Looking Back On 2023: A Year of Transitions

It’s that time of year! A time when we sit back and reflect on the past 365 days. I’ve been writing these “Looking Back” posts since 2012 and I’m sad to say that for various reasons (some of which you’ll read about here), I missed writing about 2022.

Most of 2022 was amazing and we had some very memorable moments – like celebrating our 15th anniversary together in Cyprus, an epic press trip to the Bahamas, living and traveling around Slovakia for almost 3 months, and spending Christmas in Canada with our families.

However, the end of 2022 and into the first few months of 2023 were very rocky times and we found ourselves flailing. Luckily, the tumultuous start didn’t last, and we transitioned our year from questionable to awesome!

Each year has a feeling or theme, and for us, the word that comes to mind for 2023 is transition and transformation: of who we are, what we do, and the life we lead.

In this post, I’ll start with the craziness. Even though it was so messy at first, this was a fantastic year overall, and I’m excited to share our wins and failures with you in this post.

If you want to read our previous year’s roundups, have a look at 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.

Flailing into 2023

For much of 2022, we were working on the documents needed to obtain residency in Bulgaria (more about living in Bulgaria below).

It’s a very long story, but after months and months of gathering the (many) documents required to apply for residency, our lawyer called.

It was Friday evening and we were sitting on our couch in the house we rented in Bulgaria. He was calling to let us know that we had five days to go to the Bulgarian consulate in Canada and apply for the long-stay visa, otherwise one of our documents would expire.

We knew we had to go to Canada eventually, but we should’ve still had months before we needed to apply. How could this be happening?!

Since everything took so long to do (appointments, gathering documents, notarizing/apostelling, etc.), the validity of one of the initial documents we had procured from our home country of Canada was about to expire.

If that document expired, we wouldn’t be able to apply for the long-stay visa, and ultimately, residency in Bulgaria. All of our hard work would have been for nothing.