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!

This has been an epic school term.

We’re following the NSW school year which is meant to have 4 terms of 10 weeks each. When we arrived Kathryn and Aydin were behind by a week and had booked flights to leave for Aus immediately after the spring holidays – which are on now – so we decided to push on until they left so we could try and catch up and let them have 2 weeks holiday in Aus, since Stu and I were going to have a 6 week break anyway.

So we’re now about to start week 12 and the three of us are totally over it. Thankfully this week Stu and I are going ‘freestyle’ meaning that we don’t have any material from the department to use. We’ll probably do some revision to try and cement properly into Aydin’s  long term storage things like counting backwards from 20 and the alphabet in it’s correct order and lots of handwriting to try and stamp out silly habits he’s developed. Other than those boring inside things we’d like to do more outside stuff, look at nature and try to teach him to skip rope. Fun learning! Hmm, I guess we’d better sit down and plan it.

The end of this term marks the end of the ‘big long boring period at the beginning of our trip.’ (couldn’t think of a more creative name) To break down the rest of our time here:

• On Thursday Humf arrives for 4 1/2 weeks and we’re going to do a bit of travelling together (I’ll go into that later).
• When he leaves (sniff sniff) we’ll then have 2 weeks until Kathryn and Aydin return.
• Between their return and the end of the school year we have up to 3 weeks of school to do, depending on the jetlaggedness of our student. Then it’s a…
• WHITE CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR!!! Yes, we’re looking forward to snow and roasting marshmallows. Reminds me, Humf can you please bring some packets of marshmallows? BG marshmallows are kinda tasteless and act weird in hot chocolates.
• We’ll start school earlier than Australia (mid-Jan) and have another 12 week term, this time with a holiday in the middle.
• Somewhere in there near the end of term 1 we might be getting a visit from our friend Imogen who is doing a year of exchange at a university near London and Stu’s parents, who just want to travel. We might even be coming home with the senior Grants.
• Which will then bring us to Easter and our time in BG coming to an end. While our flights allow us to stay until the end of May, we felt that leaving at the end of a term will be easier for Aydin and his schooling – our leaving will be traumatic for him and to do it mid-term wouldn’t be very fair on him or his parents.

Our first four months have felt like they’ve dragged because we’ve seen that from next week onwards the rest of our time here is nicely broken up into manageable chunks. We have roughly six months left now, which doesn’t feel very long really, considering how much of the next three months will be spent on holiday.

Speaking of which, we’ve planned a nice little tour with Humf.

We’ll start off with a leisurely week in Haskovo, giving Humf a tour of our new hometown and introducing him to our friends and favourite cafes. This part is mostly just for H to get over jetlag and for S and I to recover after the term. We even have a birthday party lined up with Mirem’s son Hasan turning 11 on Friday.

We will then do a little bit of sight-seeing in Bulgaria: Plovdiv – for some pretty cool Roman ruins, the idyllic town of Bansko – which has a lovely mountain and maybe Sofia – mostly because it’s the capital and still smaller than Melbourne.

We haven’t entirely decided whether to do this next bit or not, but we’d like to then head up into Romania and visit Jon, Margot and James Nairn in Târgu Mureş who are the parents and brother of our very good friend Andy and the owners of the house we lived in for 3 months before we left (and plan to move back in to when we get home!) They’ve been living in Romania teaching English for nearly 2 years now. It will be good to see them and their home there.

Finally, we’ll head back down into Turkey. We have grand plans to see both Cappadocia and Ephesus both of which look amazing even on the Wikipedia pages. Just about everyone we’ve met who has been to Turkey has recommended these places so we do hope to get there. We’ll then leave Humf to enjoy Istanbul on his own and head back to Haskovo.

A few hours ago I accidentally clicked ‘publish post’ before actually finishing writing and right now it’s just clicked over to midnight, meaning it’s now 8am in Ausland and people will soon be sitting down to read a half finished post. Yes, I know you read our musings this early

In any case, it’s time for bed.

Hope you all have a good week. Especially you Humf, and all that flying ahead of you. Good luck mate, see ya in a few days.

Love Elly xx