The start of our trip... Bucharest, Romania

So, after a LOOOONG trip to Eastern Europe, we've now made it to the capital of Romania, Bucharest. The first flight was a of a 10 hour trip from Portland to Amsterdam, which took off an hour late. (Thanks Delta-KLM) During this flight I watched a few movies, including Avatar, Legion, some other movie I can't remember, and half of The Blind Side... All were decent movies, but I imagine Avatar was never really meant to be seen on a 5 inch screen, it was a good movie to start with since it was about 3 hours long. The seats we had were awesome, they were the first seats directly behind 1st class so we had huge leg room where I was able to stretch out a lot over the course of the longest flight I'd ever taken.

Anthony has the keen ability to fall asleep at any time so he pretty much boarded the plane, started a movie, then passed out... this pretty much happened the whole trip, making me extremely jealous because I've never been able to do that. For the 2 and a half hour trip to Romania, he was pretty much asleep from takeoff til we got there.

We sat in the Amsterdam airport for around 3 hours waiting for a 2.5 hour flight to Bucharest. While there, we noticed that practically all of the flight attendants are all pretty much extremely good looking. The flight from Amsterdam to Bucharest was pretty much uneventful other than the guy next to me buying a bunch of jewelry from the duty free catalog totaling around 500 Euro's. Which is in the realm of $600.

So, that was the trip here in a nutshell. When we finally arrived to Romania, we were met outside of the airport by our newest friends, Liviu and his English speaking buddy who's name I don't even want to try to spell. The were just outside the gate with a sign saying "Anthony and Nick" just like in the movies. :-) After a few hello's and handshakes we were off to find the Happy Hostel, our residence for the night. Where we were greeted by a man, literally, holding a knife and asking us why we were there. After showing a reservation to the place the fella was all smiles and saying he was just cutting some plants in the garden... yeah right.

We dropped our stuff off, then headed out to a brew pub and eatery that's been around since 1879, Caru Cu Bere, roughly translated it was carriage of beer. Liviu's friend had to call up a buddy who speaks better english to get that confirmed for us...lol. It was one of a bunch of bars lining a network of cobblestone streets where practically everyone was sitting outside enjoying a nice 70 degree day with a half liter. There were 4 of us and our bill came out to ~125 Lei. A full meal for close to $11 a piece. For the amount of food and the few beers we had this was pretty cheap to myself and Anthony, but was deemed a rather expensive place for beer by our new Romanian buddies.

We walked around a bit before heading to a billiard club where we spent a rather large portion of the night showing off some American 8-ball skills and watching the England vs Algeria match of the World Cup. We drank half liter-bottles of Heineken and some other Romanian beer and then took off to check out a few other places. Which we walked through, left, drove around for 30 minutes or so, and came back to where we ended the night. It was a cool "ultra lounge" type of setting... a bunch of incredibly hot women and metro'd up men, complete with scantily clad women dancing on top of glass boxes overlooking a pool. It was a really laid back atmosphere considering the club music blasting but nobody really dancing other than the previously mentioned hotties in bathing suits.

So that was our first night here. A few things about Romania, the traffic is crazy, cars wizzing around almost hitting eachother every few seconds, seriously. Parking is probably the coolest thing I've seen in any place I've ever visited. They park on wherever they feel like, any and everywhere... It's a controlled chaos though. While they all honk at eachother and some yell and throw hands up, everyone gets it, it's an "act fast or move" type of place... not for the faint of heart as far as driving is concerned, I wouldn't want to drive here at all. In all fairness, Liviu is an incredible driver as far as I'm concerned. Though, as I mentioned to him, his ways would piss a lot of people off in the US...haha. It reminds me of a huge version of Nogalez, Mexico when I visited it a long while back. The one glaring difference from the US... Pedestrians definitely don't have the right of way here.

The women here are all pretty attractive and people in general just seem more fit than in the US, but that's somewhat expected since we are the capital of fast food it seems. The "Happy Hostel" is a tiny little place with no AC and questionable wifi but it seems to do that trick as far as having a place to stay... and I imagine it's probably nicer than some places around here. It's almost 9am here, 11pm in Portland, and I've probably got around 5 hours of sleep since 8am Thursday morning... I'd like to blame a bit of it on the fact that it's about 80 degrees in the room and the dogs out back that seem to hate eachother and feel the need to bark it out every few minutes. As soon as I get out and start taking pics I'm sure I'll be posting a bunch of those here for those who are interested. That's about all for now I guess. Stay tuned.