Sunday 27th January 2019

Bulgaria is quite a mix of old and new right now, and I'm not talking about buildings or the vehicles I see driving past my house. I'm thinking more of the way in which official things are done, banking, paying bills and so on.

Crazy as it may seem but I quite like the miles of red tape and reams of form filling you can encounter here. It's concrete, it's definite, it's human, and at the end of the day you feel like you've had a great mental workout and earned that big mug of tea and chocolate biscuits.

Bill paying, for example, can be done online quite easily, but I still prefer going to a desk somewhere and giving them my customer number and being told exactly what I owe before I hand over my stotinkis. I suppose it's the comfortable feeling of having a face rather than a computer screen to deal with if there are sudden unexpected wild discrepancies between what you expected to pay and what shows up on the system. Last week, though, the form filling intensified somewhat as I gathered together the final documentation for my citizenship application.

First was a visit to the village doctor, Diana, to enquire about the necessary medical checks. She wasn't one hundred percent sure about some of it, and took down details so she could find out for me, but I definitely need some kind of psychiatric report and for that I have to go and see Dr Stoykova at the hospital in Dryanovo. Unfortunately I watched a film recently, called Unsane, where a woman is inadvertently admitted to a psychiatric unit and only escapes after stabbing one of the orderlies. I'm taking my trusty Swiss army knife to Dryanovo just in case.

The next documents were several official translations of things such as my birth certificate (which I found out needs to be apostilled - am I the only one who has never even heard of that word - involving vast expense couriering it to an office in Milton Keynes and having some kind of stamp attached to the birth certificate presumably declaring it's genuine) and obtaining letters from the court and prosecutor's office to say I have no previous or pending convictions. Fortunately I was able to enlist the help of a Bulgarian woman for all this as it meant heading to various offices in Gabrovo (none of which I would have located unaided) and then collecting said documentation at a later date.

The citizenship folder is getting fatter each day

I'll be heading there again on Wednesday to hand in a few more documents and then I plan on having one more meeting with my trusty helper just before I head off to Kazanlak to meet with my fellow citizenship seeker, just to see if everything looks in order. I don't even know how you actually hand over the documentation in Sofia. Do they want it in a fancy folder, or do I just deposit it in the shredding machine in the corner? Who knows, but as I think I've said before, I do love a challenge and this one is proving pretty damn exciting.

I began this post rattling on about the old and the new, and so far it's all been good old fashioned footwork and pen pushing. I guess the new for me is how increasingly easy it is to find and order all manner of things online nowadays. There was my lush Pocophone a few weeks ago of course (I still love it!), several underbed storage boxes to hide all my scruffy work clothes, and the plastic screens for the balcony so I can sit out in my thermal undies in the middle of winter. My latest acquisition has been a swanky new printer to replace my faithful old one whose tubes have become blocked from all the cheap ink I've pumped into it over the past 8 years or so.

I always try and organise my orders so that they will be delivered on a day when I'm actually at home, but as usual the planets misalign, and I got the phonecall from the delivery guy to say he was on his way whilst I was still red taping in Gabrovo. Fortunately he had a few other deliveries in Gostilitsa as well as Skalsko (a nearby village) and so we agreed I would phone him as I was heading back and we'd arrange a rendevous point. As luck would have it, I was just a few minutes from Skalsko when he arrived there, so we met in the carpark and swapped cash for my fancy printer. Deal done. Even more good news, the printer came with instructions in English, and a mere hour later I was printing my very first document via wifi. How cool is that! I'm sure you can guess that the document was to do with citizenship.

It's so SHINY!

Today's closing picture is something I haven't made for myself since 'O' level biology, and that's my set of 'questions they might ask at the interview' flashcards. As long as they only require the same level of knowledge about Bulgaria as the average four year old might have then I'm on to a winner.

Not very flash cards