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Published: September 16th 2007
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When last I left you avid readers I was preparing to board (or should that be bored...) a bus for an 11 hour overnight bus trip from Inebolu on the Black Sea coast back to Istanbul.
The bus ride wasn't too bad. They stop every couple of hours so you can get out and stretch your legs, which is good except they turn all the lights on when they do. I did get some sleep, but not a heck of a lot... needless to say when we rolled into Istanbul at 6am in the morning we we're a little jaded. Our train from Istanbul to Bucharest left the main train station at 10 pm, so we had roughly 15 hours to kill in Istanbul, trying to use all our remaining Turkish money, but not go over the top.
The first stop was the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. This probably not the greatest choice of places to visit when you don't want to spend money... they sell everything at the bazaar from gold jewellery (from about 1000 different shops) to firearms (including knock off US military M16s) to police uniforms and cheap clothing.
We had to return to a jeweller we had visited the first time we went to the Bazaar. When I was there the first time I bought a silver Turkish "puzzle" ring. It consists of 6 interlaced individual rings. Unfortunately in Bozcada I took it off for a couple of minutes and when I went to put it back on I disrupted the rings' alignment. Despite the instructions they gave me when I bought the ring, there seemed no way I could possibly get the ring back together myself. Sure enough two minutes after we arrived my ring was back in one piece (with a vow not to take it off again anytime soon).
While we were there I also picked up some cheap t-shirts. The fun part is trying to bargain with the guy to get the price down. A couple of times they refused our offers only to relent as we walked out of the store with mutterings about finding it cheaper around the corner. Most of the time we only paid about 60% of what they originally asked!
We also had to pick up our carpets, which had been sent from Selchuk for us. You'd never imagine how much trouble a nickname can create. While we enjoyed the dinner at the carpet store all those weeks ago they found out one of my nicknames was Fish, we were discussing it because one of the other guys in the store had the nickname "Nick". Anyway, they found the nickname Fish highly amusing and wrote it on all the paper work. When I went to collect my carpet from the freight office and presented my passport as ID, they looked at it and told me I couldn't have the carpet because my passport didn't say my name was Nick Fish (as they were expecting). It took a couple of minutes of very fast talking (and about 3 supervisors consideration) to convince them that I was really Nick Fish despite the fact my passport didn't say that...
Following many many many hours of hanging around Istanbul, including lots and lots of walking, we finally boarded our train for Bucharest. The train ride takes about 18-20 hours to cross from Turkey to Romania, spending most of the time travelling through Bulgaria. The trip started off fine, we were a little cramped in our tiny three person sleeper cabin with all our luggage but it was relatively comfortable. We drifted off to sleep at about 11 pm exhausted after a long train ride, then a long day in Istanbul. At about 3am we arrived at Turkish passport control. We stayed stationary for over two hours while they checked to make sure everyone had got the requisite leaving stamp. At 5:15 we started moving again so we drifted back to sleep. At 5:45 we arrived at Bulgarian border control and had to wake up and present our passports again. We finally got back to sleep and slept through to midmorning when we awoke for a breakfast of tomatos and bread we had bought with our last few pennies in Istanbul (no food cart on the train!). We dozed and looked out the window for the next 10 hours as we travelled across the Bulgarian countryside. It made a nice change to see some green after weeks of the dusty brown landscape in Turkey. Eventually (after presenting our passports twice more) we pulled into the main station at Bucharest, hungry and still a wee bit jaded (despite sleeping heaps on the train). First stop, refuelling at the golden arches (McDonalds) on the train platform while we tried to work out what the currency was and what the exchange rate was. For the record the curreny is the Lei or RON, the exchange rate is roughly 2 Lei = $1 NZD. Big Mac super combo 12 Lei (sweet!), follow up cheeseburger 3 lei!.
After that we caught an underground subway to meet a guy to let us into our apartment for the next four days. He was a nice guy and very apologetic for the fact they had to move us to a different apartment from the one we had chosen, but like all Romanian drivers, a maniac on the road!
Last night we went out on the town properly for the first time during our trip. We had a nice dinner first (all pork based because thats what Romania "specialises in") then we went to a club called Club A. First round of drinks - vodka tonic 3 lei each... Next round Long Island Ice Tea 15 Lei each... followed by a round of red bulls and 1 glass of coke to dilute the spirits from the ice tea... then we discovered vodka energy (basically a vodka and red bull) 4 lei each... about half past 3 and a long dance later we decided we'd probably had enough for one night and headed home. We couldn't find a cooperative taxi driver at that hour so we walked home (good thing we'd had lots of practice over the last few weeks).
Yesterday we saw the House of the People... and ginormous palace in the centre of Bucharest. Construction was started in 1984 at the orders of the communist dictator (and general bad guy) Nicolas Ceucescu, and is still continuing to this day (they are now 90% finished). They had to bulldoze 1/6th of Bucharest to make room for it... It was 60% complete in 1989 when Ceucescu was overthrown and executed. The palace used 1 000 000 cubic metres of Romanian marble, 1 tonne of gold leaf and 700 tonnes of Romanian crystal chandeliers. The building is unbelievably large... it has corridors over 150 m long and is the second biggest building in the world by floor space (after the Pentagon in Washington). The power bill alone last year was 1 000 000 euros! We toured it for an hour and saw 4% of the building.
Anyway, I better go see some more of the wonderful sites of Bucharest.
Til next time stay safe
Nick
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Katrina Bonnington
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The Novel
Wow Nick, this blog is longer than any of your evaluation reports!!