Sheep Guarding Llama

Today we are leaving Bucharest to take the train all day down to the old capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire and the first capital of modern Bulgaria: Tarnovo.  Our train is not until the very early afternoon so we started with getting breakfast at the same place that we did yesterday, did a couple of additional videos, and then checked out of our hostel, the Crazy Duck Lodge.

We had the hostel arrange a taxi for us today.  Better safe than sorry, although scammers would not bother coming into this neighbourhood; it is all local residential.  The trip to Gara de Nord, Bucharest’s main train station, was quick and easy and very cheap as all the real taxis are here in town.  The train station has warnings all over the place about the scam taxis, too.

We got to the station plenty early, which is always very smart, and had time to do things like get Subway sandwiches for the girls to take on the train with them.

Our train today is a daytime train; there is no overnight on this run down to Tarnovo.  This is mostly good as it will give us a chance to enjoy the scenery as this is our chance to get a good look at Bulgaria.

The train was incredibly warm and we had to share our cabin with two other people who wanted the window closed making it incredibly warm.  I spent pretty much the entire trip standing in the hallway with an open window to keep me cool with the air moving by.

Standing in the hallway always makes it easier to get to know people.  I ended up talking to a New Zealander who works in London and travels extensively.  We talked for over an hour at least.  And a Norwegian traveller that I met got some awesome pics of Luciana and me that he plans to email to me.  I have not seen them yet, though.

At the Romania border we were stopped for over two hours.  So long that everyone got out and just hung around outside for a long time.  We have no idea why Romania would have an exit border process that takes so long.  What could they possibly be doing?  I met several kids travelling from France and talked to them for a while as well.

Once under way we crossed over the Danube, which I have done before twice in Belgrade but not here, and went into Ruse, Bulgaria.  Border control on the Bulgarian side was under twenty minutes, which is like nothing.  And we were into Bulgaria.

The Bulgarian countryside was really beautiful.  We loved it.  Gorgeous, open farmland with great rolling hills and deep river valleys.

We had many hours inside of Bulgaria on the train and we ended up being very late getting into our first stop at Gorda where we thought that we were going to miss our connecting train but the Bulgarians held it for us and we were able to leave immediately for the last leg of our train journey to Tarnovo!  The last bit was only about twenty minutes so very fast.

Getting into Tarnovo, all of the French students that had been on the first train with us were still with us and going to Tarnovo for the weekend, too.  Because our train was late there were no taxis available for anyone which was rather a pain.  Of course there is no cash machine at Tarnovo station so that did not matter all that much since we could not take a taxi anyway.

We started walking and realized that it was going to be a very uphill climb.  So Dominica called the apartment that we were staying at and they ran down to get us themselves which was awesome.  So we got a quick ride up to the apartment.

The train coming into Tarnovo is really cool as the city sits on several hills with a deep river coursing through it and the train would be very disruptive to the old fortress site, the old town and everything else.  So the train actually goes far under the city near the river level and so you never see the train even though it goes right through the middle of the city.

Our apartment was right on what felt like one of the main intersections in town, across the street from the Alegro Hotel and La Scala restaurant and near the city park and Aladin Foods.   It’s a great location.  Our apartment was on the second floor and while small was really nice and comfortable.  We liked it a lot.

This apartment is the first time that we have had a place in Europe with the infamous shower and toilet area all in one where the shower actually gets the toilet wet and there is just a drain in the middle of the floor.  No actual shower space.  The biggest problem is getting the toilet paper wet, although it is not as problematic as it seems unless you are flailing around in the shower.  It was nicely done and not actually bad at all, but having the entire bathroom floor wet all of the time was a problem as you get your feet wet any time you use the bathroom.

It was getting dark by the time that we were settled in and ready to head out to get some food.  We are just getting dinner and going to bed tonight.  We did not want to go anywhere and I felt like falafel but Dominica wanted something sit down so we went to La Scala on the corner, we didn’t even have to get to the sidewalk before getting to it, and had a nice dinner there sitting inside by the front door.

We turned in early.  Tomorrow we will explore the old town of Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

Today is our one, big day to be tourists in Bucharest so we are dedicating the day to seeing the city.  First thing this morning while everyone was just getting up, Liesl and I set out on a search to see if we could locate some breakfast options.  We walked around the area where our hostel is and also checked out the playground situation.  There is a really nice playground right across the street from the hostel that we think that Luciana is going to really like.  We also found another playground down the street that was smaller but had nice swings for Liesl as swings are her favourite thing at playgrounds at this age.  She just loves getting to swing.

We walked back and reported that we had found nowhere that had breakfast nearby except for the bar that is in our driveway.  We asked at the desk about that and they said that they had breakfast, so we went there.

Breakfast ended up being pretty good.  Lots of fruits and veggies and fried eggs.  Americans are really missing the boat with fresh veggies with breakfast, Europeans get this right much of the time.  Tomatoes and cucumbers are really common breakfast foods over here.  And if you have tomatoes or bell peppers and a good, salty cheese, which they always have here, you have an awesome combination.  A bite of each together is just delicious.  And so healthy.  We lingered for a while at breakfast.

After breakfast we took the girls to the playground across the street and let them play for a while.  We did several travel videos while we were there as well.  Even the girls did some and Luciana has gotten into doing her own YouTube channel, too.  Adorable.

After we had time on the playground and had had breakfast it was getting late and we needed to get to the Parliament House to be able to do the tour as the place closes at five and the last tour goes at four and it is some distance away.  We grabbed and taxi and headed across town.  The ride was maybe ten minutes.

At the Parliament House things were a little confusing.  It is not clear how you go in and there is no obvious entrance.  I guess that they just assume that you will arrive on a tour bus and lack even a sign as to where to go in!  We got in, probably around three or three thirty, and once inside it was a mob of people and very confusing there, as well.

We eventually got our tickets, but decided not to pay the extra fee to be allowed to take pictures once inside as the inside of the building will only be so interesting.  We had quite a bit of time to kill until our tour which was going to be the English one at four o’clock, so we had some time to kill.  You must get a tour for this attraction, it is illegal to go around the building unescorted.  So only official government tour guides may take you.

With our spare time we were able to go to the art exhibit which was open in the Parliament House and Luciana especially enjoyed the chance to see a small art museum.  She loves art and had a great time and was hoping that we would be able to come back.

The tour took an hour and a half and was pretty good.  The building, the second largest in the world by square footage and the third largest by volume, is really something and quite recent in comparison to the other giant buildings in its category and the largest government (non-military) in use building anywhere.  I would say that the tour is worth it, it is not so expensive and the “profits” all go towards maintaining the building, which costs a fortune just to keep lit.

At the end of the tour we were taken out onto one of the balconies and got some seriously impressive views that were well worth it.  Here we were outside so allowed to take some pictures, which we did.

We continued across the street from Parliament House to a park and gardens there that looked interesting (the opposite direction from the way that the picture above was taken) and almost immediately discovered an epic playground that is one of the best that we have ever found.  So that was our afternoon plans right there.

The girls had a great time on the huge playground.  Tons of kids and so much to do.  It was a great find and worth going to with kids even if you skip the parliament tour!  We were very impressed and we made a couple of videos there, as well.

We could not stay as long as we wanted on the playground because we needed to get dinner and I had after dinner plans to meet up with a friend in town.

We took a taxi back to the hostel, and got hit with one of those tourists fake taxi rate scams; word to the wise, when in a city like Bucharest and you are venturing into tourist areas bring the phone number of a real taxi agency with you, it’s worth it.  We only got scammed to the tune of twenty dollars, so it wasn’t tragic, just foolish and annoying.  But a twenty cent phone call would have fixed that, gotten money to a legitimate taxi driver and been far easier, in reality, as finding a taxi where we were was a challenge (and hence why they got us.)

We walked to dinner at Nonna Mia, a fancy Italian place right across from our hostel.  We knew that the girls were not up for any more walking (nor were we, I had to carry Luciana a lot around the parliament building, especially on the stairs) and this was really close and looked good.

Nonna Mia worked out perfectly.  Simple and the food was quite good.  We were happy with it and very glad to be able to just walk home afterwards.

Gabriel, my friend from Axigen, came to the restaurant and picked me up there and we went to the old town for drinks.  Gabriel had not had dinner so we found a place across the intersection from Xclusive where I had eaten last night and he had dinner while I had a few cocktails.  It was a nice evening.

I got home pretty early, maybe just after ten, and worked for a bit before heading off to sleep.  This is the end of our mini trip to Bucharest.  Tomorrow we are heading off to Gara de Nord again and will be taking the train south to Tarnovo, Bulgaria.  Bulgaria is our thirty first country for Dominica and me, and the twenty ninth for Liesl and Luciana.  And Bulgaria wraps up the Balkans for us, with this we will have visited every country in the Balkans by any definition – geographic, geopolitical, socio-economic, peninsular, etc.  Even those that are technically kind of on the peninsula but not considered Balkan like Greece and Turkey.

This morning, around six, we pulled into Romania’s capital and largest city of Bucharest.  This was the last stop for our train so we did not have to worry about quickly getting off of the train, which is the best way because that adds a lot of panic.  You don’t want to oversleep and miss your station!

We did not have any word from our hostel yet as to whether or not we would be able to go straight there as it was first thing in the morning so we went to the Subway at the Gara de Nord Railway Terminal to see if we could get breakfast as Liesl was super excited to find that there was one there, but they were closed.  So we ended up going to McDonald’s instead as we knew that there would be food that we could eat there for breakfast and we could wait there with wifi until we knew where we could go.  Breakfast was fine, the coffee was awful, though.  We don’t expect McDonald’s to live up to European standards of coffee but in the US McDonald’s McCafe brand is one of the best coffees that you can generally get (definitely better than Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts) and yet, this wasn’t even remotely up to US standards.  It was awful.

While we were there a man overheard us talking about travelling and came over and introduced himself.  His name was David and he was a retired Anglican priest from British Columbia who had been travelling and had had some travel complications.  He is a full time traveller like us.  He had cell phone questions as he had just arrived by plane from the Philippines and did not know how the local mobile phones would work and he needed to get to Budapest, Hungary and was hoping that we had some insight into that process.

We ended up moving from McDonald’s to So! Coffee which was far better and hung out there with David for quite some time working on his phone, getting him a travel plan and so forth.    You often make new friends when travelling, everyone is in the same adventure together.

We were at the Gara de Nord for a few hours and had coffee, food and even hot chocolate before leaving.  Our hostel, the Crazy Duck Lodge, had responded long before that our room was ready and that someone was at the front desk so that we could arrive any time that we wanted.

We grabbed a taxi and went to the hostel arriving before noon.  We got checked into our room and the girls played out front with some of the staff doing chalk drawings on the “driveway”.  They had a great time.  The room was really nice and the shower is great.  We are liking the hostel private room here.  If we return to Bucharest we will definitely use the Crazy Duck Lodge again.

We relaxed in the room for a bit and I worked on some writing while I could.  The girls took naps, as well.

Around four we set out to walk down to the old town and see what was there.  That is one of the big attractions in Bucharest, a restored old town with lots of restaurants and shopping.

Our hostel is not far, but it was a decent walk to the old town.  Fine for me, but rather a lot for Ciana.  I had to carry her much of the way.

We walked around the old town for a bit, everyone was really starving.  We did not spend too much time before settling on Xclusive Grill & Crepes.  I grabbed a negroni and we ordered dinner.  The food and service were so so.  They got our order wrong and things took a while.  It wasn’t bad, but it was clearly focused on tourists and not looking for much repeat business.  Dinner was fine, but we would not make a point of returning.  The girls have been so addicted to crepes recently that we had thought that it would work out well.  Luciana fell asleep during dinner, again.

We decided to just grab a taxi back to the hostel after dinner.  We were tired and it was starting to rain and Luciana was not going to put up with another long walk, especially wet and this much more tired.

It was an early night for us.  I stayed up for a while posting and writing.  Everyone else was off to bed almost as soon as we got back.

Tomorrow is our chance to really see Bucharest and do something.  So we are going to be tourists for the day.  The one big thing that we hope to get to do is to go see the Parliament House.  That is the biggest attraction in the country.

I think that we all slept pretty well last night.  No power outages all night which was good.  Today is our last half day in Chisinau, Moldova.  Dominica was hesitant to return to Bouchee for breakfast, we will have eaten there every day that we have been in Moldova and had every breakfast there but everyone loves it so she gave in and back we went.  They know us there by now.  Today everyone got breakfast except for me, I love their sandwiches so much that I went for a lunch meal instead.  It was on the late side, anyway, for breakfast.

After breakfast (or lunch) it was back to the apartment and time to get everything packed and out the door.  Both yesterday while the rain was coming down and today while waiting to go I was frantically working on getting media uploaded as we have been doing a ton of pictures and videos on this trip and it takes forever to get it all uploaded to the right places.

We checked out and got the housekeeper to call us a taxi to take us to the train station. This all went very smoothly and we were to the station long before we needed to be with plenty of time to buy our tickets and relax awaiting the train.  It’s always best when doing a major trip, especially an international one, to allow plenty of extra time so that you can deal with things that might go wrong.

We did a couple of new travel videos while waiting at the train station.

The train pulled up around four and we were able to load up long before it was time to leave.  Starting an overnight train journey from the head terminal is so much nicer than having to jump on at a midway point along the way so that you can get half an hour or more to board and get settled and comfortable instead of having just a minute to jump on and try to figure out where you need to go and what to do.  It really makes a huge difference.

We got loaded up and settled into our berth on the train.   We were very unhappy to discover that while there were power outlets, there was only one for about every other cabin and they were in the hallway, not in the berths themselves which is rather a problem when you have a CPAP that needs to be powered on all night.  Thank goodness we plan ahead and travel with a power strip that gives us several feet more distance.  We might need to consider a short extension cord too!

Dominica figured out how to set up a bit of a charging station out in the hallway and we got all of our devices charged up during the afternoon and evening portion of the journey.  Thankfully the train was not very full and there was probably only three cabins in use in our entire train car, so we had a whole section of the hallway to ourselves and we were not bothering anyone.

The first four hours of the trip was in Moldova and it was raining.  Mostly this train ride went back over nearly the identical route that we had taken on the bus just a few days ago.  Once we got to the border we had a long wait, a really long wait.

The border crossing itself took forever, hours on the Moldovan side and hours on the Romanian side.  No wonder they schedule this train route when they do, they need to do this early enough so that it is not happening in the middle of the night since you need to be awake for two sets of border controls and two sets of customs agents and the process is spread out over about three hours total!  It was a bit crazy.

Adding to the border craziness, the Moldovan side uses narrow gauge railroads and the Romanian side uses standard European Union rail gauge.  Riding on the train while it gets lifted up and the wheels (on the trucks) get switched out is really cool.  Dominica was loving that.

It was really late by the time that we were into Romania and underway.  We went down and investigated the dining car situation.  Romanian rails don’t have a dining car but Moldovan do.  They had very basic snacks (cookies, chips and peanuts) and a cook whipping up a breakfast-like meal of fried eggs, some odd salad and bread.  Very basic, but it was fine.  We ended up ordering four of them and everyone ate decently well.

Then it was time for bed.  We got the CPAP hooked up partially in the hallway and just hoped for the best and had the door open a sliver so that the power could run in.  It worked out all right but the door kept sliding open during the night and I needed to keep dealing with it and that caused me to basically not get any sleep.  So I rested and relaxed but slept very little.

Overall the train ride was good and we would definitely do this trip again.  With more info and better expectations we could make it very comfortable.  The train car that we were in was definitely an old, but well maintained Soviet-era rail car which was really cool to get to ride in.

Today is our final day in Chisinau, Moldova.  So far we really like this city.  It is green, easy to get around, low cost and very friendly with amazing food options and what appears to be awesome public transportation.  And one of the best things is that it is a wonderful city that is so liveable and is in Europe but has no tourists!

This morning the power went out and stayed out for a long time.  We eventually decided that it was not going to come back on so we walked down the thirteen flights of stairs and went back to Bouchee for another breakfast there.  Both girls really wanted croissants again and we really liked our breakfast food there as well.  We stayed for a while today, as we could see that the whole area including the underground “mall” in the middle of the city was without power.  Bouchee had emergency power only, so they could cook but their extra lighting was off.  When that came back on, we knew that the power was back.

On our walk back to the apartment, the power went out again.  This is going to be a long day.  We do not want to climb thirteen flights of stairs to our penthouse, so we decided to go to Andy’s Pizza, which is not far away, and sit outside there while we waited for the power to return.  We had a few drinks and the girls got some fruit desserts.

The power was finally back on around two and we went back to the apartment for a little bit, did some research and then set off a few hours later to walk down to the railway station to see about getting tickets back to Romania tomorrow.

The walk to the train station was rather long and downhill.  We decided that this would be way too much to walk with our luggage tomorrow and that we will be needing to get a taxi when we head out of the city.  The walk let us see a lot more of the city today and a lot of the shopping areas.  We found another underground mall area as well and I got a picture of this one with Liesl walking through it.

The train station was very nice and has a nice courtyard and a big fountain in it.  We talked to the ticket agent and found out that we need to buy our tickets tomorrow.  We have all of the details now, though, and know that we will be leaving Chisinau tomorrow afternoon at a quarter till five to take the overnight train to Bucharest where we will be staying for two days.  We asked if we needed reservations and they assured us that there would be plenty of room on the train for us to buy the tickets at the last minute.

We walked back and wanted to go to the Armenian Cemetery as Dominica wanted to see that but after going only the tiniest bit in that direction all three of them were just too hot and tired to keep walking today so back to the apartment we went.  We stayed there for a little bit and then I went out for a walk alone as I wanted to get some video footage at the cemetery for our Twitter Vine video feed which we have started doing.  I managed to get there and see the changing of the guard!  Perfect timing, I am very glad that I did the extra walk.

As I was walking back the wind was picking up and some rain began, but just a little bit.  I even managed to get a pretty good video with the iPhone in the playground of the wind whipping up the seed pods that are all over the place here.

While I was coming up the elevator it turned into a real storm with a ton of rain. I made it back just in time.  We spent the later afternoon just in the apartment waiting for the storm to pass.  It was a lot of rain.

Before going out to dinner we went to the creperia again as the girls have been asking for it.  Sometimes I’ve realized that it is better to go to two different places to eat if it keeps everyone happy.

This evening we returned to Andy’s Pizza and sat outside on the upstairs deck and got some awesome food.  No pizza for us tonight.  This was our first time really eating here.  It was really good, we enjoyed it a lot.

On the walk home I saw the same flower seller that I had gotten the roses for the girls from the other night so I introduced the girls to her and they each picked out some flowers for themselves.

Back to the penthouse and off to bed for us.  The power remained on and we are checking out tomorrow afternoon to catch our train to Bucharest.