Day 1 in VT

29-06-08
Day one back in Veliko Tarnovo & I'm all ready leaving the country, off we go to Romania, me & my Bulgarian boss, Assen his wife Ira & two other work mates Tod & Eva.
The mission was to head to Bucharest in the people mover & visit 6 other backpackers on a PR trip.
Bucarest is a brisk (& boy was it brisk!) 2 hour trip by road from VT & was of great interest.

To get to Romania you have to cross the Danube which I had seen for the fourth time on this trip in various locations in Europe. The funniest part of this is that the southern half of the bridge is maintained by the Bulgarians & the northern half is Romanian, sounds logical but exactly half way across the level of maintenance changes (for the worse) as we enter the Romanian territory. The road is rougher & the structure is tattier & rusty.... doesn't make sense to me to have 1/2 a well maintained bridge if you think about it.

Bucharest was obviously once a wealthy city, with the old buildings been very elaborate & complex in their design, beautiful they are. It's also the home of the 3rd largest building in the world, the Peoples Palace, built by the dictator Chauchescu who they later shot like a dog around 1990 when communism turned belly up. I only saw the Peoples Palace from a distance as we were on a business trip, not a tourist visit. Assen said that because the floors were vast in the palace there was no factory that could make a carpet big enough to cover them, so to solve that problem they built a carpet factory for the palace!
Bucharest is a nasty city to navigate, just a maze of roads poorly marked & rough, it took Tod & Eva both full time map reading & we were still lost much of the time! The whole excursion took 12 hrs & we were back in VT exhausted but it was great fun!
Getting to know Assen & Ira better was great, they are very ambitious & genuine people & have some really exciting plans & concepts, one which involves a real MIG fighter jet that is still in commission, & a catapult! I may divulge more later, watch this space!

Tonight they've all left me in the hot seat, Eva wasn't well, Tod went back to Sofia & Plamen needed to get some time off as well. The rest are out at another village. So far so good, the hostel hasn't blown up ;)