By popular request*, and by way of giving a nice visual representation of how excited we are that we’ve now seen our way through three whole seasons here in Bulgaria, here is a series panoramas taken from our flat. They’re slightly different to the panoramas you might already have seen. Click on them for a bigger version.

[* on this blog, the term "popular request" should be taken to mean "as requested by someone cool" rather than "as requested by several people".]

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Early Summer:

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Late Summer:

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Early Autumn:

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Late Autumn/Early Winter:

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Proper Winter:

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Tomorrow we’re heading to Romania for a very white Christmas with the Nairn family (minus Andy ). Apparently they have 30cm of snow already!

Wishing everyone who reads our blog a very merry Christmas!

Cheers,

Stu and Elly.

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ps. Winter can be a real challenge for people here. Not us! We’re fine, but we’ve seen a lot more people doing it tough since summer work dropped off and (especially) since it got cold. If anyone wants to donate towards those who have to last the winter without proper heating, clothing or food, contact us and we can find a worthy cause!

Hi all,

The kids’ group from our church (St. John’s Launceston) asked us to make a 5 minute video showing what we get up to here in Bulgaria.

Below is the result! But first, here is the disclaimer:

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Disclaimer! (note the large, bolded text and exclamation marks):

1. It’s a pretty daggy video. We’re very sorry to our friends and relations (not to mention our future children!) for making such a fine piece of cinematographic uncoolness. Perhaps we should have read this post.

2. We also keep saying “hello, Stepping Stones!” which I’m sure you can forgive, since that’s the name of the aforementioned kids’ group. If you want us to make a video where we repeatedly say “hello, <your name>!”, we’d be happy to do so. Just leave a comment with your request.

3. Being intended for a young audience, we inexplicably started using the dreaded Play School voice when addressing the camera. This was entirely unintentional. Enjoy. Note that we have already turned 21; your opportunities to use this against us are diminishing.

4. We speak in Turkish. Just a little bit. Note how I (Stu) move my eyes up and to the left when I’m thinking of the right verb+tense+case to use (maybe we should have scripted it?). Hence my complaint about brain strain!

5. This isn’t strictly part of the disclaimer. In fact, this point is for of a proclaimer. Aydin is awesome in front of a camera! Check out how he ad libs heaps of funny stuff, including the timeless “bagging out Mum and Dad” joke! Amazing.

Anyway, I can’t delay it any longer. Go on. Watch and laugh.

Hi all,

We have lots of small pieces of news! So here goes:

Aydin and Kathryn in Australia: so Aydin (our student) and his mum Kathryn travelled back to Australia 5 weeks ago so that he could catch up with various medical and educational specialists – while his dad Dave stayed in BG. When we returned from our travels with Humf, Dave had news for us. The experts are quite happy with how Aydin has progressed and feel that D+K are by no means disadvantaging him by remaining in BG. This is great news – and a relief for D+K, I’m sure!

Elly and I have felt that the schooling we’ve been doing – especially combined with the speech therapy D+K do with Aydin – has seen his reading (in particular) improve over the last few months. However, we’re not qualified educators, so it’s hard to know what we should expect of a 6-year-old! In that sense it was good to know that Aydin is officially doing well.

Uranium issues: recent testing of the R family has found that they have “concerning” (ie. high) levels of uranium. The (fairly incontrovertible) theory is that the Haskovo water supply is the problem (they mine it around here). Elly and I haven’t yet been tested, but it’s fairly likely that we’ll have elevated levels too. Uranium is a heavy metal, but it’s fortunately not in the same nasty league as lead or mercury. Nevertheless, we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about avoiding exposure. We’ve switched to bottled water already, and we’ll have to avoid mushrooms and root vegetables (no potatoes!!). We’ll also be taking medication that somehow flushes the uranium from our bodies – we’ll have more info on it soon, we hope! All that we know so far is that it’s expensive!

C’mon, leave a comment with your favourite uranium/radioactivity joke; you know you want to…

Term 4 of school: will be exceedingly short! Aydin returns to BG in about 10 days’ time, so we’ll probably only fit in two weeks of term 4 before Christmas (Kathryn has somehow managed to make a start on term 4 material while in Australia – well done on that!). Because we’re following the NSW school year, we’ll then have 5-6 weeks’ “summer” holidays – except it’ll be minus 10 degrees outside, which is hardly “enjoying your holidays by spending every minute outside” weather, is it? As such, we’ll probably start term 1 of 2010 a couple of weeks earlier.

Return flights: we’re organising these at the moment. It’s very exciting! Flying back to Melbourne on our preferred dates is looking tricky (no seats available?!), so we’ll either we flying back a little earlier (late March) or back to Sydney instead of Melbourne. It’s all the same for us poor Tassie mob who have to make the extra domestic flight anyway! So you can expect us back in Launceston in the last week of March or the first week of April 2010.

Good news, you say?

That about wraps up this news bulletin. Sorry to anyone who already knew all of that – we’re supposed to be here to entertain!

How are the Uni exams going, everyone?

Cheers,

Stu (and Elly).

ps. you know when you’ve finished writing a blog post, and then you suddenly realise you have no suitable photos to add to it? Well that happened this evening, hence my wonderful artwork! Good, isn’t I?