Today we joined a community project to renovate a local playground. The group in charge was Kalaka, founded by an American buzz light year kind of a guy called Chris. He told us some interesting stories about his life and travels whilst we painted the metal fencing surrounding the park. It was an outdoor gym with a variety of exercise machines that we felt we had to try out just to make sure they were ok. Michael was interviewed for the Romanian news where he ta...

This morning at Select we had some huge sausages. It was unfortunate that I spurted some of the juice into simon's eye as a dug the fork in. Laszlo drove us up into the hills, through villages (waving to the mayor) over very bumpy tracks. We paused for a while whilst Laszlo picked "bear garlic" - a wild type of garlic often used in cooking here. We had a taste and it was good. There were many intersting natural sights to be seen including a pine tit building a...

Today was our free Sunday so we all decided to go on a hike, meeting at Michaels place at 10.30am after eating omelette and putting on the walking boots. Violet kindly packed us a lunch. We climbed up the hills from the village as the morning grew hotter, stopping along the way to take pictures of flora and fauna. A cuckoo settled for a long time in a tree near us so we could take some photographs. At the top of the forested peak we ate lunch which was battered c...

Today we set off to Bran castle, built by saxons in 1382 to defend against the Turks. From 1920 queen Marie lived there and a lot of the beautiful contents still there now, she imported from western Europe. It felt like the kind of castle I could live in with airy rooms, secret passages, tunnels and views over the mountains and forests. We went back down to the bottom and grabbed a bite to eat. I had a savoury cheese roll and a chocolate/apple eclair type thing....

We had an early start today - we were to meet Laszlo at 8am as we were taking part in a community river clean-up. It was another gloriously sunny day and we drove to Odorheiu to meet everyone there. It was mainly groups of school children. We all walked to the first designated area of the river for cleaning. It was pretty smelly but we managed to get lots of litter up. Crossing the river was tricky at times and Michael got his foot soaked! After this we walked ...