The newest members of the EU Family....

---

....and one still won't eat his veggies!

Woohoo! Third Intrepid tour in a row! I'm quite the adventurer now aren't I? This last tour was through Eastern Europe, crossing four countries and only on one continent this time. I tell you what though, Budapest was a bit of a shock after six weeks in the Middle East. It's definitely Eastern Europe - it's more industrial, a bit less colourful and a bit cooler. Those judgements made we picked up the airport shuttle direct to the hotel (it seemed a bit of a pain to try and do it by public transport at 7 in the morning!) and found that the outskirts of the city were precisely how I expected them. They're definitely post-Communist - slightly blocky and very run-down. Downtown however is a pleasant surprise. We spent our first night on a boat in the Danube which turned out to be a really rather nice hotel. Having a cooked brekky after six weeks of pitta bread and cheese was a luxury my stomach couldn't handle! Anyway, enough about that. On to Budapest!

We kicked off the day on the Buda side of the river and basically spent most of the morning mucking around with travellers cheques (Note well fellow travellers - Hungary is the only country in this part of the world that won't change Euro travellers cheques for Euros. They have to be changed into HUF and back again. Very annoyed about that.) and finding a decent brunch. Viri Utca is Buda's pedestrianised shopping precinct and we found a couple of nice looking cafes so ate in the weakish morning sunshine and pondered what to do. We decided that we'd try visiting the Terror House on Andrassy Boulevard and then check out the World Press Photo exhibit at the Ethnology Museum. Well, that second one turned into a fizzer since no one there wanted to take our money but they wouldn't let us in without a ticket! So no joy there. Jen did steal a really nice booklet with all the Hungarian entries though, and they were very good. Back to the Terror House. You might wonder why it's called that? It was the headquarters of both the Arrow Cross movement (the Hungarian Nazi Party) and then the Communist Secret Police. In both cases, going to Andrassy Boulevard often meant not coming back and the Terror House is a memorial to all those who disappeared during the end of the Second World War and throughout the Communist Regime. It was a fascinating place and well provided with little English information sheets in each room so not too foreign for us! The exhibits took the visitor through the atrocities committed by the respective regimes, the Communist repression of religion and the fate of many anti-Communist activists. It also noted several occasions when members (including their long time chief) of the Secret Police wound up being done over by their own men. Perhaps the most harrowing part of the visit is the trip to the basement which, at it's height, included all the basements of the entire city block! This was the area where prisoners were held, tortured and executed. It has been painstakingly restored in recent years as it was all filled in late in the Communist period when operations were moved elsewhere. Jen and I were both quite shocked by the last room in the basement - the hall of perpetrators - which contained photos of people associated with the activities of 40 Andrassy Boulevard. They were only captioned in Hungarian, so we couldn't determine what they'd done, but it was quite startling how many of them were still alive.

That was pretty much it for our first day as we were both absolutely knackered and frankly we were both out of practice at this whole independent travel gig! So we went to the mall. I'm not kidding either. We wanted a supermarket and found the most outstanding foodcourt EVER! So we stopped for a wander about the shops, looked at iPods as we were both going a bit spare on the long travel days without them and had a wee slice of pizza before locating the supermarket downstairs, grabbing a light dinner and retiring to our boat for the evening.

The following day were were up bright and early to move hotels. The Intrepid one is really really nice and we were both a bit miffed we hadn't been able to get in there both nights! It was right downtown and we both felt a great sense of achievement having navigated the tram system and gotten there. Not a huge achievement, but it's the little things that keep you going. Having dumped our bags we headed for Pest across the Danube (which I will say isn't blue!) for a visit to the old town. Our first stop was the Royal Palace, built by the Hapsburgs in the 1800s to “defend” Budapest (from itself!) and to cement their place in the region. Fat lot of good it did them though. We weren't able to go around the inside as the national Sausage and Palinka (brandy) festival was on and we didn't feel up to paying the outrageous charges for one of us to eat sausages! It's rather a nice building and dominates the skyline in Pest along with the Church of St Matthias (more later!) and gave a commanding view of the rest of the city, including the Parliament building in Buda, apparently based on Westminster. I can see the similarity, but why Westminster? No one seems to know.....

There are two significant churches in the old town. One is St Matthias, the other is the Magdalene Toronye. St Matthias is built just inside the old city walls (check out the picture - cool eh!?) and has a beautifully tiled roof. Sadly we didn't go inside as the whole church is under heavy restoration so that's a story for another day. The Magdalene Toronye is a church tower and window and is all that remains of an apparently beautiful Gothic church that was bombed in World War II. It's quite a poignant memorial, given that it faces the Hungarian Military Museum across the square. Somehow I managed to talk Jen into visiting and it proved to be quite an interesting little spot, looking at the Hungarian resistance to Ottoman Turkey (which proved fairly stubborn until Mohacs in 1513) as well as their involvement in both World Wars and the suppression of the revolt in the Czech Republic in the 1960s. That last part was particularly interesting as it noted that Hungary had been “a reluctant ally” of the Soviets in repressing the Prague Spring, and this was somewhat at odds with the Terror Museum - it seemed to evade the historical record rather than confront it and I found that quite surprising. Perhaps they were a reluctant ally, but it seemed an odd thing to mention it in such a way.

Anyway, we wandered back down into the city passing through some of the lovely cobbled streets of the old town and avoided as many tourists as we could and took the long route back to Andrassy Boulevard via the Saint Istvan Basilica. The cathedral is the premier house of worship in Hungary and is named for the founder and patron saint of the nation. It even contains his mummified hand. Creepy. Apparently this was common in miraculous saints - miraculous mummification that is. It's a stunning building covered with beautiful frescoes, some amazing statuary and more gold that I've seen since the King Tut room at the Egyptian museum! We went back before dinner with the Intrepid crew and it was even more amazing in the candle light. Hopefully the photos do it justice!

Now, onto the people we were travelling with for the next three weeks. It was a bit more of a mix than the last one, but still not a European in sight, well, if you don't count our leader. Peter, our fearless Irish guide, had never run this trip before but the regular leader had to bail for some reason or another, so he was hauled over from the Balkans to lead this trip. He was absolutely brilliant and it's been quite fun having a leader who is also being a tourist, since he's been to Budapest nowhere between there and Istanbul! We had one other Kiwi, Ching the Hamiltronian BT worker (!) who came in from London, umpteen Australians - Lisa the nurse, Zoe the doctor (handy!) Robyn the archaeologist and Erica the traveller - as well as Lisa the Canadian water conservation specialist and three Americans - Cheryl, an architect working in Turkey, Bill who works for HR in a casino (!) and his wife Marge, who works for Delta, from Denver. A whopping group of 11 and Peter. Having said that, we all got on pretty well, and it was nice to have some young people to hang out with on this trip, a real change from the last one.

So our first evening was the usual dinner out and a bit of the getting to know people and eating Hungarian food. More meat and potatoes. It's not often you'll hear me complain about that, but there really is only so much meat I can eat anymore. Ask me about four-pork-products pizza in Sighişoara sometime - it's a bit of a shock to the system when you've gone without for six weeks! Getting back to Turkey was a bit of a relief for the system. Greece will be nice too.

We left early the next morning for Eger, a little town up in the north east of Hungary famous for it's wine. The speciality is a blended red called Bulls Blood and the story of how it came to be known as such is quite a good one so I'll repeat it here. The Turks attacked Eger in the 1600s and the town put up a heroic defence - 2,000 townspeople led by the indomitable Dobo Istvan defeated 40,000 Turks! Dobo Istvan was feeding the men on the walls the local wine to keep their courage up and the Turks thought it must have been the blood of bulls because the locals put up such a fight! Dobo Istvan is now commemorated with a stonking statue in the town square and Bulls Blood has become Eger's most famous export. We did a bit of wine tasting in the evening and I can safely say that while it's tasty, it's not half as strong and full flavoured as I expected it to be. Still good though.

Anyway, there's not a great deal to see in Eger and we pretty much saw it all. We spent some time wandering around the remains of the castle that sat above the town. It's small and dinky and of course since it was Monday, the museums were closed. So we contented ourselves with a wander around the battlements and a bizarre conversation that almost always returned to the pouring of boiling oil on people and whether it would be more or less effective than boiling water. Down in town, we saw a most bizarre monument to the Turkish occupation - a minaret without a mosque! Apparently one can climb it but it's not for the claustrophobic and none of us were game to go up! Our last stop of the evening was the two churches of Eger. The Maronite Church was phenomenal. The gilding and murals that predominated over the walls were quite stunning - like St Istvan's in Budapest in miniature. The Eger Cathedral was even moreso, with classical statues and frescoes dominating the view. Built after the disaster of Mohacs, which ended Hungarian resistance to the Turkish invasion, this church was built as the seat of a bishopric that covered what wound up being the rump remnant of Hungary. Sadly all the lights were out and the sun was going down so we couldn't take any decent photos of the interior, but the outside was magnificent enough!

The following morning we leapt on a ratty old bus and headed out to a little down on the Romanian border called Debrecen. None of us were much in a touristy mood so we wandered up and down the pedestrianised town centre and looked at the pretty Baroque buildings and the hideous yellow church that lorded over it all and pondered how well Hungary seemed to be doing in amongst the new Europe. It became all the more obvious a couple of hours later as we cruised across the border.

The transition from Hungary to Romania is quite distinct. It's a bit like crossing the border from Jordan to Syria. The quality and quantity of new cars drops away, the amount of rubbish left lying around goes up and the population of wild dogs skyrockets! (That last one doesn't apply to Syria. It's cats instead!) Having said that, the volume of new building that seems to be going on here, even in the most rural parts of the country simply defies belief. And they're big houses too - much bigger than the old fashioned two room jobs that some of Romania's peasants still live in. The quality of the trains remains the same however with the old school Communist machines pulling cars from the same era (except for the service from Baia Mare to Cluj Napoca - that's a shiny new German train!) We changed trains at the border and the nice Romanian border guards all had a good flick through our passports probably wondering what the heck we were doing there. The train trundled off into the countryside and as we passed through innumerable little towns with their tumble down old stations there was always a bloke with a nice uniform and a red hat waving the train through. Some things never change, Communism or no.

We rattled on into the late evening and arrived in the Maramures about 6:30 at a little spot called Satu Mare. We were met at Satu Mare by Maria and the monster van which drove us for a couple of hours through some of the most fascinating countryside I've ever seen to our B&B in a little village deep in rural Romania. The horse and cart once again became ubiquitous, after being all but gone in the rural bits of Hungary that we saw, people were making haystacks with wooden pitchforks and men were cutting grass with scythes. Yep. Old school. It's a really atmospheric place to be travelling in the late evening as the sun sets and the mist comes down through the trees. It's really no wonder Bram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula about this part of the world. We didn't see any bears, although I kept my eyes open. No rabid dogs either, which was nice. The only odd bit was that this whole trip was accompanied by the local radio station and that is, in itself, quite unique. The 80s hasn't quite died here yet and while we heard some Red Hot Chilli Peppers they also played Tina Turner, Abba, Europe and, wait for it, Chesney Hawkes! (Only die hard 80s fans will get that last one, but will certainly understand why it's weird!)

The Maramures was described by Nicolae, our local guide, as a place still stuck in the peasant lifestyle from hundreds of years ago. People are going about their lives in the ways they always have and there isn't really anything to make them want to move on. During our travels around the region we met people who still make the local palinka (a kind of apple/pear based brandy that would burn through steel) on a wood fired still behind a mill that still uses a waterwheel to hammer out felt. They have running hot water and electricity, but why use it when you don't have to! The same has to be said for the housing - there were lots of new, multi-storey, designer homes (built by people coming back from the EU with money!) but they still sat amongst the homes that successive generations of families have lived in.

Our first stop was the Merry Cemetery - quite a strange name, I admit. However the cemetery has an amazing claim to fame - all the gravemarkers were carved by a local carver (and now his apprentice) and each marker has a carved image of the deceased and a poem about their lives. They're all brightly painted and really rather lovely. Well, most of them. You have to appreciate that the marker's design and wording is decided by the carver, not the family, so if you've lived an inappropriate life as far as the carver is concerned, his work will reflect that! So while there were some really touching poems about men who are sorry to have widowed their wives and that kind of thing, there are also a couple of guys who are basically going straight to hell for their drinking, dancing and womanising. The really odd ones are the people who were killed having been struck by lightning, speeding cars and in one case, the Paris underground. But that's what the carver carved on their gravemarkers and they were rather stuck with it!

We headed back towards our village to visit the Maramures Open Air Museum, a collection of buildings that have been acquired from various villages around the region illustrating many of the traditional ways of life of the people of this region. Nicolae walked us around the many buildings, some that were running into the 300 year old category, and explained the way of life that so many people in this part of the country still lived and the traditions that governed that existence. The houses were really quite fascinating - all built in wood, usually a single room with an enormous stone stove and an attic where the woodsmoke was used to cure meats in the roofspace! We learned about the weaving (not unlike that used in the Middle East) and marriage rituals that go together, as well as the age old methods for making sunflower oil, one of the most valuable commodities,

We had to get up at stupid o'clock to meet the train to Sighişoara and discovered that because of track works we had to take a bus, which at 5am on a freezing Romanian morning isn't the best news. Turns out it was one stop away from the main station, but no one mentioned that! We caught a shiny new German train down to Cluj Napoca and then jumped back in time about fifty years to catch the onward service to Sighişoara. Aside from having an unpronounceable name it only really has one claim to fame and that's that it was the birthplace of Vlad Ţepeş, also known as Dracula and The Impaler (and Mad Vlad, if you're John vdH.) It's a cute little medieval old town lording over a rapidly developing downtown that is trying very hard to compete with Braşov for the most interesting Dracula connection. I'm not going to bore you with the details of our visit. We wandered around the city walls and looked at the many medieval towers that were still standing, as well as some nice Baroque buildings from the Hapsburg era. We trundled through the little city museum the following morning, built in the old clock tower, but it wasn't the most exciting place we've ever been! However, Sighişoara wasn't a complete loss as we learned that there is still a sizeable Saxon minority in Romania, a legacy of Byzantine rule over the area when the Saxon people were invited in to guard the frontiers and to effectively provide Romania with an aristocracy. Across Transylvania these Saxons built their settlements and within each of these was a large church. As the Tartars in particular would often come marauding, these churches were heavily fortified and so it was that we went out to a little village called Viscri which has a stunning example of a fortified church, a strong Saxon community and a sock project. Viscri is an example of something that is becoming more common across Romania these days. Most of the Germanic minority left Romania after World War II and those that didn't were often forced to leave during the Communist period and it's only now that many of them are actually thinking about coming back! As part of their return to Viscri, some of the Germans set up a foundation known as the Sock Project. Many of the rural women of Romania have no real education to speak of but boy can they knit socks, so these Germans started collecting them up and selling them and now these women knit upwards of 10,000 pairs of socks a year bringing in 40,000 Euros for the village. Not bad eh? Anyway, aside from buying socks we had a thoroughly interesting wander around the fortified church at Viscri which was quite fascinating as it included a little ethnographic museum, the highlight of which was an explanation of rural Romanian courtship rituals - it involves girls hopping round on one foot trying to find a shoe that her bloke has hidden somewhere in the garden and stealing wooden spindles in the hope of ransoming them back to their owners for kisses! We were also treated to a really lovely meal of local Saxon food - roast goose and dumplings and local liquor (yowzers!) and it was fabulous. Our hosts were lovely company and sold many people many pairs of socks for the project. Erica bought half a dozen pairs and a couple of beanies!

After Sighişoara it was on to Sibiu - European Capital of Culture 2007! We arrived late in the afternoon and finally the weather gods turned against us. First off it was cold, I mean really really cold. It dropped down to single figures overnight and to top it all off, it started to rain. Despite that, Sibiu was probably one of the real highlights of our trip to Romania. We saw two Romanian weddings, one traditional, one Orthodox, as well as the best collection of art in the country and probably the nicest old town that we've been to anywhere.

We wandered through the Piata Mare in the late evening and admired much of the Baroque architecture that seems to predominate in this part of the world, including the Brukenthal Palace, home of the former Austro-Hungarian governor and founder of the city's art collection! It's quite a stunning little Baroque building in amongst the churches and old homes that sit around the square. We saw our first wedding which seemed to involve mostly blokes marching around and shouting in traditional dress and then posing for photos. So we took some too! Teehee.

The following day dawned cold and brutal and so we set off for a walk around the town to warm up! We started with a hot coffee before taking a wander through the Brukenthal museum. The highlights included some stunning Orthodox altarpieces from the 14th and 15th centuries, the collection of the Baron's family portraits (some very ugly people!) and a lovely little collection of quite valuable works, including a couple of fantastic paintings by Brueghel the Elder. His “Slaughter of the Innocents” is a very interesting and entertaining painting! After a hot lunch and more hot coffee Jen and I tripped out with Lisa, Zoe, Kate and Chingy to wander around the old city walls and just have a wee look around. The walls in Sibiu are really well preserved and quite impressive, especially the towers. We also found the Opera House, some really odd public art and the phenomenal Orthodox church. Like so many it was covered in gold and mosaics but for a little church in a small city in rural Romania, this one was a gem that really stands out in terms of it's beauty and artwork. It's definitely worth a visit and I would strongly recommend it to anyone!

Sibiu seen, we got up early to catch the train to Braşov and another shiny new German train took us to the heart of the Carpathians. Braşov is a name that must be said with suitable.....gravitas. Try it out loud. No? I'll tell you later then. Braşov is a bustling industrial city about the size of Greater Wellington that is growing rapidly since a downturn post-1989. This is where they make all the wooden bits for Mercedes Benz. Yep. They also make a lot of the Dacia cars seen not only in Romania but also Turkey, Syria and Jordan. We were met at the train station by possibly the most amazing tour guide we've had on this trip. Julian was a larger than life Braşov native who learned to speak English watching television! Amazingly it very rarely showed, although he swore like a trooper sometimes and had a fairly unique turn of phrase.

He took us for a short walking tour of the town that took in the Council Square, the Black Church, the city walls and some of the towers. The Council Square is lorded over by it's excellent town hall (now the city archives) and is famous as being the place that the Pied Piper emerged after leading the children from Hamelin in Germany. We couldn't quite work out how he did that and how he got them all that way without anyone noticing. Odd. Anyway, on with the tour. We continued up to the Black Church, so named as it was burned down in 1689 and left in ruins for around 100 years before it was rebuilt, amazingly in the original Gothic style. There aren't any photos, since that wasn't allowed (mutter mutter) but the church itself is famous for it's enormous collection of carpets. There are over 150 and they are some of the best examples of antique (particularly Turkish) carpets anywhere in the world. They were all gifts to the church from members of the local merchant guilds after the rebuilding of the church. It also houses an amazing antique Austrian 4,000 pipe organ, a cast iron baptismal font from the original church and a few bullet wounds from the '89 revolution!

We retired behind the Black Church to see the narrowest street in Europe at a whopping 1.2 metres wide. Apparently it was a passage for the city firemen, but I cannot fathom that it had much use! Just up the road was the Skael, or Slave, Gate, so named as it was the gate used by the native Romanians to access the part of the town where the rich Saxon minority lived. We also saw the Weavers Bastion, one of the best examples of the fortification of medieval Braşov, and had Julian tell us that old people are all good at sneaking out to get mountain spring water in the early morning because (and he said this with more than a hint of conspiracy) they don't sleep.....! Now Romanians aren't that good on the naming things front and we finished the tour at the foot of the Black Tower, so named because it burned down and was left in ruins for some years before being rebuilt. I'll let you guess why the White Tower is so named. Anyway it was closed so we couldn't climb up but it still provided an excellent view over the city and up to Mount Tampa, which he hoped to climb the following morning before we left for a castle day! Well, scratch that idea. Apparently no one knows when the cable car up the mountain actually runs and as it started running a nudge before we left for Sinaia, that wasn't really going to cut the mustard. So, no trip up Mount Tampa. Bother.

The trip to Sinaia wasn't just a dull old drive - we got to visit the two best fortifications in all of Romania- Räşhov (pronounced Rish-nov) Fortress and Bran Castle. Räşhov was built as part of the series of fortifications designed to protect and tax the trade routes running through the area from East to West as well as to protect the farmers. Räşhov is mostly famous for it's well as the fortresses only weakness was it's water supply. It took two Turkish prisoners four years of digging to get down through 193 metres of solid rock to the water table. They were apparently promised their freedom but whether or not they got it remains a mystery to this day! The castle also housed a neat little collection of medieval artifacts and weapons, an actual gibbet (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know what one is) and a 400 year old medieval skeleton, still lying where it was buried, under one of the bastions. She is still unknown and will probably remain so. Julian told us of a little post-Communist moment involving Räşhov - when Ceaucescu went, the castle was leased from the local council by an Italian developer who promised to invest €1 million in returning it to it's former glory. He's spent 800,000 and most of the fortress is looking pretty good, but now the local council discovering a 1,000% increase in visitor numbers, is trying to get it back. I think the idea of foreign investment hasn't really quite taken off in Romania yet....

Now, the next stop. Bran Castle. Dracula's Castle, at least according to Bram Stoker. Well, turns out he was wrong and Bran Castle is about the nicest little castle I've ever been into, although that's someone else's fault. Dracula had actually been in the castle through, we stood where he stood in the castle jail. Vlad Ţepeş was being brought to Bucharest for trial in the 1460s and was kept in the castle overnight before he and his escort crossed the pass into the flat plains of southern Romania. Now the castle owes it's fame to Bram Stoker but it's interior design to Queen ????? who bought the castle to be a summer residence during the reign of her husband, King Karol I. The castle itself is surprisingly dinky and very cute. It claims to be the first with electric lighting and the first electric elevator anywhere in the world. Amazing....

From Bran Castle we stopped in the heart of the Carpathians for an excellent traditional Romanian lunch as recommended by Julian (which turned out to be pork, again, with polenta and a fried egg!) before rolling into the ski resort of Sinaia. Named after Mt Sinai, Sinaia has two claims to fame. First, it's monastery, which is simply breathtaking, and secondly, the Peleş Castle. We visited the monastery the morning after we arrived and listened to the monks morning service. I think that an ability to sing must be a requirement to join the Orthodox priesthood because the sounds were beautiful, as they have been at every Orthodox church we've been to. The rest of our day was taken up by our visit to the Peleş Castle. Built by Karol I as a summer residence after his daughter decided she liked Sinaia so much, the Peleş is a case study in how palaces should be built - like Versailles, but without the nation-bankrupting grandeur! The tour doesn't take in all of the Palace but shows off the most gratuitously flash bits. The main entrance hall, with it's retractable roof and amazing wood carving and gilded everything; Karol's enormous collection of medieval and renaissance arms, including a full suit of parade armour for a horse (!); the library and state rooms; the cinema and theatre and the many halls and rooms decorated in national styles. There were French and Italian halls, as well as a Turkish smoking room and an Arabic hall that had more gold in it than Fort Knox. Amazingly, not a single Romanian was involved in the construction and all the craftsmen were from everywhere else in Europe. Frankly I'm amazed that the people put up with having a German spending all their money building this monstrosity. Amazingly, Karol actually built a second palace at Peleş - the Pelişor. This smaller residence was for his nephew and heir to live in, despite the fact that the Peleş was frankly enormous! We passed on the (expensive) tour as it was reputed (and proved to be) much more sedately decorated than the original!

So from Sinaia, we boarded one more shiny German train for the trip through the countryside down to Bucharest, the capital of Romania! Now Bucharest, as far as the guidebooks are concerned, has very little to recommend it unless you like packs of rabid wild dogs roaming the city. However this is something of an exaggeration (I saw 20 dogs, 15 were at least collared if not on leads, and of the other 5, none were rabid!) at least as far as the central city is concerned. It's probably bad out in Industriilor or Titan, but despite the fact that the destruction of the downtown to make way for the Palace of the Parliament is what started the dog problem, it seems to have been largely resolved around the central city. Which segues us nicely into a discussion on the relative merits of the greatest Communist edifice EVER - Ceaucescu's Palace of the Parliament. Relative to what you might ask? Well, think of a gigantic thing that destroys whole neighbourhoods, looms over the people and otherwise costs vast sums of money. That's right - I'm talking about Godzilla. Relative to Godzilla, the Palace of the Parliament was an outright disaster. The second largest administrative building in the world (after the Pentagon) lords at the top of Ceaucescu's Champs Elysées like the great big ugly building that it is. It astonishes me that he could have gotten away with the wholesale destruction of downtown Bucharest in an effort to create a grand avenue up to his massive edifice. Amazingly, it still houses the Romanian parliament and Senate, so it wasn't a complete waste of time but even more amazingly, it's still not finished and probably never will be. Whether or not the current Romanian administration is prepared to go to the expense of completing the project with the grandiosity that Ceaucescu had in mind remains to be seen and sadly we weren't able to even see the inside as those inconsiderate Lions Club of Europe members were hogging all the public space for their Annual Jolly. Not bitter, just disappointed. Either way, I'd still recommend going to see it (so you can tell me what it looks like inside!) and seeing what Communism and megalomania leads to. Not pretty.

Having seen that particularly disastrous monument, we decided that we'd go and see the museum rated Europe's best (admittedly in 1996, but still!) and on the way there would go and see a monastery in downtown Bucharest that, according to legend, had a stunning golden dome. We saw three lovely basilicas with some really well executed murals and mosaics and not a single golden dome in site. It was a nice diversion though as we strolled to the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. What makes this museum so good is that it's an eclectic ethnographic collection of arts, crafts, artifacts and photos collected over the best part of the last 100 years and it goes a long way to preserving the heritage of a huge portion of Romania's population. The needlework was superb and the painted eggs (which I wish I could have photographed) were simply stunning, especially when one considers the frankly primitive means of painting being used by these peasants. There was also a complete frame windmill on its rotating base and a huge water-powered wool carding comb illustrating the, well, ingenuity of the people. There were a couple of moments, especially the comment that Romania was still part of the “Chair Zone” and that the further east one goes, the more one is likely to see people sitting on the ground. Odd. On the other hand, an important part of their collection has been acquired recently through people giving the museum things “from my grandmother's house” that they would have otherwise thrown away and the museum has given them a home. It was an odd, but very creative way of gaining new material. In the basement of the museum is the Museum of Communist Iconography and these two rooms contain a large proportion of the Communist art saved from the '89 Revolution. The only two public portraits of Ceaucescu, along with one or two others, are kept here as well as paintings and statues of Stalin and Lenin. The museum is something of a memorial to those people who suffered at the hands of the Communists, particularly in 1962, when the collectivisation of agriculture on the Soviet model led to a vast number of people being dispossessed or worse.

We had dinner that evening in the very nobby part of Bucharest before stopping briefly at the Memorial Arch just up from our hotel. Very much in the mould of the Parisian version, this was built in 1883 to commemorate those soldiers who died fighting the Hapsburgs. It's rather nice at night. It was rather a nice way to end our brief stay in Bucharest, although I don't really know what we would have done had we stayed any longer! So it was with a little trepidation that we headed for the Bucharest railway station to catch the train bound for Istanbul. No we weren't going all the way there quite then, there was still the small matter of Bulgaria to contend with!

Bulgaria. Ah, Bulgaria. Best said with a Dracula-esque accent to the steepling of the fingers. Do it with me now - one, two, three....”Bulgaria!” Believe it or not, Bulgaria turned out to be the absolute highlight of this tour. Partly it was down to the group, partly the food and mostly the trains. We picked up a train that was running all the way to Istanbul and it was supposed to go via our first stop in Bulgaria, Veliko Tarnovo. Well, you'll all have noted the use of the word “supposed” there and surmised that it didn't. In fact we were unceremoniously dropped on the train platform at Ruse, just over the Danube and the Bulgarian border and told to wait for the next train that would take us to Gorsa, a mere 14km from Veliko Tarnovo. Fortunately there was a Bulgarian on board who could explain everything that the guard couldn't manage in his limited English. So we wound up sitting on a cold train platform for about 40 minutes all waffling on in quotes from “The Young Ones” and confounding the north Americans, who have of course never seen it. Lisa was almost hypoxic she was laughing so hard. This was, in actuality, the start of the most entertaining train trip of a lifetime. The train dutifully pulled up and we climbed on board and made our way through the corridor rammed with people and Lisa, Zoe, Ching and I wound up in a cabin with four random Bulgarians, all of whom spoke nothing other than Bulgarian. Fortunately, Chingy had a secret weapon - a pick up line taught to him by a Bulgarian workmate of his. So our Ching turns to the 75 year old grandmother next to him and proceeds to tell her that he thinks she's beautiful. She tells the rest of the cabin and we all thought it was positively hilarious. Why he didn't try it on with the four students in the cabin next to us is anyone's guess?! We spent a good couple of hours with these people and all attempts at communication proved wholly unsuccessful. We did pick up a packet of bacon flavoured pork things (which none of us wanted to eat) which came in very handy some time later when most of the Bulgarians on the train had decamped to their destinations. A random bloke in the cabin between ours and the one Bill, Marge, Cheryl and Robyn were in stuck his head into ours to get a gander at the weirdo tourists and at that point, for no apparent reason, Chingy handed him the bag of pork jobbies. The dude looked like he'd won the lottery and bolted back to his compartment and presumably scarfed the whole lot. The look on his face was priceless and geez, I haven't laughed that hard in ages. When we arrived at Gorsa we discovered two English tourists on our train had jacked up a bloke from their hostel in Veliko Tarnovo to come and pick them up and he was good enough to arrange for some taxis to come from the town and pick us up as the ones in Gorsa were trying to do a number on our Peter!

It was raining in Veliko Tarnovo when we finally got there and it was also getting a bit on the late side. So we retired to our room and slept off the hilarity of the train trip waiting for the rain to stop. The following morning the rain had eased and we were set loose on the town. We headed up to the citadel and checked out the very nice ruins that looked back at Veliko Tarnovo. They were in quite good nick and are in the process of being extensively restored. We admired the views and the tower in which one of the Byzantine emperors had been held (before being beheaded!) and the place known as Execution Rock, where malefactors were simply tossed from the citadel into the river. Not a nice way to go, that's for sure. We had a shocker of a moment where Peter was telling us about the castle and the town and he decided to do it in song. Now Peter's got a pretty good voice and a talent for rhyme and meter so it was very good and very entertaining. We were all falling about laughing. Problem was that a Bulgarian tour group went past and asked firstly if Pete was our priest and when we said no she thought we were laughing because we didn't like Bulgaria! We did our best to convince her otherwise, but I'm not sure that we met with any success. Mad.

Atop the citadel was a church known as the Palace of the Patriarch and was rebuilt to match the original in the early 80s. We decided to go in and have a gander as we had nothing else to do and the entire group was struck dumb at the amazing contents. The church had been entirely painted with the most amazing murals I have ever seen. They were reminiscent of Picasso's Guernica, sort of, but also of Bosch, Rivera and still others. All we managed to find out is that they were painted in 1985 and represent the times of the first Tsar of Bulgaria. The identity of the artist is a mystery, as is the reason for the commissioning of the work and how the Communists allowed a work that was in no way Communist in it's approach, execution or subject matter. I reckon Jen took at least one photo of every panel, so we should be able to reconstruct the entire image! We both balked a little in Eastern Europe at constantly being asked to pay to take photos, but this one was easily worth the 3 leva that we were charged.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around in the freezing cold looking at Veliko Tarnovo's other real attraction - churches. There are umpteen churches and cathedrals in the town and rumour has it that there are a couple that are really stunning. The one we all really wanted to see was unfortunately closed and despite Peter's temptation to climb the wall and see if he could get in, we weren't able to. We checked out a couple of the other ones but by that stage of the afternoon we were all bitterly cold and so retired to Skates and Erica's room to try the chocolate wine that they bought in town that afternoon. While it went some way to warming the very chilly travellers most of us agreed that it was pretty heinous. It did top off a good start to our visit to Bulgaria though.

The next morning we walked through the drizzle to the bus station to make the three hour journey to the capital! As we headed up through the mountain passes most of the scenery disappeared and we were all quite surprised to see that it had clearly snowed overnight and quite heavily in places. We all got quite excited as we were all quite convinced that it would either snow in Sofia or in Bansko and we'd all be able to make snow angels and have a snowball fight.

Sofia isn't the most exciting city in the world and in the rain it's even more dull. Even Peter nearly coming to blows with taxi drivers trying to do the dodgy on him didn't make up for the poor first impression. On the other hand, the hotel did. The Hotel Maya is run by a couple of crazy old Bulgarian ladies and is decorated in the Communist Grandmother style. Imagine all the hideous old things your gran had in her house and then make them Communist. It was awesome, especially the padded leather doors, there is nothing better. Sadly it's being renovated quite heavily and I doubt this old fashioned design and style will carry on. Shame really.

We stepped out into a freezing cold Bulgarian afternoon to have a bit of a look around Sofia. We started off our visit to the stunning Aleksandr Nevsky church (why are all Orthodox Churches not named after St Stephen named after Aleksandr Nevsky?) and it's magnificent Icon Gallery. The church itself is absolutely beautiful and decorated in the Orthodox style with oodles of gilt and murals. The picture of God on the top of the dome was simply stunning and brought to life a real image of grumpy, angry Old Testament God, not the nice, huggable one from the New Testament. I rather liked it. Sadly, no photos....which is also a pain as I have none from the Icon Gallery either. Housed in the crypt of Aleksandr Nevsky is the most brilliant collection of icons. Taken from churches across Bulgaria, they date from the 1400s to the present day and it was quite interesting to wander amongst them realising that we knew almost nothing! There were a couple of icons of the life of St George (y'know, killed the dragon....!) and it turns out he had a pretty rough time of it. He was beaten, put on the rack and the wheel, burned and presumably martyred in the end and he went and did all these people a favour! The other gem was a bloke called St Demetrius, who pops up a lot in Eastern Europe who's miracle seems to have been kicking a scorpion off a balcony. I don't know....We also visited the Saint Sophia Church just up the road, which is reputed to be one of the oldest in this part of the world. It was being heavily renovated when we were there but one could still see photos of it through the ages and it looks like it will be amazing when it's been completed.

Our final stop was at the Bulgarian Parliament to watch the changing of the guard. It was a short ceremony, but came complete with goosestepping. Like I said about train guards in Romania, some things don't change after Communism! By this point the sun was starting to go and it was getting inordinately cold so we stopped in a nearby cafe and had some of the most outstanding coffee and cake we've had anywhere. I tell you what, Eastern Europe really goes in for it's coffee and cake and boy do they do it well. If you're ever in this part of the world, I can heartily recommend taking time out and enjoying it. It was quite fun to people watch as well. I can tell you that the 10 of us really scruffed up the place as it was pretty well choc full of trendy Sofians. We stopped at a political rally on the way back to the hotel but pretty much to take photos of the building in the square where it was going on. The elections were on in Bulgaria while we were there (we think both local and national) and it seems that there are a lot of people running. Marge noted that she'd read somewhere that one of the ballot papers was something in the region of 3 foot long. Mad!

We got up the next morning to more rain and discovered that our bus to Bansko was about a sixty seater, a little big for the 12 of us, but hey, such is life. We had one stop to make on the way to Bansko and that was at Bulgaria's premier monastery at Rila. Rila is beautifully set in the hills between Sofia and Bansko and it is the setting that makes the difference - in amongst the turning trees, the snowcapped peaks and the rain, it's hard to imagine a more peaceful place for an abode of quiet spiritualism. Of course there are tourists, come to see the stunning architecture and murals on the main church as well as to marvel at the surroundings, and marvel we did, despite the inclement weather. The frescoes are simply amazing, if a little twisted in places and watching the black-clad Orthodox monks scurry about the place is pretty cool. Nicolae (our guy in Romania) mentioned that there are over 400 active monasteries in Romania and I believe the tradition is alive and well in Bulgaria too - Rila alone houses 300 monks. I guess 50+ years of religious repression has encouraged a new generation of religious people. Fair enough too, with places like Rila in the world.

So we missed the snow in Sofia by a day, but it was still bitterly cold and we hoped, mostly for Erica, that we'd get snow in Bansko. Sadly, it wasn't to be. It just rained instead. No fun. Bansko still turned out to be a really cool little town. Peter said that they're bidding for the 2014 Winter Olympics and I couldn't imagine a more beautiful alpine setting in which to have them. It would be good for the bear sanctuary too, but more on that later. The lass behind the desk told us there was a free concert on in the town hall that night by one of Bulgaria's most famous folk singers so we decided that we might as well go along and in the end we were treated to a pretty good gig. The opening two acts were a local dance troupe who did some interesting pieces that were partly inspired by traditional folk dancing and mixed in with western dance from the past 80 odd years (there is something odd about seeing Bulgarian girls doing the Charleston!) and a girl who looked about 16 singing folk music. They were all young and all quite talented and it was really rather good. The headline was well, odd. She reminded us all of Elvira, which is never a good thing! But the music wasn't half bad, so we couldn't complain!

Bansko wasn't really a great place for doing cultural stuff so we did a lot of random wandering and sitting in cafes and that sort of thing. The one thing we did see that was rather good was the Church of Sveta Troitsa. It's looking a little worse for wear these days, but when it was built it was a way for the people of Bansko to get one over on the Ottoman Empire. The church was built by local merchants who bribed the town council and built an enormous wall around the site, before building this really lovely little church. The mayor of the town got five years in an Ottoman prison for that little stunt, but it's a really good story! The major highlight, and probably the reason for visiting Bansko outside the ski season, was the bear sanctuary. Owning a dancing bear was outlawed in Bulgaria in 1993 but not ever acted on until the year 2000 when an Austrian charity stepped in and built a park outside Bansko to house the 24 registered dancing bears in Bulgaria. It's taken the last seven years but they have finally rescued all two dozen of them. The treatment meted out to these poor animals by their gypsy handlers was simply brutal beyond belief and while some of the animals have not yet adjusted to life in captivity, they are at least going to live out their days in comfort, being well fed and well treated. Some of them still look pretty miserable and it does tug at the heart strings more than a little, but one can take solace in seeing the bears that have broken the conditioning they received at the hands of their former owners and they can be seen quite happily snuffling around in the undergrowth doing what ever it is that bears do. One of the keepers was quite proud to say that they thought that this year 17 of the 24 would sleep through the winter, something most of these bears had never done!

Peter pulled out a few stops while we were in Bansko and managed to rustle up a van to take us to Plovdiv, since taking a public bus for five hours when it's close to freezing isn't pleasant, especially with a 6 am kickoff! So at about lunchtime Thursday, we rolled into Plovdiv, which wins my award for the best city in Bulgaria. Partly it was because the sun came out and it was warm again, partly for the look on Ching's face when he discovered the hotel had the Hustler channel and partly for the two best meals we had in Eastern Europe.

The old town of Plovdiv is sited on a hill called Nebet Tepe and at the peak of this hill is a Thracian settlement, one of the earliest in a town that claims to be the oldest in Europe. There's not much left but it did have a nice view. The highlights of the old town were a number of the old neoclassical and baroque houses, many of which are being restored and the Roman amphitheatre. The houses up there are just wonderful to wander around the cobbled streets and look at, like many old towns of Europe and the Amphitheatre is rather good as it has commanding views of the city and is in surprisingly good shape. Under the main shopping street at the bottom of the hill is also a stadium for 80,000 people of which one can only see parts of the seating at one end. Plovdiv also has a lovely little forum, although it's site next to the main crosstown road does rather lessen one's urge to examine it too closely!

We spent some time in the afternoon strolling around the enormous park looking at the bizarre statues of people we didn't recognise and the real stand out - a Samurai and animals from Plovdiv's sister city in Japan. We had dinner at a little restaurant beside the park and discovered, to our horror, that they only had menus in Bulgarian. Peter didn't tell us that.....however our waitress, whose name I don't think anyone got, came to our rescue with her outstanding command of English and basically explained the entire menu to the table. No small effort on her part and we tipped her lavishly for her sterling work. On top of that, it was an brilliant meal - what's not to love about potatoes baked in a white sauce with prosciutto?

Before we left the following day we climbed to the top of the “Hill of the Liberators” to check out the excellent Soviet soldier looking down over the city only to discover that much of the base had been covered with neo-Nazi graffiti. There seems to be quite a bit of that around Europe, which is a little sad to be honest. Anyway, we enjoyed the awesome views of Plovdiv and a good yarn with Chingy and Peter before we headed down into the city to do a bit of shopping for the long train ride and have some tea and cake. Peter showed us a few more of the Roman ruins that run around Plovdiv - the city authorities have built a little shopping arcade along the same routes as a Roman one and the remains of walls have been incorporated into the façades of the new shops! Neat! We went looking for a supermarket and couldn't find one so after a lot of faffing around in the main shopping precinct for a couple of hours we located a deli that provided suitable sustenance (and we were still finishing all the red wine we bought three days later in Istanbul!) before heading out for dinner at a restaurant that served meat on three foot long skewers. Remind me and I'll show you Chingy's dinner! Half a kilo of pork on a stick! Amazing. We headed down to the train station all feeling very full (spending all our remaining Leva on food will do that!) only to discover our train was two and a half hours late so we resorted first to playing conkers, in which Kate, conker champion of Calgary and Canada defeated Peter, conker champion of Eastern Europe and the Balkans in a close match that showed that youthful luck can overcome experience and guile. After Peter's remaining conker shattered we wound up playing charades on the train platform for a good couple of hours, including a particularly vicious round of me trying to do “Deliverance” without doing anything inappropriate.

If you're ever tempted to take the overnight train from Belgrade to Istanbul, only take it from Belgrade and don't get on anywhere in the middle and don't plan on being on time either. We got in to Istanbul FIVE HOURS LATE! It was nice to be able to see some of the Turkish countryside but since we didn't get on the train till after midnight and had to get up to get stamped out of Bulgaria about four hours later and then get up again to get stamped into Turkey it was a pretty painful journey. So we rolled back into the Middle Eastern chaos that we had gratefully left behind three weeks ago and it was something of a shock to come back to the honking, if nothing else!

I'm not going to do a chronological tour of Istanbul, I just cannot be bothered trying to sort it all out in my head into some kind of order. So I'm just going to rabbit on about things in whatever order they come to mind! So things we saw and did:

Mosques first. We visited the Suleiyman the Magnificent mosque at the top of the hill behind our hotel and had a wee look at the tomb of the great man himself before walking through one of the biggest mosques in Turkey. It's quite magnificent inside and the stained glass in particular sticks in my mind as the real gem. The Blue Mosque isn't. Blue that is. The outside is grey. I was disappointed! The inside though is covered with blue tiles. I was expecting something Ishtar-Gate-ish but instead found that all the tiles are delicately patterned in both Turkish and more Eastern styles. It's really rather pretty actually and while we were hurried in and out because afternoon prayers were coming up, it was really enjoyable to look around. Across the road from the Blue Mosque is probably the most famous religious building I know of - the Hagia Sofia. Once a Byzantine basilica, reconsecrated a mosque by Mehmet the Conquerer and then turned into a museum by the great Ataturk, it is truly a magnificent monument and an amazing way to see some of the best of Byzantium and of the Ottoman Empire in one place! The first thing that strikes you about the whole place is the scaffolding though, that is holding up a large part of the dome and will probably never be removed. While it's something of a pain for the photographer, it does go some way to really putting the scale of the magnificent building into perspective. The enormous Arabic calligraphic discs in the corners are simply stunning and the mihrab is the best I've seen in a mosque anywhere for sheer beauty. Alongside this, some of the Byzantine mosaic work that's been uncovered is simply stunning. The sheer amount of gold that must have adorned this place when it was built beggars belief. I really enjoyed going there, it's probably my favourite place in Istanbul. It's really hard to describe in words what a stunning building it is, so you'll just have to go there and see for yourselves.

We also visited the two big bazaars while we were there and managed to only buy a single evil eye magnet. Erica managed to spend $2,000 Aussie dollars on carpets. She actually got a pretty good deal for two quite large carpets, two very large silk throw type things and express shipping to Australia frankly. The Spice Bazaar isn't. Not anymore anyway. There are still a few men selling spices and the smell from those stalls still fills the air. The place was packed with people since it was a long weekend in Turkey and we saw some of the most bizarre things you'll ever see in shops anywhere including Sultan outfits for your five year old! There was the complete range of knock off everything though! The Grand Bazaar, on the other hand, was. There were some amazing things there, the lamps being my personal favourite. They were really quite beautiful. The nice thing about Turkey is, unlike Egypt, that if you say no to a person there, they walk away! It's really quite nice and not once did we even get invited into a carpet shop. Helps to go an hour before closing on a long weekend methinks! The other little spot we went to was the Topkapi Palace, home to Ottoman Sultans throughout the Sultanate. Much of it seemed to be closed to visitors, which just keeps happening to us, but we were able to see some of the best bits - the kitchens, the armoury, the summer houses and the treasury. The treasures of the Sultans are simply beyond belief and the amount of gold and seriously large gems really does stun the onlooker. The palace itself is a fantastic home for them and we enjoyed looking at the opulent surroundings that the Sultans used to enjoy. Oh to be king eh?

I know that on our last day in Turkey we went down to the Basilica Cistern under Sultanahmet. Built by Justinian to collect water from the aqueduct we saw later that afternoon, it's now an enormous underground cavern that just has to be seen to be believed. Two hundred and something columns hold up the ceiling and the two feet of water in the bottom keep some of the biggest catfish I've ever seen. In the back corner of the cistern are two columns held up on gigantic carved blocks with the head of Medusa on them. No one has ever been able to work out where they came from or why they were put there, but they're fantastic sculptures and worth a visit.

So that was that. We're eight weeks down now, eight more to go. Scary eh? It really whips past. So we're off for a week in Greece(which we've just finishd, blog due in two to three days!) and on to the best part of a fortnight in Italy before the big trip north to Prague and Berlin. Hope you're all well and warmer than we are!

Talk soon,
Al and Jen

---

Photos

Hapsburg Palace
Edifices. Hungarian Style.

Matthias Corvinus
Outside his cathedral

The City Walls of Pest
Not just for decoration mind...

The Hungarian Parliament
Westminster it ain't!

Eger Cathedral
Yellow seems to be their colour...

Eger Maronite Church
Complete with sentiment - Nothing is enough for God. You decide what it means...

Dobo Istvan
Defending the town - an action shot!

Debrecen Cathedral
See - yellow!

The Bank of Transylvania
MWAHAHAHAHAHA! Actually, they're quite big in Romania...

Making Palinkas
and boy does it taste terrible!

Tombstones
at the Merry Cemetery

Maramures Village House
Some people actually still live in houses like this. This one is a 17th century example!

Making Hay
the Maramures way. The same way they've been doing it for hundreds of years!

The BT again with the Sighisoara clock tower
Cool eh?

Casa Dracula
where he was born....apparently

Sighisoara Walls
It's a tower. What can I say?

Viscri Fortified Church
and the photo from the graveyard we weren't supposed to be in....!

Wedding Photos!
From downtown Sibiu! The Brukenthal is in the centre background

Sibiu Walls
Some of the best I've seen.

The Transylvanian Orthodox Cathedral
Stunning isn't it. That's the other wedding that we weren't invited to!

Sibiu from atop the Evangelical Cathedral
Lisa and I were too chicken to go up!

Bran Castle Exterior
Hardly Dracula territory!

Jen and I at Bran Castle
Pretty isn't it?

Rashov Fortress
See how it looms on the skyline?

The Peles Castle
Hideously conspicuous consumption.

The Palace of the Parliament
What was he thinking?

One of the many basilicas we saw
and this one didn't have a golden dome either!

Bucharest Triumphal Arch
of Arcul de Triumf in the vernacular.

Veliko Tarnovo
Pretty town, shame about the weather

The Palace of the Patriarch
Atop Tsarevets Fortress in V.T.

From the Palace of the Patriarch
This one is called "The Tsar defeats his enemies." You've got to admit, it's pretty amazing.

Wall Art
There are a few of these in V.T. They're pretty cool!

Peter Scouting
and not breaking into the churchyard. That's definitely not what he was doing.

Aleksandr Nevsky Cathedral
That's real gold people. REAL!

The Changing of the Guard
in Sofia. Some things never change, communism or no.

Just a random building
But what monumental architecture eh?

Rila Monastery
Where the Monks live

The Church at Rila
Where the Monks pray

Dancing Bears
Not Dancing, you'll be pleased to know

Lots of Bears
You can count them if you're quick!

Elvira
Well, no one can remember her name, but boy can she sing!

Plovdiv Amphitheatre
In good nick it is. They still use it!

The necessary group shot
From left: Erica, Marge, Me (being a silly bugger), Bill (also being a silly bugger), Chingy, Kate, Lisa and Zoe. Jen took the photo. Cheryl and Robyn are also missing, but meh. I'll tell you the story some time.

The old Roman Gate
into the Old Town of Plovdiv

One of the many old houses
that grace the old town of Plovdiv.

The Liberator
Note large machine gun.

Kebabs, Bulgarian style
Note Chingy's look of bemusement and Peter's look of envy. He looked like that a lot. Always hungry that boy!

Suliyeman the Magnificent Mosque
Just plain magnificent really...

The Blue Mosque
Not blue you'll note.

Hagia Sofia
What can I say?

The grounds at Topkapi
Who'd be sultan? Anyone?

The Spice Market
No spices, a lot of people!

The Basilica Cistern
Atmospheric piccie!

Medusa
Yes, it is meant to be upside down.

The Basilica Cistern Again
More atmospheric photography!

Comments

[Julian]

Hy Al & jen
Guess hwo....... This is Julian from Brasov.This is a nice review and i'm happy to see my name in it.I'm glad you had a good time in Brasov,hope you'll send your kids too..... Best regards.