We arrived early in Istanbul and ventured to find our hostel.  We met another person on a train.  This time it was a guy From New Zealand.  He decided to follow us since he had no hostel.  We were able to find the hostel relatively easy.  It was smack dab in the middle of all the historical sites in Istanbul.  We checked in and decided to follow an itinerary I downloaded from the internet.  Our first stop was the Basilica Cistern which was a ...

So not much happened today.  We left early and were on the tracks all day.  We had to share our couchette with a Korean couple that spoke NO English.  Traveling through two countries was awful as we got woken up in Turkey at 1:00 in the morning and had to come up with 20 USD.  Even though we had British pounds left over the lady didn't know the exchange rate and thought the USD dollar was worth much more than it really was, which devalued our british ...

One of the castles was closed for some unknown reason and our tour guide was cancelled for another unknown answer.   We were supposed to leave at 9:30 this morning with the tour bus.  He showed up about 15 min late and then he said he had to make another pickup at 2:00 and would not be able to stay that late so we needed another driver.  After another 15 min waiting fro a driver to show up he decideds to take us to the tour place to pickup another dri...

Since the tours were not running today we decided to explore the ciy and visit some of the museums and other historical builidings.  We figured out after about 5 miles of waking and visiting 3 places that EVERYTHING is shut down on Mondays!  Just another example of a backwards country that doesn't really support tourism.  The coolthing was that the streets vendors are still open along the main drag and it is easy to get a sandwich or sit down and have a ...

We arrrived in Brasov around 5:00 and were promptly greated by Gina, a local who has rooms of her own.  She was quite pushy but at the same time trying to give us directions.  Unfortunatelyshe gave us a crappy map that had been photo copied about 15 times and was barely legiable.  At the same time the mapI made was awful and was also no good.  So yeah we got lost again.  It is interesting that diferences in Brasov and Bucharest though.  Brasov h...