Bulgarian life
The ‘rona report, part 1: No scrap left behind
When life gives you lemons (and orange cordial), make (orangey) G&Ts. Then re-use the lemons. I’ve always been a bit competitive about food and drink. The number of times a waiter has looked at me in a restaurant and said, ‘Are you sure you want to order...
‘Rona rage
This end-of-March snow was an outrage. We’ve had a snowy couple of weeks here, which has lent an ‘interesting’ new dimension to the whole self-isolation thing. We’ve been indoors for almost two weeks. No spending time in the garden. No popping to the...
Explorking
Explorking: Verb. A portmanteau of exploring and walking. Basically a nonsense word we made up. This is what we’ve been doing with our afternoons lately. After work and a big lunch, we’ll use the last couple of hours’ daylight to go explorking the...
A trip up Vitosha
One of the many things I love about Sofia is how Vitosha mountain hulks beside it. We’ll often stroll down the streets and comment how unusual it is, in a capital city, to see a ruddy great mountain squatting at the end of the road. But we’ve never really...
Back in the saddle
White trees on a snowy walk. Happy New Year to you, dear reader. And welcome to Auntie Bulgaria 2020, which will no doubt be pretty much the same as Auntie Bulgaria 2019. Cats. Snow. Wonky stuff in the garden. The usual. So how was it for you, the whole...
Decking the halls
Thank God for martinis. It’s not been terribly Christmassy in the Auntie Bulgaria household this December. We both picked up a horrible bug that knocked us sideways for the first 10 days of December. I mean, this bug had everything: aches, shivers, sore...
Hello again
If you were wondering why I’d been a bit quiet lately, it’s because I was visiting in the UK, and then going through the customary readjustment to Bulgarian life. It’s like jet lag (life lag?), where the culture shock takes a while to wear off. Our house seems too...
Patience is a virtue
This month I’ve stood in a 90-minute queue for something, had two separate hospital visits (nothing serious) that both involved lengthy waits, and endured a three-hour flight delay. Every time I was waiting, I kept expecting to get restless or annoyed or...
Scavengers
You know what’s the surest sign that winter is on the way? It’s not the arrival of this year’s wood order, which finally turned up about a week ago… The annual Rob-in-front-of-the-wood-delivery picture. Nor is it harvesting the tempting butternut squash,...
Last of the warm days
Hot as it’s been during the day lately, there’s a definite feel of autumn in the air. I’m scribbling this outside as, next to me, Rob scrats the apples for this year’s cider. I wish you could smell what I smell right now. It’s a mixture of apple juice and red wine...
