Two winters

The first time I had travelled through Bulgaria, I hated it. I blush now, but you can read the blog here. Joe on the other hand had spent a lot of time in the country on business since the early 90s and  had a soft spot for it. Our journey through this short but wide nation in May 2011 was a complete eye opener for us all. Suddenly, we saw what everyone was on about! Why so many Brits had bought out here! This was far from just an inconvenient, rainy place to push through at a rush between Greece and Romania. We discovered the utter beauty of the Pirin Mountains, of Rila and perhaps most importantly for us – of Veliko Tarnovo. We met wonderful, welcoming Bulgarians who opened their homes, their fields, their restaurant car parks to us (and their windows, through which to pass an electric cable). The land was staggeringly diverse, from stork-laden villages with donkeys and some of the most croneyesque crones ever, to mountains and forest that rival Switzerland, to the Black Sea coast. So we believe. Though we still haven’t made it to the latter.

We also met expats in numbers. This was a bit of a culture shock for us, having been secluded in Greece for so long. We must have talked 25 to the dozen to all these new people who suddenly spoke … gasp … English! Of course at times it was all too overwhelming, especially when the home nation and its expatriates went into mass hysteria for that greatest of British anachronisms: a Royal Wedding. But we were quite staggered by the universal LOVE they showed for this, their adopted country. Not one had a bad word to say about the place. In fact, they were almost evangelical about it. The kids were suddenly happy, especially at a fantastic campsite outside of Veliko Tarnovo. Here they swam, made friends, swapped books, talked English and even started speaking a bit of Bulgarian. They romped.

Maybe the first time I thought seriously that we might be able to settle here was whilst having my hair cut. At this point, we hadn’t reached crisis point. We still were on our way back to the UK. But my hairdresser? Well, she was a lovely woman with a young child who had made the decision to settle here. She wasn’t immersed in the whole expat scene, her kid was bilingual. She told us not only how affordable, how possible Bulgaria was but much, much more … more about how fantastic the people were and how, and more importantly why, they’d come to love this country. You know who you are, missus. And now you’re lumbered with us.

But we had to move on. We still had to return to Blighty. The seeds of an idea were planted however and they started to grow as we travelled and as the kids got more disaffected by travel. More on this later …

So, we found ourselves back in Bulgaria on Independence Day, July 4th, 2011. And this time we had  a new and outrageous plan. For the rest of the kid’s school careers, we would live here. We would buy a house – bricks and mortar, having only sold everything a year before – and hunker down. We’d make some money. We’d give them a base. We warned them that it was not going to be easy, that this was no soft path.

Seven months later, I can confirm that it has not been a soft path. It’s had its potholes and its ice. But it has been an amazing one to walk. After a summer of 43 degrees with the vines brimming with grapes, we are now coming towards the end of our first winter which has thrown -27 degrees at us. And yup, that is in centigrade. In one simple, short year, we have changed our lives again. And how they have changed! Finding a moment to draw breath, let alone write has been hard since we arrived in July. We’ve had so many laughs, so many trials. If we thought our adventures and discovery were over, we couldn’t have been more wrong.  But more of that later. For now I shall go back to watching the snow fall thickly on the barns, stop our adopted dog from jumping the drystone walls, help the rescued cat down the outside stairs (she distains the snow, possibly because it’s whiter than her). I’ll try and stoke up the fires, get Joe to chop some more logs and find kindling from amongst the huge stockpile of old timbers and chairs, check the loft for leaks and see if the snow plough has been down our lane so we can venture out over the fields for a walk and get in the bare essentials from our local shop, next to the icicle clad, full-sized plane mounted in the centre of our village. That will mean twenty minutes of dressing  accordingly – after all, there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. It may involve negotiating not only the snow drifts but offers of wood, rakia and work. We may have to dig out some cars. We may stop to talk to the local horse, Maia, and we will certainly stop to talk to our fantastic neighbours who have made this truly a home.