Gostilitsa 2004

So I'll try and start at the beginning and talk about the reason why I've started a blog about Bulgaria. The short version is because it's great and deserves greater exposure. The slightly longer version is because it's great, deserves exposure and because I own a small piece of it. And therein lies the essence of why I'd like to talk about it a bit. Because it's not just great, but I've a stake in the country and the people. A perfectly natural next question might be, 'how did I come to own a small plot in Bulgaria and why?' I get that quite a lot and it's not that I'm bored with answering the question but putting some the answer to that down not only shortcuts an actual conversation with people (something I'm often prone to avoid if the mood takes me) but it also makes me think about the reasons more carefully myself. No bad thing, thinking. If my thoughts made public also happen to offer insight into this little talked about Balkan nation, and inform just a tiny bit, then that makes two good reasons for writing this.

Before we really get into this, I'm not planning on recounting every detail around my personal history and association with Bulgaria but will try and stick to the salient points.

I first visited Bulgaria in October 2004 on a property buying trip. Why? Because I found myself with a small amount of money in my pocket, for the first time in many many years, and had pretensions of being a property mogul. Swiftly realising that I couldn't be a property mogul in the UK with the small amount I had, I started surfing for cheap places to buy and Bulgaria popped up.
I'm not a detail person. My due diligence was non-existent. I did research the weather and looked up where Bulgaria was on a map. That was about it. I'm a sucker for an impossible dream and decided to act upon my notoriously unreliable instincts alone. Back in those days, the notion of return on investment or exit strategies were not a high priority. That the sun shone quite a lot in a very cheap country came out top trumps.
Anyway, I ended up looking at a bunch of places and found one to my liking in a village I'd never heard of. It looked like it had some potential, so I bought it. There, I told you I'm not into detail, house buying in Bulgaria condensed into a single sentence. I can assure you there was a long and drawn out adventure story involving lone travel in a Cyrillic nation but I haven't gone there.

So this is what I bought (it didn't cost a lot)