Caracal

At the opposite end of the spectrum to the large, dusty, communist era theatre in Craiova is this little chocolate box theatre in Caracal.

The theatre is even too small to house our truss.

I had a day off whilst we were here, however as it mostly rained that day my sightseeing was confined to a walk to the supermarket with Bridget and a quick walk on the final morning.

There are a number of churches and government buildings here. Whilst these buildings seem well looked after a lot of the buildings are in a really bad state of repair, a good number falling down.

I saw this building from my hotel room and set off to try and find it. After a couple of false starts I finally worked out which street it was on.

The building is part of a complex of official looking buildings and unbelievably the right hand section with the turret is occupied. There were even plants on the window sills.

This lovely park was next to our hotel and a cut through to the theatre. It was really well tended and here along with the park in the centre of the town there had been gangs of people mowing the grass and tidying up.

All around the lake there were people fishing.

The journey to the airport was by bus again. This time as it was light outside we were able to see some of the countryside. The first section of the journey was through small villages and we saw lots of carts being pulled by horses or donkeys and people stood or sat outside their houses or working in their gardens. There were also lots of animal in the fields. Unlike the UK for each group of animals there was a person looking after them; shepherd, cowherd, goatherd; it was like a step back in time. As we got closer to Bucharest the roads began to improve a little, although they were mostly single carriageway. Close to the airport we were caught in slow moving traffic and a stream of people were walking along the centre of the road trying to sell items to drivers, trainers, socks, water and 1 man with a chainsaw!

Another fisherman

A row of bee hives along the side of this field.

We had a nice time in Romania. It was hard work as we had two different venues in a week, but it was interesting to see the country and all of the people we met were really friendly.