Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to the inaugural (and, for that matter, final) Bulgaria Awards ceremony! These are the awards for the coolest, the silliest, the funniest, the most wretched things (technical term) we have encountered this year!

This, the first half of the awards ceremony, is brought to you by Stu. My delightful wife Elly will conclude the presentation soon!

Best Cake and Coffee Establishment:

неделя (Nedelya – BGian for “Sunday”)

Humf – we took you here! Their coffee is kinda okay (which in Bulgaria means it’s exceptional!) and they have a huge range of yummy cakes. Like the majority of Bulgaria’s plentiful cafes, Nedelya is very nicely fitted out with a giant display fridge for the cakes and classy (albeit fake) dark wood panelling all over. If only smoking was illegal inside! We enjoyed being able to go there and chill out on a weekend afternoon – and the fact that you can get two coffees and two big slices of cake for around AU$5 is nice too! Just don’t ask for one of their branded calendars (they’re borderline soft-porn!).

Best Language Mistake:

Elly and I were at Mirem’s house for a Turkish lesson and we were learning Bible verses in Turkish. Actually, it’s worse than that; we were being given important verses by Mirem and being asked to translate them into Turkish to show that we could render them intelligible. This is difficult, since the English used in the Bible is very different to spoken English, and we really didn’t have the requisite Turkish to make it work! But we tried. And paraphrased drastically. Anyway, none of that excuses my language mistake…

What Stu meant to say: “Allah bize Kutsal Ruh verdi” = “God gave us the Holy Spirit”.

What Stu actually said: “Allah bize Kutsal Ruh vurdu” = “God struck us [with] the Holy Spirit”.

Gah! Definitely time for a mono-lingual holiday!

Best Dad-Joke in a Language Other Than Your First:

Another Turkish pun (on purpose this time). So… the Turkish word for prayer is “dua” (pr. doo-ah), and the Turkish word for wall is “duvar” (pr. doo-vahr). I’m sure experienced Dads all over the world are sitting there nutting out the possible puns already! Elly and I had gone to the Millet meeting (church) which had only just started being held in the church building you might have seen in our video (when it was half-built).

So, this one evening, Kemal was up the front praying loudly (with his eyes closed) to end the meeting. He was swaying from foot to foot a little bit, with his arms way up in the air. Without noticing, he started turning away from the rest of the meeting until he was facing the wall. His supportive wife started poking people and pointing at Kemal, sniggering openly. Before long there was an irresistable ripple of laughter happening, at which point Kemal finished praying, opened his eyes, realised he was facing a wall and joined in the giggling! And it was at that precisely timed moment when I pointed out that Kemal was supposed to giving us a dua (prayer) not a duvar (wall). Ha ha ha ha! Well done, Stu.

[start of slightly off-topic rant.] When they started gathering at the “church building”, the change in the meeting was profound[ly disturbing]! Whereas when we’d met in Kemal (the pastor)’s house, people would show up late, if at all, and Kemal would give surly, 10-minute sermons, things changed. Attendance doubled immediately, and people started bringing musical instruments, and Kemal was transformed into a yelling, ranting, enthusiastic preacher-man! If that sounds good, it isn’t. Really, all that was happening was that the people were mimicking the behaviour they might have seen at the Bulgarian (ie. “real”) meetings. It went entirely against their own cultural norms and while it might have made them feel good to be able to associate themselves with what they saw as a real meeting, it could really only get in the way of them genuinely engaging with Jesus in their unique cultural context. [end of rant.]

Best ‘Thank goodness no one else speaks English’ moment:

Okay, this one needs some explaining. Are you familiar with the Meyers-Briggs style of personality test? Elly tells me they were quite the rage on Facebook this year. The test is a way of categorising different personality types and your “result” takes the form of four letters – E for extrovert or I for introvert; S for sensing or N for intuition; F for feeling or T for thinking; and P for perceiving or J for judging. If that’s confusing, bear with me because it’s not strictly relevant to the story! In the last section, Elly is a “P”, meaning she generally needs to hear lots of info before being able to make a decision. So… there we were, walking down the road, with people around, loudly talking in English about our preferences in decision-making.

Elly said (something to the effect of): “But I like to know all the relevant facts before choosing…”

What Stu meant to say: “Yes, that reflects your preference for “perceiving” rather than “judging”.

What Stu actually said: “Yeah, but that’s because of your P-ness”. (Say it out loud; it’s funnier.)

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Is making bad jokes all we’ve done this year?!

That’s all for now. You can be sure that Elly will update you in a couple of days with the final few categories.

Hope you enjoyed the show. Cue the orchestra.

Cheers

Stu.

We love the Lada.

This is a Lada:

The Lada is a Russian-built, Soviet-era car “for the people”. They are famously simple under the bonnet, which is a good thing since they are also infamously unreliable. Dave has often jibed that they are the perfect car to drive if you’re looking to meet people – since you’ll almost certainly break down at some stage and need to ask for help!

There are still thousands of Ladas driven around Bulgaria, despite the fact that they are no longer made (except in Egypt, apparently) and most are getting quite old. Like many other Communist cars, their simple charm is somehow quite charming. We wish we’d been able to buy one and drive it around Bulgaria, but alas, they are becoming something of a collectors’ item and aren’t that cheap!

This is how you spell Lada in Cyrillic:

Ladas are very useful:

Here are some posing as taxis, police cars (though not in high-speed chases, I suspect), utes and, importantly, 4WDs!

Ladas come in many colours:

Don’t think that just because they were Communist-made that all Ladas are boring blue or beige!

Some Ladas are well looked-after, some are not:

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And that’s about it. We just thought it was appropriate to share some of our Lada love with you all.

Take care,

Stu (and Elly).

* – Stu wishes to apologise for this pun.

Practice Packing:

Watching David and Kathryn pack up their house over the last two months did NOT make us envious! They have had to pack 12 years’ worth of stuff (technical term) into 3 x 30kg bags (yes, Aydin, who weighs 25kg, gets 30kg of checked-in luggage…). Luckily they discovered that sending a 20kg box of, say, books to Australia only costs about AU$80.

Well, we’ve been starting our own culling of the useless junk we’ve acquired over the last year, and packing the rest into our bags (limited to 20kg for us! Not fair!).

Why are we finished packing when we have two weeks left over here, you ask? Well, to be honest it’s probably excitement to be home as much as it is an attempt to be organised. We knew for a fact that we wouldn’t be able to fit everything in our packs, so we had to see what needed posting. We’re getting rid of lots of our clothes – having a limited wardrobe for 12 months really wears out your threads! – and we drank the 2kg coffee that I brought over here. But we’ve been fanatical customers of the Book Depository and bought/received 15-20 books since arriving here (!), and despite our whingeing about the local fashion, we’ve also managed to buy some new clothes.

We’ve been pretty brutal with our wardrobes – most of it is being given away or thrown out (possible the former, followed by the latter). And the books, along with some other random stuff, is in the box you can see above. We’re hoping it’s under the 10kg postal limit!

The rest somehow fit into our packs! It’s a miracle. But… now we have to unpack everything so we can continue living normally for the next 2 weeks!

Going home?

The thought of going home is very strange. It’s a similar feeling to when we were preparing to come over here – excitement mixed with apprehension (both to be expected), but also a strange sense of really not knowing what to expect upon arrival. We haven’t been here long enough to expect reverse culture shock to be a problem, but we’re sure that some things will seem unfamiliar. It would be nice if that unfamiliarity became a kind of inspiration to get the most out of being back in Australia, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Running Out.

A funny observation I made yesterday is everything is running out just in time for us to go home:

- the coffee I bought in London;

- the Vegemite my Mum sent with Humf back in October;

- the T2 teas that Fred bought for us (also delivered by Humf);

- the usability of our camera (need one of those tiny screwdrivers…);

- our patience with our semi-functional laptop (claiming on Harvey Norman warranty as soon as we get back!);

- even our money is running out precisely on time!

Aah, but talking about going home won’t make it come any faster! So I’ll sign off now.

Cheers

Stu.