Well summer has definitely arrived! The sun is beating down, temperatures in the shade reaching 36 degrees , hitting 50 degrees at times in the sun, now that is hot! Since the departure of my brother and Mum, it’s been so hard to get motivated. The heat just zaps all your energy and we have been spending most of our time trying to cool down. It got to the point where one day we had 4 fans going in one room, but it just wasn’t enough, so we made the decision to go buy a portable air conditioner, easy said than done! We traipsed around Vidin from shop to shop, sweating buckets along the way and loosing the will to live as it was starting to feel like searching for the fairy at the end of your garden, the one that doesn’t exist ! Bulgaria gets very hot during the long summer so shops do supply air conditioning, except they are the ones that are fitted to your walls in every room, they cost a fortune and are expensive to run and as we are on a tight budget, purchasing that type was out of the question. Finally we found a shop that did a portable unit, trouble was, it wasn’t quite the real deal. Basically you had to fill a tray up with ice then when you turned the fan on it blew out cold air, not really practical and we would need a big freezer to store enough ice cubes to keep it going, ours is only small. Luckily the shop next door also did one, only this was a proper portable unit, but it was a bit expensive. It was a dual one, air con and heater, bonus! After deliberating for about 20 minutes as to wether to buy it or not because of the price (549 Levs), we decided to buy it. Word of warning, never buy something when sweating buckets and dying of heat exhaustion, you end up making rash decisions!
Finally home, hot and bothered, we unwrapped the box and read the instructions….’ Before using for first time,leave to stand for 2 hours’ , GRRR…. a ‘ carrot and a donkey’ situation! Also in the instructions, ‘ attach the vent pipe to the back of the unit and place vent through window or door ( only suitable for sliding windows or doors ) ‘ . Ok, so now my patience has been pushed to the limit, this is Bulgaria, you don’t really see many , if any houses with sliding window, let alone doors!!! We have wooden double windows but the trouble is if we opened the outside ones they would probably fall apart so our only option was to put the vent out our living room door into the kitchen. Not the best idea as, although the air con worked in the living room and it was lovely and cool, the kitchen was cooking as the vent releases the hot air out of the back of the unit ! Not so portable as we thought. It now sits in the bedroom as we use it at night, which is a blessing, and the vent goes out our window because we are lucky to have a missing pane of glass, if you can call that lucky! As for the living room it’s back to using fans…….