Will, Ben and Nevil

It’s been a little while since we posted anything particularly interesting here but to be honest we’ve just been cruising about in search of something suitably spectacular to write about. If you’ve seen the more recent photos you’ve seen a little of the beautiful and occasionally very industrial countryside we travelled through. We’ve got used to overtaking horse and traps and 12-year old scooter-riding boys along the roads now and it now seems normal to see packs of dogs roaming every part of the countryside.

At the border into Romania we impressed a border guard so much with our newly-acquired Romanian skillz (“boo-nuh-zee-wah” is something that approximates “hello”) that she asked if, when we’re back in the UK, we could send her a copy of our Lonely Planet eastern european phrasebook as apparently they have nothing like it here.

Entering bucharest was fun. Trying to locate a hostel we liked the sound of proved difficult and once again we recruited the skills of a Romanian student studying (coincidentally) computer science to help us find the place. In between having geeky computer conversations with Roshan and me (Ben) he proved to be totally useless and we spent a couple of hours driving in circles around the suburbs of the city.

Bucharest was okay, but nothing particularly special to look at. The four of us had a big-ish night out at a club and during the day wandered about. Saw the balcony/square where the dictator Ceausescu made his speeches until he was executed in 1989 and the massive (Communist) Parliament building he built for a ridiculously huge $6billion in the 80s. It’s the 2nd biggest building in the world by floor space after the US Pentagon building.

The city contrasts quite a bit with the rest of the country. As with most cities it’s a lot more modern than the countryside, more westernised. Apparently the average wage in Romania is something like 120quid a month (1,440 a year), not much at all. By the price of drinks on our night out (same as UK) there is a pretty massive variation in incomes.