Bulgarian life
Sofia vs Plovdiv: Which is better for a city break?
I’m back! If you follow my adventures on Instagram, you’ll know that we’ve been away in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city, and Sofia, the capital. After 15 months of pandemic life, I was in desperate need of some city action – and with both of us being fully...
Vaccinated
We had our second COVID-19 vaccines last week and, boy, are we pleased with ourselves. We’re so grateful to have been vaccinated for free in Bulgaria – we would have gladly paid for the privilege – and to have both doses done so soon. (For the folks back home,...
Be more Blanche
We went back to the fabulous plant shop in Sofia last week. I mean, we were supposed to be in Sofia looking at ovens. (Our electric oven hasn’t worked for years and every time spring rolls around, when we no longer want to put the woodburner on just to cook...
Dumpster-diving window beggars
This is our life now. Every time we go out, we’re on high alert for abandoned wooden windows to finish off the rustic greenhouse. We eyeball people’s gardens as we drive by. We scour municipal bins. We tell anyone who’ll listen, ‘We’re looking for old windows. DO...
April, is that really you?
My calendar, filthy liar that it is, is trying to convince me that it’s April. But that can’t be right, can it? How are we already a quarter of the way through 2021? How can time fly when none of us are having any fun? It doesn’t seem fair. As it’s April Fool’s...
A trip to Troyan Monastery (but mainly, Bulgarian pottery)
I have never seen Troyan Monastery as quiet as it was last Friday. True, the main chapel is currently undergoing restoration, but I was still surprised to see the rest of the complex so empty and, well, monastic. There were more people browsing the wooden bowls and...
Wanted: An unsociable person’s guide to making friends
It’s hard to make friends later in life, isn’t it? I often wonder how people do it. So many of my longstanding friendships started in the workplace or stretch all the way back to my college and university days, so now that I work from home and am about as likely to...
Gratitude (I’m not a robot)
Seems a lot of people back home are grateful that there’s now a roadmap for bringing the UK out of lockdown. I’m not really one for strong ‘feelings’ (she says, in air quotes, like feelings are something marketers made up to sell ice cream), so I’ve always felt,...
The (secret) joy of Bulgarian power cuts
We’ve had a couple of lengthy power cuts in the last week. We seem to go through phases where we have no power cuts for months, then we’ll have days or even weeks of frequent disruption. Long-time readers will know my frustration with this. There are the...
Homemade liqueurs. Birthday snow
The snow has finally returned to Bulgaria. Which is handy because I was getting really cheesed off with all that brownness. Brown trees. Brown muddy lanes. Brown garden. Brown paw prints all over the kitchen floor. Brown village river (it’s been raining a lot,...
Very important things I learnt in 2020
I just don’t want to write about COVID-19 and the misery of UK lockdown. For one thing, we’re only semi-locked down here in Bulgaria and life, at least in the village, continues pretty much as normal. So I can’t even begin to relate to the struggle back home, and I...
Autumn highlights
Yes, it’s no longer autumn. In fact, it’s very snowy and festive here in Bulgaria. But because I took a two-month break from blogging while the site was being redesigned (which actually only took the designer a matter of days. The rest was me fannying around), I...