No. More. Early. Flights. It's a mantra that we try to live by. A bit like "Never, Ever Pay Retail". We manage the latter much better than the former. By early we mean 8.45 am for a domestic trip from Timisoara to Bucharest (only 1 hr 15 in a prop plane). But we know that on Romanian flights if the check in cut off is 45 minutes prior... then 80% of passengers will turn up at the 55 minutes prior point and security becomes a scrum. We are all in favour of avo...

We have just spent 10 nights in our last Romanian city - Timisoara (Timmy-shwa-rah). We have been vulturing again... culture-vulturing that is (thank you to Marilyn & Dennis in the USA for the new verb). In fact we've been told by another friend that it is possible to overdo culture - be it opera or yoghurt. We have explained to him that we have 3 months coming up in Australia/New Zealand - the sort of tickets we've been paying €10-€20 for between us.....

Cluj Napoca. Apparently it's just me, but the name of our new town (for 7 whole nights) makes me think of Neapolitan icecream. Just sayin' is all. This is in fact 'History City' by Romanian standards. Size wise it is the second largest city both in area and population to Bucharest, but time and development wise, it goes waaaay back. To the Dacians and then, for a short period of only 100 years or so, to the Romans who arrived around 100 AD to snag all the salt...

First off it's not Siggy-sore-rah! Though given the rock hard nature of the teeny-tiny double bed (go on - measure 140 cm across your current bed... not much is it), after Siggy, we are sorer than we have ever been. Also nothing to do with Dino-saur(a). In fact, and it's certainly an interesting Latin based language, it's Siggy-Shwa-ra. We only say, because we've had to learn the "shhhh" sound here, otherwise people just look at us like we have two heads. Wel...

Jagged, mountainous and cloaked in snow - the Carpathians kept us company for the 3 hour train ride from Brasov to blinky sweet Sibiu. Despite the blue sky and sunshine during the trip, the day was certainly brisk when we chuffed into Sibiu Station just after 4 pm. Getting much better at bribing cabbies for short trips (no meter, sling 'em 10 lei), we were at our swish yet cosy apartment, bags dumped and off exploring by 4.30 pm. We'd not planned on being out f...