The Time Warp

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Good to see my blogs were recovered after all. Well our little adventure has finally come to an end and we have arrived back in London to search for jobs, a home and a life abroad. But before that, the last I left off we were on our way to Romania.

Romania really was a step back in time. If anyone ever suggests that you should hire a car and drive around Romania, my recommendation is don't. We spent 4 days dodging what seemed at the time like certain death with some of the craziest drivers ever doing there best to send us into a ditch. In Romania road rules are seen as more of a suggestion than a rule and the one most frequently ignored is driving on the right hand side of the road! Footpaths, gardens, medium strips and anywhere else a car can physically go are all seen as perfectly acceptable places to drive which combined with potholes big enough to lose a cow in make for some interesting driving.

The upside of having the car was that we got to see some sights that have long dissapeared from other parts of the world such as old men getting their daily water from the well and taking there horse drawn carts to the shops.

As for vampires, we did all the mandatory dracula stuff which turned out to be a lot different to what I was expecting. Vlad the Impaler, who the Dracula character was based on did however have his own castle different to the one Bram Stoker user for his novel, which turned out to be a lot more scenic with 800m cliffs on all sides. Although it is now in ruins, the castle was apparently where he invited all the Romanian nobels for dinner then burnt down his castle with them inside for sympathising with the Turks. He didn't like Turks.

Other than driving around the mountains in Transylvania, we also spent a couple of days out on the Black sea coast at Eforie Nord and Mamaia, Romania's two biggest resorts. A lot of fun, but very very crowded. There were also some of the most ordinary swimsuits worn by lets just say less than swimsuit model material.

In Mamaia we also managed to get to a real circus. If there is one thing the do gooders have destroyed in Australia it is the circus, and it was great to see how it used to be. There were lions, bears riding scooters, camels, performing porcupines and lots of other cool stuff that the EU will no doubt eventually put a stop to now that Romania is a member. My favourite was the bear jumping through the hoop of fire!

From Romania we travelled to Sofia, Bulgaria for our final couple of days before heading for London. To our surprise Bulgaria was nothing like Romania. It was relatively clean, good roads, not too much chaos, everyone spoke english and generally well maintained, and it was cheaper! The only challenge was navigating town as Bulgarian looks like something between Russian and Greek and all the street signs are largely illegible. This turned out to be quite fun though. The cool thing about Sofia is they have kept all of their crazy Russian monuments where everywhere else has removed and/or destroyed theirs.

So after Lara spent the life savings buying half of Sofia, we headed to London. The last few days we have been staying with Bella Zanesco and trying to get organised while catching up with everyone who is over here.

Job interview tomorrow ahh!

So that is it from me. I might update this site every now and again but not as regularly as I have been while we were travelling. I hope you have enjoyed reading my blogs as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

Cheers
Christian

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