So we were up very early this morning - before it was even light! We went to have our complimentary breakfast in the hotel which we had ordered the day before (note to self - you probably won't want to eat scrambled eggs with feta cheese at 7am!)
Anyway after food we set off for our house. The journey was supposed to be relatively easy but we forgot to account for the horrendous Bulgarian roads. As well as this it was raining alot and we also found a blocked road with a massive detour that added at least an hour to the trip. We were taking a 'main' road and it was all going fine and was very pretty and then suddenly we were driving through a proper blizzard and there was snow everywhere. Eventually the blizzard calmed and turned into hail. It was crazy! After some hard driving we got down to Sofia, around the ring road and onto the home straight. We again encountered some snow but as we got down to the plains everything chilled out a bit and we even got a few rays of sunshine, which gave us hope. We had seen on the weather forecast that it would be raining all day so we had already looked up a cheap hotel in Chirpan (the town near our village) to stay at because it might be too wet to put up our tent.
We finally came to the turn off to our village and very excitedly we drove to our house! There are two ways to get to our 'road' in the vaillage and the first one we tried we didn't actually make it up because it was so steep and the wheels kept spinning (should be fine when we are empty.) So we reversed and tried the other slope; this is much less steep but not so much of a road as just some jagged rocks in the street! But we made it! It was about 3 o'clock by now and the sun was attempting to shine through the clouds. As we'd made it up the hill we thought we'd better unload the van. After a quick look around the house we started carrying all our stuff inside - this took a while as we have alot of stuff and also the entrance gate is quite far away from the house.
We had taken everything in from the van, and Pete was just untying the things on the roof, when a little old lady came walking up the street. We said hello to her in our awful Bulgarian and she looked at us in disbelief when we tried to explain we were moving into the house. I took her into the garden to try and show her we were moving in and she kept saying a Bulgarian word over and over (I looked it up and it meant 'job' - I think she was saying what a load of work we had to do!) Anyway neither of us had any idea what each other was saying but she smiled alot and kept hugging me. The most weird thing was that she actually shook her head yes and nodded no!!!! We had heard that they did this in Bulgaria but hadn't experienced it yet. I just couldn't get my head around it so she must have had some very mixed messages from me shaking my head and saying 'Da'. I could have agreed to anything! Also even though she was probably about 80 she helped me to carry in our massive, heavy tent to the barn! After a while she took my hand and started walking me down the road. Pete also followed and we found she lived right around the corner and she took us in her house. It was so cool - she had green furry sofas, huge old TVs and showed us that she does embroidary on an old school sewing machine. Amazing! She was so nice and offered us eggs and then picked some flowers from her garden and gave them to us. But we were quite tired so we eventually managed to escape and told her we'd see her tomorrow.
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| SNOW! No bliazzard pics I'm afraid. |
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| Arrival. |
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| Going in! |
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| Room before. |
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| Room with stuff. |
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| Flowers from our neighbour (we have no water to put them in!) |
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| On the balcony. |
We went back to our house and had a beer sitting on our little balcony - which has a perfect view of the sunset - and started thinking about the huge amount of work we had to do. After the beer we got back in Rusty and drove back into Chirpan (Rusty was moving so much faster now he was unloaded.) We found the hotel very easily and checked in. By now it was already nearly 8 o'clock so we chucked our stuff in the room and went out for dinner. We managed to find the nice restaurant we'd visited last time but sadly it was closed so we went back to the main square and went to the pizzaria there instead. The menu was all written in Bulgarian but I am pretty proud that I could read it so we knew what to order :) We got a salad and a huge pizza each as we hadn't really eaten all day. Feeling full, happy and excited we went back to the hotel to do some blogging and watch a movie. We'll be up early tomorrow to set up our tent and make our home more liveable! Life's goooood! :)
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| Shopska salad. |
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| Last night in a warm room for a while! |
Hey guys, been following your blog since the beginning! Welcome to Bulgaria :D
ReplyDeleteI love the look on Peter's face on the "Arrival" photo - a mix of utter desperation and fear :D
Two short bits of info:
Re: all your stuff in the house. Please think about security as soon as possible. Working non-glass doors, chains on fences, locks, etc. News travel fast in small villages - by the end of the month the whole area will be talking about "Anglichanite" - the English. There are some people, especially gypsies but not exclusively, that won't hesitate to relieve you of some possessions.
Re: the old lady (baba - grandma). Most UK expats stumble upon an old lady in their first days (one of my favorites: http://oldschoolbulgaria.blogspot.com/ - I follow a few). The old people in the villages are desperate and see no future for the bulgarian village as a social entity. In the last 25 years (50 in more general aspect), the villages have been depopulated to extent where many go off the map each year, having no living residents left.
For the old timers, the prospect of young people coming to a village to live there WILLINGLY is at the same time hard to believe and a close to miraculous event. Usually, if you're kind to them, they'll try their best to make you feel at home and help you with anything within their power and knowledge. They'll probably start to bring you food on regular basis, maybe vegetables from the garden, milk, bread, pastry, some flowers. Mostly stuff that cannot be bought with money, as the average pension in BG is about 150 Euro, most people get below 100.
So, I wish you many happy hours of work on your house and project, I will follow the blog to learn about your camp progress... and hopefully, we'll visit one day :)