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Jonnys Eastern Delights!
After finally arriving in Varna more than a little frustrated, the advertised "5 minutes walk from the train station" took over half an hour, and then we found out our reservation hadn't gone through. We were seriously beginning to wonder what we had done to deserve such a crappy day! Thankfully, the guy who ran the hostel (who went to our school!) found us room and we just had a n early night - with not a ray of sunlight caught. Our bad luck continued on Monday as we got up really early to maximise our beach time, but after only a couple of hours the heavens opened. Aaargh! Knowing we had to meet Gemma on Wednesday, and with awful train times to contend with, we saw our beach time disappearing before our eyes. It picked up a little in the afternoon and we stuck it out for a couple of hours, whilst I tried to avoid looking at topless 50-something-year-olds who seemed to be all around us - eeew! Monday night was one of the best so far as almost everyone from the hostel went out to some beach bars and then saw in the morning at a club - if we would have had our towel we could have gone straight to the beach!
The weather was perfect on Tuesday, and we treated ourselves to spending the day at an ultra swanky resort type bar complete with swimming pool, spending the day with Jo and Emily, two really nice girls out of our dorm. Beckys famous last words "I don't want a late night tonight" meant sambuca shots at 5am were always going to happen!
In between the sun and the drinking, there had still been a lot of hard work and frustration trying to organise meeting Gemma, but we had managed to work it so that we had a good half day back by the pool on Wednesday. Even that didn't go straightforwardly though, as every other day there was a direct train to Bucharest, but oh no not on the day we wanted it - meaning we had to wait for 6 ungodly hours in Ruse, the Bulgarian border town. Trying desperately to kill soem time, a friendly local called Peter joined us for a beer, and then proceeded to talk our socks off for a good couple of hours. At first he had some really interesting stories to tell, like how he had been in prison for 6 years, how his grandad got shot et al, but the previous two nights soon caught up with us and we just couldn't take any more. After what had seemed like an eternity, we finally got on the train, only to find a crazy woman sprawled out in our carriage. I mean that in a nice way though as she was dead sweet, but she was just hilarious. She couldn't keep still, kept muttering things to us, and gave the immigration officer the most blatent back-hander I have ever seen, right after he had asked us if we had anything to declare! She was only smuggling thousands of fags over the border!
The final drama of the trip came when she came in and woke us up - we had slept straight through our alarm and were now almost an hour after we were supposed to have been arriving in Bucharest! After a serious panic, we were relieved to see that we were literally just pulling into the station - and the mad woman had probably stopped us sailing straight through into Moscow!
And so began a seriously hectic few days in Romania.
Jonny
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