Geoff’s World

Our House is Bulgaria is doing well.
We have been so busy with work, moving house and preparing for our baby that we haven’t done anything re our house in Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian trip was just awesome, I was so pleasantly suprised with Bulgaria.  Thanks to Helen for finding a house to buy and doing all the ground work.  I would never thought about thinking about going to Bulgaria.  And when she told me we are buying a place there I thought she was mad.  But as I learnt more, she is brilliant, Bulgaria would be about the cheapest, and fastest increasing real estate in the world at the moment.  We missed the boat back home, So I sacked myself as real estate investor, after not doing anything and seeing prices double in a year. 

The Bulgarian people were just so beautiful and friendly. The old town of Veliko Turnovo was so beautiful and steeped in so much history.  Samantha would love this place.

We stayed in a small town outside of Veliko Turnovo, called Arbanassi. 
The village’s name comes from the Greek word ????????? or ???????, which, like Turkish arnavut, was used to denote Albanians and other people that came from parts of Macedonia and Albania that had a large Albanian population, regardless of nationality. As of 2005, Arbanasi had a population of 291.

It is accepted by some scholars that the village was populated by Bulgarian boyars that came from the westernmost parts of the Second Bulgarian Empire after Ivan Asen II’s important victory over the Byzantines near Klokotnitsa on 9 March 1230, when the tsar conquered “the land of the Albanians”
The village is also mentioned by the Roman Catholic bishop of Sofia Petar Bogdan Bakshev, who visited Tarnovo in 1640. He remarked there was a village up in the mountains, from where the whole of Tarnovo could be seen, that had about 1,000 houses, and whose population spoke Greek, whereas the neighbouring villages did not speak Greek at all.
In its hey day the settlement had over 1,000 houses at the time, its population consisting mostly of eminent merchant families who traded in Transylvania.  As a result of well-organized brigand raids in 1792, 1798 ad 1810, the settlement was pillaged and burnt down.  But with the property boom it is rapidly rebuilding now, with a few very nice guest houses and hotels that are being built.

Am reposting the pics from our trip to Bulgaria as all my previous posts were lost

I think the two main things we will miss from our old house is the convience of Toa Payoh across the road and the view

As it turned out my conspiracy theory turned to be correct.
The story we got told as why we had to move out of the house in Toa Payoh was that the owners son was getting married and was going to live there. I thought they just telling us that to get us out of the house so as to rent the place out at a higher rent.
We left the kitchen ikea shelves up as the kitchen had no storage space at all, but when we were handing over the owner said no she didn’t want them and we had to remove the units. So we cam home to get the tool kit to take it apart to remove it. We were about 3/4 the way through taking it apart when the owner came in and gestured us outside, she didn’t speak english but we got the message she wanted us out NOW We were both thinking silly lady grrrrrrr. But then as we got outside it all fell into place up came a real estate agent with a couple to view the house we had caught them out in their lies.
When I went back upstairs to return the keys to her that we had forgotten about the real estate agent was leaving, I asked him how much she was asking for, he says “$2″ I found it very hard not to laugh. $2k for that she must be mad” so my conspiracy theory was correct. Makes our new place seem ever better And thankfully it happened now and not in September.

We are slowly  but surely unpacking and getting settled in. 
We arrived in Singapore with 2 suitcases and ~4boxes, we now have over 100boxes
plus lots of bookshelves, desks, chairs and a bed

We are getting there