As the day approaches for me to leave Madison, and a little over a week later to leave the US entirely for Bulgaria, several things I’m trying to do to be ready for this are cropping up. Problems, uncertainties, a dismal world economic forecast and so on.
How do I take my cat with me? Nedda has arranged for a vet in Burgas to be part of it, given me a phone number, but what am I supposed to do exactly on this end? What if I show up in Sofia with what I expect is the correct paperwork but the officials there refuse to let me in?
What about taking him back with me to the states, when I get around to coming back that is … ?
I found out a couple of weeks ago that Amazon.com will not ship electronics overseas. Fine, then I’ll try Amazon.com.uk, see if the Brits will let my buy online and ship to Bulgaria.
But no, they won’t ship electronics to Bulgaria. What the hell is this all about? How much trouble is this going to cause me in the future, after I’m already in Bulgaria? If we (or I) absolutely must have some particular kind of hardware, how much will it cost us to *import* it?
I want to ship one of my bicycles there, but how much trouble and expense will that be? How will the price of doing that compare to the price of my just buying a bicycle in Bulgaria and leaving it behind when I eventually return?
What is the economy like in Bulgaria, in eastern Europe, in Europe overall? What will it be like for us to do business in this coming world we face?
I have to worry about getting Stuck there with no way to get home. An experience highly unlikely to occur, but shit – how would I deal with that? I have enough dollars to survive for some time there without new income, but what happens if the dollar crashes while I”m over there? Should I transfer most/all of my money from dollars into Bulgaria, or into Bulgaria and say … Switzerland or Holland?
Then what happens if the euro crashes???
Those are just the things on the top of my mind at the instant I’m writing this entry. There’s a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about this upcoming period in my life, that’s for sure. I”m 50 years old now, do I have enough time left to recover if I completely fuck this all up and have to return to the states broke?
