Buna Romania!

Well we made it finally! The flight from Stuttgart to Bucharest was pretty easy and we were picked up at the airport by a Projects Abroad guy named Daniel. I was so hoping we’d be picked up in a Dacia Sandero (local car – Top Gear joke), but sadly no, just a VW Golf.

His english was pretty good, so he was able to tell us a lot about what parts of the country we were going through.

We saw our first horse-drawn cart, complete with driver talking on a mobile phone! It wasn’t the only contrast we saw… In the 2hr drive to Brasov, i counted no less than 4 new Bentleys, a million near new BMWs/Mercs/Audis and so-on. Either cars here are dirt cheap or there’s money in this country than people are letting on.

We’re currently at our host family’s house. They’re very nice people and very accommodating. They even have the interwebs! I might buy them a new keyboard though, this one’s spacebar, shift, control and enter keys barely work. American layout keyboard though, so that’s a winner (unlike Germany where you have to do alt-Q for @).

We’ve just enjoyed our traditional Romanian dinner – soup with pork meatballs (we think) for entree and stuffed capsicum with rice and pork for mains. A glass of home-made sweet red wine went down a treat.

We’ve had a good chat with our hosts, the son & daughter-in-law speak reasonable English (good enough) and we’re trying to learn the language with our cue-cards. The TV has heaps of channels and at least 6 are English based, so that’s handy.

Tomorrow we get a tour of the city, get some local currency and find out what the deal is. We can’t lie, it’s bloody daunting, but so far so good!