In Bulgaria's embrace, where the mountains kiss the sky,
The dawn awakens softly, as night begins to sigh,
A palette of pastels, in hues of pink and gold,
Unfurl across the heavens, a sight to behold."I tend to see things and my friends will tell me I'm quite a deep person, Darren says. And what I found about being in Bulgaria is every day something was different and in my eyes beautiful, you know, and it warmed my heart. I was excited about every day. As I was doing my blog on refurbishing my property I wanted to try and get across to people, you know, how I feel about this place I'm now wanting to call home."
"And the best way I could do that really, I couldn't find a lot of the words for it. So the feelings and the emotions and things I wanted to tell people about what I am feeling. So all the words I put on my social media come from how I feel. And I found that putting it into poetry sort of articulated my feelings better. Every word I use to describe Bulgaria comes from deep within. I started putting these words and emotions into poetry so they could touch others too."
“So I spent the winter in Bulgaria on my travel visa. And I experienced the Bulgarian winter losing power and staying warm and enjoying the scenery and getting out and about, which I really, really enjoyed. And I enjoyed the going back to basics, having to collect your firewood and cook all your meals and spending times with Bulgarian families and sharing food and things like that. So I spent the winter in Bulgaria until my travel visa expired.
And then once I could go back, I went back. I started to sort of explore a bit more of Bulgaria and enjoy the spring and seeing the difference in the landscape and the difference in how Bulgaria changes from the winter to the summer. Everything comes alive, people start to go out and socialise. I started to fall in love with the country. My main focus was to try and get my house repaired. In the village, there is a few expats who have lived there and could give me good advice and also as I got to know the locals more and take advice from them, too.”
But Darren's tourist visa expired and he had to return to the UK. Now he's looking forward to renewing it so that he can come back in the autumn for a longer period and so on until he gets permanent residency.
“What I enjoy is the quietness of the villages, the serenity of the countryside, the easygoing lifestyle, plus I found a nice thing in Bulgaria - the Bulgarians are very resourceful. If something breaks, you just throw it away. But here people can actually repair things and you reuse and repurpose things, which I absolutely loved. And the basicness of it, you know, lighting your own fire, collecting your own firewood, going back to what I call "old school". So I left the UK because really in my time of life it was somewhere I didn't want to settle down and retire.
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