For five years we’ve had morning coffee with the neighbours
almost every day. At first I was a bit reluctant because I’m a lazy moo and
sometimes I like a lie-in. But then I started to look forward to morning
coffee. Now I get outraged when they can’t make it, because I miss
them already.
On a practical level, it’s been good for our language skills.
But, more than that, I love the random nature of our conversations. Here are just
some of our favourite topics:
- The weather forecast.
- The weather in England.
- What just happened on the telly. Svilen likes to tell us what just happened, even though we watched it with him. (The downside of not being fluent: people assume you are a bit thick.)
- The health of various people’s kidneys. No, I’m not sure why either.
- ‘Eat that.’ And if you try to object, ‘EAT IT!’
- Blood pressure. We went through a phase of all checking our blood pressure together but we’ve not done it for a while. I miss it.
- Gardening. Obviously.
- Cats. Obviously.
- The difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, Wales and Scotland.
- 'No, Holland is not in Britain. Yes, I'm sure.'
- The outrageous price of Nutribullets. These are being advertised heavily on Bulgarian TV at the moment.
- The outrageous price of memory foam mattresses. Also being heavily advertised right now.
- Bulgarian Masterchef and this new cooking show called Mama Gotvi Po-dobre (Mum Cooks Better).
- The fact that we must all go and pay for our water now. I have no idea how everyone in the village knows when to pay for their water. It’s not like the water company sends bills in the post. Everyone just seems to go and pay on one particular day – but never the same date in the month. How do they all know? Who tells them? Why don’t they tell us?
…plus lots of stuff that we still don’t understand. And
that’s the real beauty of it – right now we only understand about half of
what’s said to us. Just imagine what it’s going to be like when we can
understand everything! I can’t wait.
