Sheep Guarding Llama

A slow Tuesday on the “farm” in Baita.  It was cooler and overcast today, but nice.  We did not open the windows today, though.  This might be our first full day at home with the doors and windows closed.

Did a bit of posting and writing today.  Liesl did school.  Dominica discovered today that Netflix Romania has Full House available which we are quite excited because we think that Liesl is really going to like it.  Although we always say that and the reality is is that our girls have never gotten into most American shows the way that we expect them to.  They just don’t have any experience with traditional television and they do not find the shows to be that interesting.

This afternoon just two of the village girls came over and spent a few hours playing with Liesl.  They stayed from probably two or three until after six.

This evening Dominica made lasagne for dinner, which was awesome.  It was late when it was ready to eat and we felt like relaxing.  So we fired up Netflix and watched That 70s Show while we had dinner.  Luciana came in from time to time to snuggle and watch it with us but mostly she and Liesl had some quiet time on their own in the kitchen.

Dominica ended up falling asleep around eleven.  I was tired too, but I always have to stay awake to get the girls off to bed.

Luciana ended up having a temper tantrum about watching videos and so lost them for the night.  This ended up having the benefit that she was in bed and asleep before midnight.  Liesl did not want to be awake alone so turned in voluntarily at a quarter past midnight and was asleep almost instantly.  She had seen too many millipedes and since Luciana was long asleep and likely going to sleep longer than her anyway I said that Liesl could sleep in our room which helped get everyone off to sleep very early.

We got up around eight and had to get everyone moving so that we could make it to breakfast as the girls always take forever to get moving in the morning.  We made it down around nine thirty and just sat inside at the cafe because it was a little damp and chilly to be outside as it rained last night and it is still in a bit of a drizzly state.

We had a very nice breakfast, I really like all of the food at the Hotel Diafan.  We have really enjoyed our stay here.

We returned to the room and got everything packed up, checked out and loaded up the car.  The hotel let us keep the car in their locked parking lot for a while so that we could take a little bit of time to see the square.

I took the family over to the biserica square just off of the square that we were staying on so that they could see the awesome archaeological display that I had discovered last night while I was out on my walk.  It was a very small thing to do this morning but a good use of the time before we had to get in the car and get moving.  And it gave the girls a little bit of time to run around and expend some energy before needing to sit in the car for several hours.  Dominica enjoyed the small exhibit and agreed that it was all very well done.

We returned to the main square and grabbed some treats from Millennium Chocolate for the girls to have with their motion sickness medicine.  Then we let them play for half an hour at least just running around on the pedestrian square as it was mostly empty of people.  Hopefully they will manage to get some sleep in the car as it is at least three hours back to Baita.

It was closer to one when we got into the Ford Focus and worked our way out of Baia Mare, which involved a little bit of getting turned around as always, and hit the road back south.

We had overcast skies but little to no rain on the drive.  It was nice to get to see everything in daylight that we went through in the darkness a few nights ago.

The drive was not bad and was not as long as going from Dallas to Houston.  So for Americans, a short drive.

Around four we got back to our village of Baita.  It was a long weekend away so I was set up right away and busy at writing and posting.  It remained cooler and very overcast all day and since almost no one saw us drive into town no kids came over today.  We had the afternoon to ourselves.

I went over to the farm next door in the evening to buy a fresh supply of milk.  This is my first time venturing out to get milk on my own.  The language gap there is very large and is always a big challenge.  But I successfully got two litres of milk.

We had a quiet evening with me spending most of my time trying to catch up from having been away for part of the weekend.

Today we woke up in Baia Mare, the capital of the northern county of Maremures which is grouped with Transylvania for administration purposes but is actually not a part of Transylvania proper.  For those in America, Baia Mare is, as a city, about the size of Syracuse, New York.

We are staying in Room 101, the apartment, at the Hotel Diafan right on the main square of the city.  It was a cloudy day that looked like rain when we woke up.  The mountains outside of the city had thick clouds pouring over them.

Dominica and I had breakfast at the hotel, delicious cheese and mushroom omelets and coffee.  We are impressed with the food and the service and hope that we can do dinner here at the hotel this evening.

After breakfast we gathered the kids, loaded up the car and drove to the east out of the city to head from Baia Mara out into the country to explore the famous UNESCO Wooden Church sites.  The drive east to the first city went surprisingly quickly.  I figured, based on the driving last night, that we would be on the road for a  while but we actually turned off early and were headed south on the small roads into the country in almost no time.

The drive around northern Romania, out in the country around Maremures, was really pretty.  Quaint villages, misty mountains, cute architecture.  We enjoyed just the drive itself quite a bit.  This is a very nice area and quite different from the area that we are living in around Baita.

We made several wrong turns and explored the back country lanes behind many a little town.  We found one church, basically by accident, that turned out to be one of the old wooden churches that had been damaged, as wooden churches are wont to be, and was the old wooden steeple and roof raised up and put on top of a modern stone building and in use for this morning’s service.  It was a neat find and not an UNESCO listed church and not even one of the ones that Wikipedia lists.  Apparently this region is just loaded with them if you know where to look.

It did not take us too long to find the first of the villages with the wooden church, although getting to the church itself was a bit confusing and although these are UNESCO sites they are not at all well labeled and it seems obvious that they are not large tourist attractions.  We got to the biggest of all of them and the parking lot for it could only take a dozen cars at most.  We were the only people here, today.  It was a gorgeous site, though.  We parked and walked up a nicely managed little area to the church itself and took a lot of pictures.  The church is locked up but you are really only there to see the outside of it, anyway.

We probably put in about half an hour at the first site.  It was very nice.  These churches were built by the Romanians here hundreds of years ago during the Hungarian occupation when building stone defensible structures was forbidden, probably for military reasons, so the locals who traditionally did all of the work in stone, turned to wood and made these really ornate and historically important churches to celebrate their religion in a way that was allowed for them.  The dark wood has stood up well to the centuries and would remind you of the famous Norse churches.  They really fit neatly into the misty countryside up here, too.
There was a meadow down below the church and I went down there to take pictures and noticed a barely visible, rock outlined path going through a big meadow and off towards another village.  In the distance, in the mist, I could see the next of these churches.  There must be a walking trail that connects there.  Very cool, indeed.  It was too far to walk with the kids, or with Dominica, so we used the car to drive to the next village to see that one.

At the next village, the church was in use when we arrived.  These are real churches, of course, and some of them are actively used for church services and it is Sunday morning, after all.  We arrived at this one right at one o’clock and people were staring to come out.  So we sat in the car until nearly everyone left.  Dominica and the girls decided that they wanted to stay in the car and just see it from there.  So only I got out and walked around the grounds and took pictures and got up close to the structure.  It, like the first, was quite impressive.

One of the things that is interesting about these churches is that many of them have ridiculously large steeples.  The churches themselves are not large at all.  They are actually quite small.  This one, on its back wall, got so narrow that it was no wider than the span of my arms finger tip to finger tip.  But the steeple is both massively wide and tall going many times the height of the church itself.  Very interesting design.

These two are the two churches that are closest together.  Getting to these was easy and I am pretty sure that these are the two that are the most visited.  Likely by a huge margin.  The drive to get to these was pretty easy as well.  It is up in the hills but not hard driving for me to do as the driver and not too bad even for Dominica and the girls who easily get motion sickness from the car.  These part was easy.

Going on towards the next village took us from an easy drive into big mountain roads and a lot of twists and turns.  The driving got hard, nothing terrible but a lot of work, and it really started to bother Dominica.  It was really cool, though, because we got into the core of the famous “peasant landscapes” that people talk about.  We found the world of roaming sheep, big old hay stacks, no cars and nothing has changed for hundreds of years.  This is a region where nothing has changed in forever, things are as they always have been, but with cars driving through from time to time.  It is a gorgeous region, partially because the sheep graze it all over so it looks like a golf course going on for miles.

We stopped and found the third of our wooden church towns.  This one had the church right on a main road so it was very easy to find.  It also had a bus load of Romanian school kids, probably around fifth to seventh grade levels, all over it.  So it was a quick stop as the kids were everywhere and, as you would expect, they had very little interest in the church itself.  It made it hard to take pictures because at least one of the boys intentionally moved in front of you if you tried to take any pictures and in general kids were lounging everywhere at the site just waiting until they could get back on the bus to leave.

We continued along our loop to find the little village of Breb.  This is the home of the family who wrote Somewhere Different which Dominica loved reading and, coincidentally, I completed reading on this very day.  It is a little village past the churches, but on the loop of them, high up in the mountains in the midst of the peasant farming region.  It is an incredibly picturesque spot.  Dominica had tried to get a reservation for this weekend at their hotel that is located in Breb but they had no rooms available for this weekend which is why we ended up staying in Baia Mare instead.

We got to Breb and managed to track down the Village Hotel.  There were several pensiune in town but to get to the hotel we had to drive through town and up a gravel road that, Dominica always the worrier, thought that the car could not make it up.  But the drive was fine and we managed to find the hotel which is not a hotel in the traditional sense but really a collection of out buildings as part of their theme is to let you stay in a real, traditional Romanian peasant home.  So they have three actual peasant cottages like you see around the landscape.

We were hungry for lunch and were hoping that with the name hotel they would be able to accommodate as the word hotel implies a restaurant in Europe (and really, just about anywhere, even in the US.)  The place, however, was closed up and empty.  They said on their website that they were open year round but there were no guests and no reception or anything so we are guessing that they are still closed for the season.  It seems unlikely that they are out of business as Dominica saw the ability to make reservations later in the year.  So they just were not open now.  There was no restaurant there so we figured that we would not have been able to have eaten anyway.  We took a few quick pictures to prove that we had been there and we left.

We tried the big, new pensiune in the middle of town which looked really nice but found that they only did breakfast and dinner and could not do lunch (so they cannot offer a full pension there, only a half pension, which is a bit odd.)  Not easy to do things in this neck of the woods.

Dominica looked at the map and decided that the loop ahead of us was going to be far too many mountains and winding roads for her.  The road to get where we were now was bad enough and she was not looking forward to returning that way but the road ahead looked even worse.  So instead of seeing the fourth church we turned around at Breb and took the path back the way that we had come which went very quickly as we were not stopping in every town trying to locate an out of the way historic wooden church.

We looked for lunch options along the route back but really there was nothing.  One of the things that we have already learned about Romania is that small town restaurants are a rarity.  Stopping casually just anywhere to grab a bit to eat in the middle of the day is much harder than one could guess.  It just is not a thing that people do.  Maybe as the tourist industry develops and the country enjoys greater prosperity it will start to creep into the culture.  In most of Europe you can eat just anywhere, just like in the States.

We ended up just driving all of the way back to Baia Mare, parking the car at the hotel and eating in town.  We had wanted to eat dinner at our hotel anyway, so we just went for a very early dinner.  We asked if we could eat outside at the outdoor cafe on the piata rather than upstairs in the restaurant proper and they said of course.  The upstairs restaurant is very fancy and right next to our hotel room and has great views of the piata but being outside on a gorgeous afternoon with fresh air is much better, especially with the girls.

Dinner outside was really amazing.  Dominica and I were both very impressed with our meals.  I got a Hungarian fish and dumplings meal that I loved.  It was two fried fillets of fish, covered under a mound of sauteed vegetables and the dumplings were something akin to a potato based pasta with cheese like German spatzel and dill.  Luciana tried my dumplings and proceeded to eat a large portion of it as it was basically mac and cheese and she said that it was one of her favourite foods, ever.  Dominica had a really good salad with cod on it that she really liked as well.  We are loving the Hotel Diafan. If we return to Baia Mare we will certainly stay here again.  The location is just perfect and the hotel setup is just right for us.

While Dominica and I finished our dinner the girls got up and ran around the piata playing tag.  One of the many benefits of sitting outside.  This gave them some time to stretch their legs and burn off some of the energy that they have stored up while riding in the car last night and today and seeing wooden churches which does not excite them very much.  They had a nice time and we enjoyed getting to just sit in the cafe while they wore themselves out.

I asked at the desk where we could find a playground and the front desk said that there was a big municipal park right across the bridge from where we were, so ten minutes on foot was all.  That would be perfect.  We have been looking for a playground for the girls and that would be a great way to wind down for the evening.

We walked and found a massive park with a huge mall and all kinds of things including a massive ethnographic museum there.  The playground was at the far side of the park so even though the walk to the park was fast the walk through it took some time.  The playground was really meant more for older kids and really little ones, an odd mix.  There were some obstacle course things like what I had as a kid at the Genesee County Park and neat rubber coated hills that we think might have been for skateboards or something.  There were no swings.  There was a slide for very little kids and a few other things.  And a broken trampoline that was very dangerous.

We stayed for probably an hour and the girls had a nice time.  Dominica and I sat on one of the rubber hills and relaxed for a bit.  The girls wanted us to constantly help them with one of the big kid activities after another, though.  They did have fun and they did get some exercise so we were pretty happy with coming out.  There were a lot of people in the park, more than we would have guessed.  Tons of people just out for a stroll or skateboarding on the mall.

We left and walked back to the hotel and went around the piata.  We found a chocolate store that also had gelato so we stopped there.  Dominica, Liesl and I got gelato and Luciana got some chocolates.  This is a good combination store for us since Luciana does not like ice cream.  The gelato was quite good.

It was nearly dark so we turned in.  The girls wanted downtime to just relax and use their Kindle Fires and play with their toys.  Dominica was tired and done walking.  I got everyone settled and then set off for a bit of a walk on my own.

I went to the piata and since I did not have a good idea of how to get around the city so I radiated out from the piata in a star pattern only going in straight lines off of the square so that it was always easy to come right back to the centre.  I discovered some nice areas and that there was an amazing piata one block away from ours with the big church for the city along with a really neat archaeological site underneath the old church that they have made a really nice display of.   I will be bringing the family over here tomorrow.

Altogether I did about ten kilometres of walking on my own this evening after dropping off the family at the hotel.  It was a nice walk and gave me a good feel for the city.  It’s a nice town, I like it here.

Back to the hotel it was time for a  shower and then off to bed.  Tomorrow we are going to do breakfast here in town, walk a small amount and see the area directly around the piata and then get in the car and drive back down to Baita.  Our goal is to be on the road and out of Baia Mare no later than one in the afternoon.  If we make good time driving in the daylight then we should be comfortably back to our village in around three hours getting us there at four in the afternoon.  Tomorrow is a Monday so I want to be back in the mid-afternoon so that I can get my writing and posting and stuff done as usual.

This has been a nice trip and we are glad that we got a chance to see Baia Mare and Maremures County.

Saturday.  Luciana was the first one awake actually getting Dominica and me up today.  That is unusual.  And she had not just woken up, she had already done her morning ablutions and was looking for breakfast and YouTube videos to be set up for her.

It is cloudy today.  We have seen mostly just bright sun since getting to Romania.  This is a bit more of how I had pictured life in Transylvania.

The home owners came by this morning.  They wanted to check on us since we had had the power issues this week and they felt bad that we had to deal with that and wanted to be sure that all was well.  They stopped by in the morning and after introducing us to her husband, she went to her parents’ home to visit for the day while her husband Tony, who grew up in this house, spent the day doing lawn work, gardening, pruning the plum trees (called prune trees here), mowing, watering and such.

Since Tony was around all day outside working we think that it discouraged the village kids from coming by early on in the day.  We had no visitors but did see a few going to the well.  Tony came in at one point and had some tuica with us.  It turns out that the tuica that we have in the house is made by him personally and is made from the plums that grow in our garden and orchard!  That makes it that much cooler.

At three we decided to make a daytime run to the grocery store in the hopes of being able to hit a playground and get dinner while we were out.  We wanted some things that we knew were available at the Lidl so we went there.  We were not so rushed this time, which was very nice.  We had a relaxed, successful grocery shopping trip.

We had such a nice dinner a week ago when we were at the Pensiune Casablanca that we decided to just return there and get much of the same food again.  Their vegetarian offerings are just delicious.  It was not so overly warm this time, either.  We had the only table in the place that was not being used for a private party so we sat in a small room on the side to ourselves.

After dinner we stopped at a gas station on the west side of Reghin that was on our way back to the village.  We had noticed before that they had a nice looking playground and outside cafe seating area and figured that we would check that out for the girls.  We wanted to get gas, so this worked out well.

The gas station is really nice and modern, offers a few sandwich made to order items like better American gas stations, pumps your gas for you and cleans all of your windows and lights while they do and has a cafe with decent coffee and a little shop with all of the mini market things you expect from a gas station.

What is amazing is that we have been in Romania for over a week now, eight days, and we drove from Bucharest all of the way up to Baita, which is most of the way across the country, and have done three trips in Reghin and in all of this time we have used only half a tank of gas!  Amazing.  This Ford Focus Eco does a great job.

Dominica and I got coffee and sat outside at the cafe while the girls hit the playground.  The playground is excellent.  It is very well made, has lots of things to do, has lots of nice safety features and is all on nice rubberized mats so extra safe.  No other kids were there, really, the whole time so we put in close to an hour just relaxing with our coffee and letting them play.  This is way better than the playground in the city square, even though it is much smaller.

The area where the gas station is located is an odd suburb with amazingly large, American style houses laid out close together in a nice Romanian style.  I could see Americans or Panamanians liking this area.  There are some really amazing houses on the rise behind the gas station, one house with commanding views and is very modern that I can only guess is worth over a million.

While we were sitting out at the cafe with time to talk we suddenly decided that we were itching to go see some stuff and that we had energy and that even though it was late in the evening that we should go home, back and do a two night trip up north to see some stuff in Romania!

It was nearly eight when we headed back to the house.  Dominica set to packing and I tried to wrap up what I could so that we could get onto the road.

It actually took us until ten to actually have the kids in the car and pull out of the driveway.

The drive north took about three hours.  The weather was fine and the traffic was light but with low visibility and crazy Romanian roads (crazy because of the mountainous terrain) it is slow going.  And there are no real highways, just roads that go through towns and cities so a lot of slow speed zones.

We got into Baia Mare, which we had chosen because it was one of the few places that we knew that we wanted to see in Romania and we knew that we could get there quickly and see the area on short notice.  Dominica has been extra interested in it because the hotel owned by the family from Somewhere Different is located there and she wanted to see it.  She wanted to stay there but they had no rooms available for this weekend (because they were closed, it turns out.)  So she had researched the area.

I am most interested in seeing the famous UNESCO World Heritage wooden churches there that are a remnant of the Hungarian occupation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  There are eight UNESCO sites up there, we are planning a way to see four of them on this trip.

We got into Baia Mare at one thirty.  We struggled for a good half an hour to find the hotel after we had parked.  It was very hard to find and the girls all stayed in the car while I wandered around on foot trying to located them.  I finally found them, after calling them and making someone pop their head out to wave at me, right on the main Millennium Square.  A really awesome location.

The city was hopping with tons of people out on the streets and in the square.  We had been seeing long lines for clubs for a while while we were out driving.  Saturday night is a big time to go out in Romania.

The hotel turned out to be really awesome.  This has to be one of the best places in town.  The hotel has an outdoor cafe, indoor cafe, restaurant and an amazing location.  We rented out their apartment instead of one of the regular rooms and this turned out to be absolutely ideal as this gave us an entire floor to ourselves – just us and the restaurant are on the first floor and we have views in a few directions and can see our car parked on Dacia Street, too.

We were straight off to bed, we were all quite tired.  Dominica and I have the main room and the girls have a little room off to the side with a fold out bed.  They like the set up of the room as it keeps them close enough to use to feel like they are with us but lets us all have enough space.

The Hotel Diafan was a great find on Booking.com.  We are thrilled with this one.

When we got into the room and got Internet access (which is normally wide open in Romania making things much easier) Dominica found that Liesl had taken a selfie with some of her new Romanian friends at the playground yesterday while the power was off at the house and it was posted on Facebook.  Our little girl is so old that she is taking selfies all by herself.  So adorable she is…

I woke up at seven thirty, got some water, reminded Dominica that we were scheduled for coffee with the neighbours at nine and tried to nap until it was time to go.  I was really exhausted from last night and not feeling well.

At nine we went next door, bringing a tray of cookies with us, to Nikoli and Maria’s house.  We had a good time attempting to communicate.  They know a tiny bit of English and we were able to struggle through.  There is no WiFi at their house so there is no way for us to use Google Translate when sitting there unless we climb the hill behind the house to get a signal.

We learned that they only weekend at the house here in Baița and that they live most of the time down in the city, in Târgu Mureș which is the largest city and capital of Mureș County, where we live.  They have been working on building a new home down there as well.

Yakov (we have no idea how to spell his name, it is Jacob in English and pronounced with a Y sound here and I believe that it is spelled that way but actually have no idea) came over to feed the pigs and joined us for coffee as well.  Yakov keeps his pigs at the farm here, Nikoli and Maria no longer keep any animals of their own but only tend the garden and the wine cellar.  But as they have a large barn, two pigs are kept there as the priest does not have any farm space of his own at the casă parohială.  He invited us to attend mass on Sunday because Dominica asked him about the services this morning.

We went back home and I managed to do some writing for maybe an hour when the power went out.  The power being out is a bit of a problem here because we are on well water (there is no village water supply) and it has to be pumped from the well so no power means no water.  At least we can walk to the well outside and get water by the bucket so we wouldn’t get dangerously desperate or anything, we just go from indoor plumbing to old fashioned wells.

Since the power was out I decided that it was a good time to take a walk.  The girls were doing school and the power was out so some exercise would be a smart way to go.  I walked about four kilometres round trip going north on route 160 all of the way through town until it Petered out and turned into a mud farm trail and went up in the hills.  I went as far up the hills as allowed me to still see Baița in the valley and managed to get some great pictures with the iPhone while I was up there.  I actually went far enough that I went into Bistrița-Năsăud County.  I walked about halfway to the village of Ocnița.  It was a nice walk.

I got back home and the power was still off.  Liesl was still doing school but there was a lot of her stuff that she could not do without power.  Luciana asked if she could have a break from school (if Liesl could) so that they could go to the playground now that we know that there is one basically across the street that they are freely allowed to use.  So we walked over there and let them play for a while.

After a bit some of their friends came and joined them on the playground and slowly it grew from a couple of kids into a giant pack of them.  I noticed that there was power now at the municipal building where they were working putting on a new roof overhang.  I figured that our power was back on at the house.  I went back to check, but there was nothing.

We took the girls over to the little general store, the magazin mixt, and got ice cream (they did not have ice cream a week ago when we moved in to town but they brought in the cooler for it sometime this week.)  The store had power.  So after eating my ice cream I set out to see what was going on.

I called in to Nikoli and he checked and he had power.  As we are only feet apart, he came over to look at the house.  He checked the outside box, he checked the breakers and decided that the issue was outside at the pole but we were the only ones affected.  He said that we needed to call the power company in Reghin but he had no idea what the number was.   So we walked all over town trying to find someone with the information.

Eventually we got it and he climbed the hill to get some signal and called into the city to let someone know that our power was out.  It took a little less than an hour before they came out.  We waited for a while then he gave me a tour of the church and then I went back to wait with Dominica who I know was a bit overwhelmed being the only adult around with close to twenty kids at the playground.

The kids were all congregating at the playground waiting for us to get power as they were all hoping to come over to our house again.  Eventually our girls were just very, very done with the playground and wanted to go back home.  So we decided to head back even without power.  The pack followed us, of course, so we moved like a mob through the street.  When we got to the house the electricians from Reghin were there and already working on the house.

It turns out that the wires where the power comes into the house had shorted out and fried.  That is why we were having brown outs yesterday and why it was only us that lost power.  So this is actually a very good thing, power has not gone out in the village at all since we have been here, it has only been faulty wiring in our house.  Twenty minutes later and we had power again.

Our house was a mad house of the rest of the evening.  It is Friday night so it seems that kids were able to come over longer.  I got the video games set up again and kids were playing games all evening.  The Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing is a pretty huge hit.  We really need more multiplayer games and only having two controllers is that much more of a limitation now.  Four controllers would go a very long way.

Dominica was busy baking cookies for everyone, as well.  Kids made different activity areas all over the house.  One room for video games, one room for Legos, one for Playdoh and Shopkins and kids running around the yard.  It is crazy.  And this is three days of this!

Normally the kids disperse around six because they have to go home for chores and dinner.  Paula and Diana were allowed to stay here this evening because we were doing movie night.  Paula has never seen Star Wars so we bought the six movie pack from Amazon and got it ready.

Paula helped me to go over and talk to the farmers that supply our milk and eggs to let them know how much we would need and when.  They gave us eggs right away and told us to come back after seven when they milk the cows to get the milk.  Liesl went along so that she could see some of the animals.  She got to see the cows and chickens and sheep.

Paula, Diana, Liesl and I watched Star Wars for a while, but we did not make it halfway yet, when it was time for Paula and Diana to go home.  Everyone goes to bed very early in Romania.  It is a farm life and it is common for everyone to be awake at five in the morning so they can’t be up late like we often are.  Liesl scheduled to meet Paula at the playground tomorrow at three in the afternoon, though.

After everyone had left we felt like a family movie and Liesl has been begging, literally since the first day that we arrived in Greece and got into our home there, to watch Transylvania 2 with us.  So Transylvania 2 it was.  And it is actually a very good movie, I can see why she has watched it so many times.  It is one of her favourites.

Thank goodness for Amazon Instant Videos which work flawlessly wherever we go while Netflix and Hulu really barely work at all, and often not at all.    Amazon has made it that most of the movies that we want are able to come with us all of the time.