Before we could move into our village house, we had to wait for it to be ready to actually live in, which in a mountain village in the middle of winter mostly meant waiting for wood. Temperatures could drop to minus ten, minus fifteen, sometimes minus twenty overnight, and heating a large house properly wasn't something you could rush. So for almost a month, between the drive across Europe and those first weeks in Bulgaria, we lived out of hotels.
When we finally moved in, the village in winter looked like something out of a snow globe, white everywhere, with the kind of clear blue sky Bulgaria seems to get no matter how much snow is on the ground. The house sat on top of a hill, and I could see snow-capped mountains from my bed. From the garden, we had views of the Shipka Monument and Buzludzha, two of the country's most recognisable landmarks. That first morning, waking up somewhere that was actually ours, was one of the most exciting mornings of my life.
We didn't speak much Bulgarian yet, and the village shops weren't the kind where you browse the aisles yourself. You asked for everything over the counter, which meant learning the words we needed, starting with our shopping list, before we could even attempt a trip for bread and eggs. I remember my first time going alone. The shop had a little seating area where the local men gathered every morning to drink coffee and smoke, and the whole place smelled of both. I walked in, and everyone noticed the new face straight away. I asked for bread. The woman behind the till couldn't understand my pronunciation the first time, or the second. Eventually it landed, and I walked out with one loaf of bread and a feeling of achievement completely out of proportion to the task. That's the thing about learning a language from nothing, especially one in a different alphabet. Things you'd never think twice about at home suddenly feel like a small victory.
The alphabet was the part that overwhelmed me most at the start. I'd studied French at school, but Cyrillic was something else entirely, thirty new letters before I could even begin sounding out a word. Once I had those down, everything else came more easily. My first Bulgarian word was "da," yes, and from there it was the basics: how are you, what's your name, food, the everyday words you build a life on.
Underneath the excitement, though, there was a growing weight I hadn't expected. A couple of months in, it started to sink in that if I wanted any kind of real life there, friendships, a future, a career, I would need to learn the language properly first, especially in a village where almost nobody spoke English.
Everything I wanted to build was on the other side of that. It felt like a lot, some days almost too much. But the only way through was to start, so I did.
Home didn't arrive with the furniture, or even once all our belongings had finally made the journey from England. It arrived on a cold, rainy night in March. We'd mentioned to our neighbour weeks earlier, almost in passing, that we wanted a dog, and then one evening there was a knock at the door, and he and a friend were standing there with a little black and white bundle in their arms. We hadn't expected it, not really, and we wrapped him up in a pink blanket even though he was a boy, and just like that, he was ours. That was the moment the village stopped being somewhere we were staying and started being somewhere we lived. Not the furniture, not the decorating, not even the routine I was settling into with my homeschooling. The dog.
