Branching out from Biser…and Back
Biser, Bulgaria
Lunch in Harmanli, the only town we have been in so far where you have to drive up a no exit street right in front of the police station to get to the restaurant!
Staple mixtures of tomatoes, white cheese, egg and cucumber with the famous Bulgarian meatballs and long sausages and fantastically grilled bread.
Enjoyed in a leisurely fashion.
Countless games of backgammon and chess completed.
Relaxing.
All followed by a tiki-tour of Harmanli including last week’s pizza shop, the river, the gypsy quarter, the hotel/nightclub (definitely the fanciest building in town by a l-o-n-g shot, accessed only through the gypsy ghetto!), the church, our-friend-the- policeman’s apartment block, and more abandoned buildings than you would give one town credit for….including a four storey monstrosity which had started out its life destined to be an old folks’ home, but no-one thought to put a lift in it (now it is a concrete shell of floors and a few internal walls), and an even better one….a five or six storey grey concrete box with no stairs at all!
Harmanli has only one set of traffic lights, and as our jeep driver pointed out, “They have not been working since democracy.”
For all that, Harmanli is a delightful quirky little town caught in a fifty-year timewarp.
Back to Biser.
Because we have a social life!
Drinks with Elena at 5, to be precise. We are Bulgarianly-late; not much, but enough to make her wonder if we were serious about 5 o’clock meaning 6 o’clock!
Elena lives in her parents’ home on a section of about a third of an acre. In this space they grow a massive quince tree, keep bees for honey, a goat for milk and have a newly-acquired calf, not to mention growing vegetables, which are watered from their own well when the town water supply is erratic.
But we didn’t stay here for coffee. Elena had organised for us to visit the virtually-next-door Tudor House (with its stunning collection of art relating to the two brothers, who designed the Bulgarian alphabet…..that’s what Nikolai was working on when he was killed in a road accident in England), and so the fading English garden became our “parlour”. That, and the bench on the roadside. Many of the ladies I had met yesterday turned up, and with Elena’s help, they received much more satisfactory answers to their questions!
It was dark by the time we trudged back up the hillock to home, a big bag of quinces and a homebrewed bottle of wine in our possession….but we knew the importance of not being in a hurry.
Dinner: potato out of a box (made with UHT milk from another box), German sausages out of a jar, green beans out of a tin and beetroot from a jar. Adequate, even if not particularly nourishing!
Tags: 2008/09, food, housing, postcard: Bulgaria, recreation
rayres
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