Ro-mania!

It's been a crazy few days; sorry I haven't been able to post here to tell you of all of my wild and crazy adventures. The last few hostels have offered free internet, but for only a few minutes at a time.

So I breezed through the picturesque towns of Plovdiv and Veliko Tarnovo in Bulgaria last week. They were both really scenic and delightful, made all the more so by a nice collection of fellow backpackers who I got along with splendidly. Bulgaria was quite a lot of fun; once you get past the baffling cyrillic alphabet, you can decipher that beer costs about $0.70 for a half litre and the accompanying meals are also plentiful and cheap.

Adventure in border crossings also proved to be plentiful and cheap. When a threesome of us set off for Romania on Wednesday, we were armed with no native-language speakers and train tickets for only half of the journey. (The ticket agent inexplicably only gave us tickets to the mid-way point). It turns out (thanks to the translation help -- Bulgarian to French -- of a 27 year veteran of the Bulgarian opera) that the way for us to stay aboard the train all the way over the border was to effectively bribe the (ununiformed) train car conductor 5 euros apiece. This did the trick, and we eventually made it over the border, but only after having declared that we hadn't visited any slaughterhouses or played with any dead chickens in the past month.

Bucharest was grimey, so we only spent one night there en route to Transylvania. The city of Brasov is lovely, and notably less dirty than the capital! But we got our first taste of gypsy hospitality on the public bus from the train station, when our travelmate got pickpocketed and lost a chunk of money plus his bank card.

Anyhow, all is well in the grand scheme of things. I have a clean bed to sleep in and haven't lost anything valuable yet (... except perhaps a bit of my sanity??). I'll return to another cafe soon to get some pictures up. I have some real gems!