I have to say I’m quite disappointed by my disappointment in snow. I think it comes from the fact that I imagined snow everywhere to be magical and romantic, but didn’t consider that life goes on even when snow is thick on the ground. And I’m tired of trying to get on with life with snow about! If we were forced to stay inside and admire it, then I would probably not be disgruntled by this week’s snowfall.
Someone who is beside himself with today’s snowfall is Stu. It’s his birthday today (or yesterday, depending on your longitude) and it’s forecast to snow all week! He has gone to bed hoping that it snows overnight so there’ll be ‘a gazillion’ cm of snow to wake up to.
He took a video of it falling today:
(Extra special mention needs to be made about capturing the ‘mawp mawp’ of the police car/truck/something bossy)
Happy Birthday Stu!
March 9 also signifies 1 month until we touch down in Tassie. Time is going by fast, we better savour our time here while there’s some left!
It was one of those ‘if only I’d gotten the camera out moments earlier’ moments.
You might remember this post where we described how half of Haskovo’s charming power plant disappeared on us? Well, the other day I happened to be out on the balcony (not a common occurrence in winter!) when I heard this great boom like a thunder clap. I looked around to see the power plant’s 30m-high concrete smoke stack toppling over!
The image will stick in my memory forever! And the sound of its collapse was amazing (once it reached us)!
Here is a video I took of the aftermath. I apologise that it’s essentially pointless – in that I missed all the action and all you can see is the cloud of dust rising up from where it fell – but perhaps I captured some of the coolness of it.
Did any of our current readers follow the old blog when we came to Bulgarian 2-and-a-half years ago?
We came with a group of 9 people – all from St. John’s – for a 4 week foray into David and Kathryn’s ministry in Bulgaria. At the time, D+K were living in a town 45mins south of here called Kardjali (Кърджали). Some of their team still live and work in Kardjali so we visit the town fairly often. We’ve been meaning to visit one place in particular ever since we arrived in Bulgaria but it took us nearly 9 months to make it there!
These stairs:
You see, building these stairs was one of the practical tasks we had on our Aug-Sept 2007 trip. It’s a nice story: the stairs are in a Romani mahalle (the Rom are another ethnic minority – pretty much the bottom of the social pecking order) where David and Kathryn knew an amazingly faithful believer named Shaziye. As a way of blessing Shaziye in a practical way, D+K organised for us to build these stairs up to the neighbourhood toilet – which is used by about 10 families in the immediate area. So we built them – without a great deal of confidence in ability to do so. We also had to contend with wood that hadn’t been cured properly, so it warped quite badly! But the stairs turned out okay.
When Elly and I checked them out last week (about 2-and-a-half years later), I was almost certain they’d have been broken… or torn down for firewood… or something. But they weren’t! They looked good as new:
You can see what is probably sewage water flowing underneath. Ok, so we built stairs, but neglected the sewage problems. Oh well! You do what you can.
So, Team-of-2007, well done! I certainly felt quite chuffed that the locals appreciated what we did enough to look after it. It was a very small gesture, but I’m glad it’s still helping people!
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