The Black Sea

We got into Constanta last night around 8:30. We took a 3 hour train ride to Bucharest, changed trains, and took a 3 hour train here. We met a real nice girl on the train. She was a 22 year old history student in her senior year. She spoke pretty good English which she had learned only from tv, music, and the internet. She had never spoken it before, but we had no problems talking with her.

Constanta is the second biggest city in Romania with about 350,000 people. It is right on the Black Sea coast and is close to the Bulgarian border. During the summer, it is a big tourist area, but now it is a bit cool and not very packed.

We got a pretty nice hotel called the Hotel Sport. We actually have a balcony that overlooks the beach, a private toilet and shower (with hot water all day), a phone, and satellite tv! The room is 800,000 lei/night at about 30,400 per dollar, so it's still pretty cheap, but not as cheap as the $8 a night we were paying at Eugene's house in Brasov - haha.

We got in and went to get dinner at an Irish Pub nearby last night. We were real tired from traveling so we went back early. Turned on the tv and found the KState/Colorado game. Great game. Afterwards, instead of showing the TX/OU game, they showed USC/Washington. I guess I should be glad I couldn't watch the Horns. We are 8 hours ahead of CST so it was pretty late anyway, but it was still nice to watch some American football for a change.

It's a bit overcast and cool today, so we will probably just bum around town and relax. It's too cold to hang out on the beach. We plan on heading north in the next day or two and renting a boat and cruising through the Danube River estruary (second biggest river in Europe drains north of here and created an enormous estruary that is environmentally protected). You can only reach it by traveling down the rivers by boat. I want to try and do some fishing. I have no idea what kind of fish we can catch. After that we head down into Bulgaria.