Tag: travel

Well here we go again, a new year has started and I must say I am relieved. I mean we all cast out the old and ring in the new when we get to Jan 1st but I have never been more glad to see a new year in, in fact I'm usually in bed by 10 and barely flinch when the fireworks start.  This year I was up barking with the dogs and marveling at the coloured flashes as they exploded across the sky.  Well how can this year be any worse than last. Seriously I'm not just talking personal stuff here, I'm still happily plodding along in my new life, largely oblivious to things going on around me, however some things are difficult to miss. 2017 provided a gigantic fruit salad of poo around the globe didn't it. Lets take a quick look! The 'majority' of us (by that I mean the uneducated, mildly racist, easily-lead part of Britain) apparently voted...

No this is not the story of what we did with all that turkey post Christmas, or about me stopping class A drugs, but rather about my radical decision to spend an entire week without going on Facebook. If anyone had asked me, prior to this experiment, what that would be like, I'd have shrugged my shoulders and said 'no issues, I don't spend that much time on there anyway'. Well that is not quite true! By not going on Facebook this week I have noticed a couple of things: 1. Just how much time I actually spent on there and 2. Just how hard it would be not to… I documented each day to understand how this affected me and so I would realise just how much of an addiction this had become, this is the story of my week living outside of social media. Day 1 My old routine of logging into the 'world' first thing in a morning became blatantly obvious as I...

Isn't amazing how different we all are. One person's dream is another's nightmare. But and here's the thing, we all have dreams, ambitions, fantasies, call them what you will, but we all strive to be somewhere different, doing something differently, but few of us think about what it will take to get there and interestingly not many (if any) of us consider what it will actually be like once we arrive at our destination. I certainly didn't! Oh yes I was more planned than most - that's what I do…planning…I drive people crazy with it, but it's what makes me, me. But what I didn't do was think about what it would actually be like. I travelled through the country and looked at what seems to be a million houses to decide which one fitted the bill (by the way I bought three that didn't) and this is where I ended up…but I didn't talk to people living here to ask about...

These last couple of weeks I've been on my own so I've had TV on in the background while I've been working to keep me company (or drown out the barking dogs)… One thing I've noticed is how depressing the news is and how it is always 'bad' news. The obvious reason for this is that 'good' news doesn't pay, but then I thought maybe there are two sides to every story so I started looking closer to home…and this is what I found! This week I have lost two chickens to our local fox. One of our chickens was sitting on 5 eggs and the fox took these too. Now whilst this may be annoying for me and pretty disasterous for the chickens, there are however some very well fed and cared for fox cubs enjoying fresh chicken and protein this spring…and I have less chickens to feed. So it got me thinking, for every bad story there is a good...

I came across a friend's post on Facebook a while back that got me thinking. It was a list of interesting places to visit, incredible events to attend and extreme things to achieve and the idea was you went through the list and ticked off what you had done and what was left was your bucket list …to do before you die. I'm not usually so obedient but thought it would be interesting to see what I'd done and what I had left to do…. Now when you take these sort of tests you can be left feeling two things: 1) Excitement for all the things left to do in the world or 2) Disappointed at not having done that much with your (in my case) 50 years on this earth. That is if you let the internet dictate how you feel about yourself…I don't, I just don't…so I started thinking of some of the things I'd done. I have show-jumped in...

I think the question I get asked the most out here, by other expats, those thinking about moving here and the Bulgarians themselves is, why Bulgaria. My answer is probably very similar to everyone else's, 'because I always wanted a house in France'. This is the truth, since returning to the UK in 1989 from Belgium, I always wanted to go back across the channel and Provence had a wildness about it that appealed to my nature, but then it became popular and out of my price range. So I saved a little more and the French just kept putting their prices up, it was like they were trying to tell me something and despite my belligerent nature, eventually I listened and looked further afield. We found Sicily and fell in love with it, we bought a cheap do-er-upper and had a good friend and French architect complete the renovations for us, only to find that while we'd been busy plastering, painting...

Have chickens they said, chickens are easy they said, fresh eggs they said... They, whoever 'they' are may be need to tweak their enthusiasm somewhat so that I can manage my own expectations sensibly! Yes I love my chooks, I have named them all for goodness sake...some of them twice, but that's another story...and I have to admit that on the whole they are pretty damn simple most of the time, but they do have their moments too! And EGGS...well I'm still buying them from the local farm shop so you work it out. Some of this lack of egg production I must admit comes from the fact that Charlotte and Delia have now officially been renamed Charlie and Dilburt after they were caught having a right old 'cock-a-doodle-doo' one morning...I guess I'll wait a while for some double yolkers from them. I also have some doubts about Amelia and Babs who if not cocks, they are awfully butch ladies with lesbian tendencies.  It is only...

Well that's my year off complete so I better get back to work and start earning some money...no, no, no I'm not giving up and coming back to good ol' Blighty...not unless someone drags me kicking and screaming, but I have decided it is time to stop the pot draining and do a little something to earn my keep! So I've started teaching English as a Foreign Language online, just for two days a week - it's great - and I get the rest of the week off to renovate the house and tend the garden. At least this way my muscles get some time off and so does my brain, win win :-) This change of lifestyle has been an adventure in many ways, figuring out how to bring in a few quid to keep things ticking over while trying to save a few quid doing the work yourself ...we are not lacking in desire, determination or in our ability...

It has been exactly one year today since we arrived at our little piece of heaven in Bulgaria so I thought I'd do a quick before and after blog to show everything we have done (and still to do) We had the place rewired completely, new windows and doors installed and the roof checked over and repairs made (we didn't do  any of this ourselves). Lounge We gutted the lounge ceiling to floor and rendered the walls - this still needs sanding and painting and the floor still needs tiling but it made it at least useable over the winter months ...                   Shower Room (again not us) Paul basically rebuilt this little room for us while we installed the septic tank system ( a lot of digging)...             Kitchen Again this was gutted, rendered, painted, and the fireplace opened up, new oven put in and it did us through winter but we have a stone floor to put down and units to build still (and I'm still using...