyone has said ab...

  Christmas has come a bit early this year and my amazing present has arrived: an air fryer. I read about them on Amazon and I saw a couple of videos on YouTube, so of course I wanted to get one, even though they are not made by Bosch. It really does what it is supposed to do and the Philips air fryer produces very hot foot that tastes as though it has been fried, even though it used very little oil or no oil at all. It is easy to use and it also seems to be quite safe, as the outer plastic casing hardly gets hot at all. It is a bit noisy, as the air fryer makes a hum or a buzzing noise, a bit like a hair dryer. But who cares, when you can eat CHIPS that are actually quite healthy, for once?