Excuse me but you have no right to excuse your excuses being used by me. Your ignorance is excused

Who do you think?  

TBH we got swindled both times...    first one to Greece was initially presented as "could she go to spend a week on her friends parents yacht in Greece...   it would only cost a hundred quid for the flight".

Yeah...  it ended up costing LOADS more.

Then last year...  Barcelona...     she insisted she would save up birthday money...      didn't save a penny & ended up "borrowing" a few hundred quid from my Dad.       Still be be paid back.

As a family we haven't had a holiday in 5 years!! 

She's not getting any more out of us...      the boy is off to Belgium in a couple of weeks on a school trip.. its his turn.

Usually the tax payer in my case 

320d and must be clearing £25k.

Excluding the taxi work.

Norty Cinds.

Thanks x

Ditty, I knew what you would say.  

We've just been swindled in a BIGGER scale.  We got the 'oh it would be lovely for us all to go on holiday again as a family' story.  So we've booked a massive villa (fine we'll pay for that).  But then it was (from Mr Cinds grown up daughters), can you book all the flights for us 2, our partners, ours kids the 2 cousins etc.  Which we did, and paid for.  Now we are getting all the sob stories about not being able to afford it etc.

My son is 18 and worked since he left school at 16. He currently gets up at 4.30am to get to his work at 6am and works on a building site till 3.30pm. He normally gets home around 5pm . He is paying his own holiday by grafting 

Screw that!!!!!!

OMG!   Talk about taking the p*ss!  

awwww!   well done him!     And going somewhere sensible!

You got a good un there Skylark! 

Good on him sky  

But it was a nosey question.

Good on him.  I make my lad work for his money.  I always had to, and I really hate it when I see kids getting hand outs without earning it.

Thanks, hope he behaves in Bulgaria 

I dont mind, i am very proud of him x

Coming into this late as usual, bit nevermind...

I worked in Bulgaria for a short while just before it joined the EU. I expect it’s changed a lot in that time, so I don’t know how useful my comments will be. I was living in a top Sofian hotel (I wasn’t paying, natch   ), and working in Haskovo ( “H”s are pronounced like the Scottish “ch") and near the Greek border. I never got near the Black Sea Coast, but from what I’ve heard it’s virtually a different country. (One of my Sofian colleagues who doubled as my driver told me about the first time he visited the Black Sea: the first person he met was a local shopkeeper who addressed him in English!)

Sofia was great: a young, lively population, good nightlife, lots of historical sites and museums and some jaw-dropping Orthodox churches. Haskovo was pretty basic by comparison, even though it’s one of the main cities (it’s on the old Silk Road from Istambul). The South was beautiful hill-walking country; some quite stunning views, but dirt-poor. The place I wanted to visit, but only saw passing-through, was Plovdiv: Bulgaria’s second city and the cultural heart. It supposedly has the best-preserved Roman amphitheatre in the world, although all the Sofian lads raved about was how pretty the Plovdiv girls were!

Food: I found this to be generally fine, and pretty cheap. Shopska salad has already been mentioned. However the one thing to watch for is that, like most of the Balkans, Bulgarians are extremely keen on offal. “Creamy Brains” was one particularly memorable menu item: needless to say, I didn’t partake!

Language: probably not a problem as I mentioned above. If your lad’s likely to go outside the resort, though: the best piece of advice I was ever given was to learn Cyrillic. You could learn it on the flight out, and it helps enormously for reading menus, road signs, etc. Also, a surprising amount of Bulgarian is quite similar to French, so once you’ve translated the Cyrillic, the word will sound quite similar phonetically. A lot of modern words are phonetically identical to their English equivalents too.

One of the best-known things about Bulgarians is that nodding means “No” and shaking the head (actually a sort of rocking movement) means “Yes”.

Roads: if he’s tries to travel around, this is the one thing I’d definitely warn about. The “motorways” aren’t too bad (at least around the big cities), but even then: we’d be passed by an expensive German car doing around 200kph (about 125mph), while there was a donkey-driven cart moving along the hard-shoulder...  Off the beaten track’s another matter, though: I remember describing it as “even the potholes have potholes"...

The police were staggeringly open about taking bribes from speeding motorists (you’d pass a stopped car with the policeman talking to the driver, but his notebook was lying open on the bonnet: literally “off-the-record”...) I was walking through the Borisova Gradina (huge park) in Sofia, and noticed a police car parked amongst the trees, with the driver standing around drinking coffee from a flask. I asked my colleague about this, and he explained that the Police didn’t have enough money to keep their cars on the road all the time, so they’d park them off-road for hours on end. This was symptomatic of much of the country: there was some wealth in Sofia, but staggering poverty (by European standards) in other parts, especially down South.

Thankfully, I didn’t see much of the Mafia, but they were definitely around. They’re supposed to be strongest around the Black Sea, which is where cigarettes and suchlike are smuggled-in. (I don’t smoke, but I was told that black-market fags cost about 20p a pack...)

Probably pointless for this topic, but I thought they were incredible anyway:

Aleksander Nevski Memorial Church, Sofia:

Stunning 

Stunning from the outside; even more stunning from the inside.

The forum didn't seem to like me posting the picture of the Russian church in Sofia as well, so I'll post it separately (it's supposed to be the most photographed place in Sofia):

Thanks very much Eugene, and lovely pics x

As you should be, he's a credit to you.

Lovely pics, Eugene.

What beautiful churches!

Those Churches are stunning.

If they still sell Tangerine flavoured fanta, could you ask him to bring me a bottle back.  Thank you 

Cheap property in Bulgaria

Will do