Dear friends,

Sorry for the delayed (by much) update! Our time in Sofia so far has been exciting but also extremely busy. With work, church tasks and the need to sleep there’s very little time left for chatting with you all. I hope that after the holidays, soon after the new year begins things will finally settle and I’ll be able to get back in touch with you on regular basis.

What’s happened so far?

Petra has a full-time substitute job at an Anglo-American school in Sofia. All is in English and she works with children. It’s a blessing for us, and she’s enjoying it a lot.

Still no progress has been reported onthe situation with our apartment. It’s become a frustration as now we need to work hard to pay off the loan for it but are unable to actually use it. We hope and pray that God will resolve this and give us the necessary patience and peace until this happens. Please, do pray for us in this respect. Read more…

Ok, it’s been a long working week since we arrived in Sofia but at least things are starting to look better. Our room isn’t quite as a mess as it was in the past 3-4 days and the most necessary of paperwork is done.

As promised earlier on, here’s the brief story of our trip to Sofia… We left the Netherlands on October 2nd and headed to our friends Ali and Sonja in the Stuttgart area of Germany. We ate lots of big (and quite fat, I must admit) American food (Friday evening), had a good laugh at 10 Drugs You Shouldn’t Use While Driving… took a walk in the area around their home and slept well (!). Saturday was ice cream day – a super treat in itself. All in all – we had a great time in Germany. Thank you Ali and Sonja for having us over! We’re already looking forward to coming ’round again. On Sunday morning we hit the road. Around noon the German traffic police decided we’re an interesting case with out handmade transit license plates, so they pulled us over for the traditional (for me at least) 40min. check. At least this time the car was so packed, they didn’t seem to have any interest in checking our luggage. After that the travel was quite smooth.

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Looking back at the time we’ve spent in Holland it’s a pity we didn’t get to see Rotterdam in more detail. Oh well, at least we covered the basics. Here’s some shots of Rotterdam at dusk I had a chance to take a couple of days ago. Looking at them, I’m actually thinking I might miss the city (as much as I think it’s rather boring compared to most other places). Perhaps it’s the cleanliness and order that I’ll miss most. On the other hand, I won’t have to worry that all stores will close down at 5:30pm. Ha ha. Well, enjoy the photos as we are starting to pack up for the trip.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention… I’ve planned on turning this trip to Sofia into a photo trip. I’ll try to capture the fun, strange, characteristic or beautiful sights that we’ll encounter on our journey through six countries and well over 2000km. I hope you can become a part of it this way and share in our excitement, that quickly turns into road-trip  boredom, and successfully takes us to previously unknown levels of tiredness. Stay tuned!

This is just a brief photo update. The photos are taken while we were on a walk in the Biesbos national park in Holland some days ago. Click here to see it on Google maps. Hope you’ll enjoy them and should you have some recent photos online – leave a comment so we can check them out.

It was the trip I was waiting on for quite some time now… Not so much because it involved yet another Christian leaders meeting, but mostly because I got to see old friends from college and spend some good 1500-1600km on the road. And I just love long drives – whether on highways or small roads – it don’t matter. This time I even got a little of both.

Below you can see some of the shots from the Leadership Conference 2009 – taking place in the village of Buesingen, Germany/Switzelrand and organized by the college I graduated from – EuNC. This time the conference was quite strange, with the topic Fully Alive. I won’t comment much on it, besides saying that it was far less than what I had expected – could have been more practical and addressing the whole of the church body, not just the leaders. The whole church ought to be fully alive, right?

Anyways, here’s the shots. I didn’t get to take any other type of shots because the weather was primarily North-Western (ie. gloomy, cold and wet).

For the exciting parts of the trip – hit the Read more link below…

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