Snails Pace

I'd planned to blog today about autumn and the changes it brings to a Bulgarian household. Some of the wonderful sights and usually quite mild weather. I may even have included a few photos of the garden and scenery, but no, I'm sorry I've changed my mind and am gonna have a rant instead!

Don't get me wrong, I've not had a bad day at all. In fact it's been an ok day. The rain stopped, all the animals enjoyed their time outside, the kids helped with feeding etc and I even had an online chat to hubby. But tonight the internet is driving me mad! Unfortunately living in a rural Bulgarian village has it's downsides at times. We're 22km's from the closest town and surrounded by fields and hills. It's quite olde worlde where we live which also means that unfortunately technolgy here just hasn't quite caught up with the rest of the modern world.

In all the cities and towns internet speed is very good, wi-fi is offered in a lot of places and life goes on at a rather hurried pace. Here things are slightly different. Our internet currently runs at less than dial-up speed and that's on a good day. We're limited on options as to how we connect to the internet and have to use a dongle which to be frank is absolutely pants! We curently use a M-tel homebox which is supposed to supply our internet and home phone service via wireless and works very much like a mobile phone. Of course that is when it wants to work - the internet is usually ok (apart from being slow) but does get affected by the weather, the phone part rarely works and people get tired of trying to ring us and to be honest I understand why. We also have pre-paid mobile phones with the same company and they work great if you want to stand in the middle of the field with one leg in the air, shouting like a lunatic because the person calling can't hear you and freezing your backside off in the colder months...........grrrrrrrrr. Maybe it's time for a change I can hear you all saying, but the truth is we haven't found anything else that works for the kind of money we have to spare (not a lot).

Well that's my rant over for today. Hopefully the god's of internet will allow me to post this quickly then I can drag myself off to bed with a book. Night night x

Trying New Things

Since living here we've tried a load of new things and not just food. Bulgarian cuisine is wonderful and most of the food is very enjoyable.

We've drastically changed not only the way we live but also our diets. Gone are the ready prepared meals and convenience foods, replaced with fresh, in season vegetables and meat that we've usually reared ourselves. Life has become much simpler and our needs/wants have altered too.

There are things I do miss though - good chocolate, a fast internet connection, friends and family, my horses that I sold before moving here and decent books or magazines. There are book shops in Bulgaria and some do sell English books. We swap books between friends too which helps but after a while the choices get slimmer. Some expats to buy books either online or at various book stores, but I must confess to being a bit tight! Although I love to read I begrudge paying over the odds for anything. I've always been the same I guess.

Yes it's nice to have some things from "back home" but is it really worth the extra we have to pay to get things? If friends come over to visit or for a holiday we often ask them to bring Oxo cubes or Marmite as we can't get them here, but everything else we've about managed to live without......apart from books!

So I've added a Free e-book download tool to this blog and I will be trying it out, if you click the link and then browse through the site it takes you to there's a huge list of books available. Hopefully this will come in useful for others too......Enjoy!