Uh-oh.

It’s been too long between blogs! We beg your collective pardon. We promised not to let our blog ‘fizzle out’ so hopefully we can get back on track!

It’s 10 weeks until we leave Bulgaria! That’s an attractively short period of time, to us. One of the other missionary families asked us if we were looking forward to leaving. We diplomatically answered that we were looking forward to getting home, rather than leaving Bulgaria. It’s true; as the time for us to leave gets closer – amidst continuing feelings of homesickness! – we are also beginning to imagine some of the things we’ll miss when we come home.

That’s the topic of this blog: things we’ll miss about Bulgaria, and – on a slightly less upbeat note – things we’re worried about in relation to returning home.

1. The price of things: we normally loathe talking about money with our language helper, Mirem, since it makes us feel so awkward. By which I mean ‘rich’, of course. But today we had an interesting discussion where we started comparing the differing prices of things in Australia and Bulgaria. It started with the price of the internet. We explained that our sharehouse prior to leaving Australia was on a AU$70 per month plan (between 5 people)… whereas we’re paying BGN16 (AU$13) per month here for 4 times the speed and no download limit. Bread is AU$3-4 a loaf compared to 80st (AU$0.65); tomatoes AU$6-10/kg compared to BGN1-2 (AU$0.80-1.65). Mirem was horrified. We explained that people earn more in Australia. I think we gave the figure of AU$1500 per month which, on reflection, would be below the minimum wage. Mirem suggested that the average wage here is BGN240 (AU$190) a month. On top of that, David recently told us that unemployment rises to around 40% in the mahalle during winter. Actually, facts like that kind of put any whingeing I might have had about how expensive everything is in Australia into perspective…

2. The Lada: what can mere words say?

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3. Dodginess! I remember writing about this from Istanbul before we’d even made it to Bulgaria last June. There’s a completely different attitude here to things like safety, efficiency, hygiene etc… Chainsawing firewood in a kindergarten playground during recess? Yup, no worries. Postal clerks going about their business merrily ignoring a room full of people wanting to get their letters stamped? You betcha! BBQ chickens on a set of rotisseries with raw chickens dripping onto cooked ones? Absolutely. We saw equally good examples in both Turkey and Romania, too – obviously it’s just we uptight Australians who worry about such things. Ok, so I’m not about to ignore everything I know about preventing salmonella outbreaks, but there’s certainly something liberating about not worrying so much!

4. Snow: ok, this is more relevant to right now where it’s minus 6 degrees outside and steadily snowing! It’s been cold all week but it’s only just started snowing again. It makes all the frostbite worth it. I went for a (short) walk after dinner just so I could kick around in the crazy stuff. Did you know that when it’s this far below freezing the snow on the ground behaves like very fine sand? And you have no hope whatsoever of making it into a snowball? It’s like dust!

Well, I’ll be uncharacteristically succinct and leave it there for now. I had some much longer and more boring thoughts to share with you, but hey, I’ll leave that for another time since it’s late and you’re all about to start waking up and checking all your favourite blogs, right?

Cheers,

Stu.

Merry Christmas faithful readers! If you are reading this on Boxing Day, then you are indeed dedicated, so thankyou!

We hope you all had a good day yesterday with lots of good times and little stress. We’re here in Romania with Jon, Margot and James Nairn and really enjoyed ourselves!

Here’s a short (yeah right) run down of our day:

8am: We wake up and turn on our laptops. Soon the apartment is filled with the joyful tune of ‘boo di doo boop’ as family in Australia – who were by that stage well and truly over-indulged – called us on skype to tell us all about how fun it is to have Christmas in summer and to ask if it snowed. It didn’t snow, but there’s still week old snow out there so we’re not complaining.

9-10am: A batch of chocolate filled croissants emerge from the oven and Team Jon and Stu go hard on the coffee making. Yummo!

11:30am-ish: The other Christmas orphans – Texan Dave and Canadian Andrea – arrive which means we can divvy up the presents and rip into them.

We’ve become severely disenchanted by the shopping in Haskovo, so I was impressed and delighted by how thoughtful the presents were. Of course, we are biased towards Romanian shopping! I love the orange spiral earrings Margot found for me, they’re so fun! We are also very taken by the cute little European-esque Santa ornament, he will definitely be treasured for the rest of our lives. With those and the beautiful candle set and big box of choccies we were really spoiled by them!

We in turn presented the Nairns with a ‘Snowed In Survival Pack’ which will aim (probably in vain) to get us socialising together and not on our computers if we do indeed get snowed in. The pack included the last bag of Humphrey-roasted coffee, Bulgarian wine, home-baked brownies and a 1000 piece puzzle of Sighişoara. Fun times ahead!

1pm: LUNCH!!! Jon and Margot created a wonderful lunch of roast chicken and veggies for us. It was probably the first Christmas where I appreciated hot food! They very thoughtfully made sure to include lots of root veggies (potato, carrot and parsnip) that we’ve sorely missed because of uranium avoidance. Dessert was homemade apple pie and custard with ice cream. I inadvertently started everyone off singing the Happy Birthday song with ‘Merry Christmas’ substituted in. Quite strange.

After lunch: More skyping. The non-Australians were shocked to hear that my brother Fred woke our parents up after midnight just to tell them I was on the phone. It was quite a foreign concept to them that we would treat our parents with such disrespect! The rest of us found it pretty funny and not at all unusual. We continued the introduction to Australian irreverence as we played a game called Dutch Blitz which involved Margot declaring that James needed more alcohol so he would stop winning and James launching a counter-attack against her. How dare a son treat his mother like that! [Dutch Blitz is a great card game, but I think you can only get it from the US]

Now: We just watched a funny little animated movie called Igor together before the parentals went to bed and Andrea went home. The boys are now watching a horror movie ’30 Days of Night’ which I think has vampires in it. The movie is set at night, when there’s snow on the ground and after the viewing, Dave himself will have to walk home alone in the snow in Transylvania – the birthplace of vampires. How fun for him!

Boxing Day plans: I think sleeping in, puzzle starting, left over eating and beer drinking are definitely on the menu.

Hey, we sound like a family!

Merry Christmas everyone,

Love Elly and Stu xx

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!