Weeks 41 & 42.

It's been another quiet couple of weeks for us here in Bulgaria, in fact even quieter than the beginning of January I think - so it won't be a long update today.

As predicted we had a very, very cold week or so and the snow has only just started to thaw now. The days were beautiful and sunny but averaging around -3 or lower and a couple of nights got to as low as -15 - which is bloody cold! We had a bit of a disastrous time of it to begin with and ended up having about 2 and a half days with no water - which, I can tell you, is even worse than having no electricity. It took so long to fix as we thought the pipes were freezing just outside the house, so we spent hours defrosting them there and even cutting off the outside tap and covering it all up again. After doing this for 2 days and it still not working we were worried it was freezing inside the house, but thankfully we found the pipe had actually frozen down by the water metre - despite being covered in 8 bin liners of straw and being a metre underground! It was quite a relief to get that all sorted and re-insulated after 3 days and since then it has been fine.

Defrosting with... boiling water...

... heater ...

... more insulation! All for nothing!

Covered again (but not for long)

Cutting the tap off

Melting snow for water!

Over this same couple of days our kitchen heater broke, our kettle broke, Lucy got ill and our van wouldn't start for a whole morning (it's fine now) and we just weren't having a great time! We did manage to slide down the hill in the van so we were able to drive out of the village - we just couldn't drive back up to our house, so had to leave it parked in the centre. This was fine, except when we did a massive shop on Friday and had to walk all the shopping up the hill!

Poorly doggy 

Shovelling the snow off the van before moving it

Pete with the locals at Chirpan market

Anyway, enough moaning! Since then we've actually been having a lovely time seeing friends, watching TV series and keeping warm by the fire. We have also been out walking and sledging a bit when it hasn't been too cold.

Saturday night at the bar with K & R and our neighbours

Big icicle

Pete has been doing lots of cooking - making delicious lemon curd with cheap lemons from the market and meringues (with the left over eggs whites from the curd.) He also reduced 11 litres of old red wine into 300ml of red wine reduction, which tastes like sweet balsamic vinegar and will be SO tasty on fig salads this summer! We also made pasta, which I have never done before, and that was really fun. We mostly made lasagna sheets and dried them out, as it was the easiest to do and buying lasagna is actually quite pricey here. We also made a bit of tagliatelle and ate some of it fresh with garlic and butter. Yum yum yum!

Lemon curd

I made another lemon drizzle cake to eat with the curd - so good!

Meringues

Pasta machine

Drying pasta

Mmm freshly made pasta

We also bought steaks from Lidl, which was a massive treat as beef is very difficult to buy in Chirpan (they seem to only eat chicken or pork.)

As well as cooking I have had my sewing machine out and spent about 3 days making a window hanging that will eventually go in our living room. I made it using scraps of fabric I had and I am pretty proud of it :) I've also (finally) made a proper curtain for the airing cupboard.

Not a great photo, but this is my window hanging

Airing cupboard 

We've had a few visits from neighbouring animals this week too, including a massive cat that Lucy chased up a tree and a funny little black dog that Lucy made friends with.

Like the Cheshire cat!

New friends :)

Oh also, We went to SZ to pick up our resident cards and in true Bulgarian fashion they took our photos and told us to come back to collect them in one month! Why they couldn't have just taken the photo on the first day is beyond me, but nevermind - they will be ready on time for us to get our insurance sorted at least.

And today we are hanging out in Chirpan all day whilst our van is in the garage having some work done to it. The temperatures have risen significantly over the last couple of days - we didn't even need the wood burner on last night - and the weather is set to be good now until at least the end of February, so we hope to be able to crack on with work. Our biggest goal being to get our veg garden finished. So hopefully I'll have more to report next time!

Writing the blog now in a (very dark) cafe!

And that's it really - this maybe the shortest post to date! xxx