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!

It’s been about two years, since my husband and I moved to Holland in August, 2007. I came back to my home country. I had been gone for about five years in total, only being here for one year in between. Coming back here I always knew that we would leave Holland to go to Bulgaria. Already since we started dating it clear that we would move there. But it seemed so far away.

As we met people and we told them our plan, only few of them seemed to understand it. Why go to Bulgaria when you live in Holland. You have all the financial needs covered here, why take the risk and go to Bulgaria. But the truth is, that we never doubted that we would go to Bulgaria, and never consider otherwise. We felt this was the right thing to do. As Petar had made a promise, and as we felt also led by God to follow Him. God was leading us to Bulgaria.
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It’s been a long while since the last update. Sorry for that. It seems that “summer” means “vacation” only on the TV screen. Althought we hadn’t had much rest lately, we’re still alive and kickin’.

July 2nd, 2009 – Petra became a nurse (see images below). A long awaited break from studies has come her way. It’s also a relief to have completed what she started. Currently, she’s working as a nurse almost full-time. She does home care for elderly people in our area – something that’s apparently making her happy. This will be her job till we hit the road for trip number two in October.

Road trip number one went rather well. We were stopped for drugs check on the car and ourselves only once (in Bucharest, RO), the car didn’t need to have a major service, for some reason there was very little back pain for the two of us, and I only fell asleep once on the road (almost drove straight through that 360-degree highway exit lane). We left for Bulgaria on July 9 and were back in Holland on July 19 – pretty much a week back from the time I’m writing this. We managed to get all the paperwork that needed to be done in time and this gave us a couple of days extra with friends and family in Sofia. Read more…