Figure 8 On A Bike

After our string of city days we were looking forward to our time in Sinaia where we had a very nice apartment booked. Sinaia is a small town in Romania's Bucegi Mountains. To get there we experienced our first Romanian train. We had been warned that Romanian trains were old and slow and not up to European standards. To us Americans they were marvels of public transit, though we could see the complaint that much of the infrastructure in the country dated to the communist era and was in sore need of investment. There were no indicators of which stop we were at so we had to use Ben's phone GPS to anticipate which stop we needed to get off at. The station was small and cute and we managed to order a taxi to take us the short distance to our place up the hill. It was raining, which was depressing as we wanted snow. We took the day to run grocery errands and the following day we spent relaxing in the apartment and planning future parts of the trip. Rainy Sinaia

Not a pair of cities I ever thought I'd link together in my life. But here we were in Bishkek , the capital of Kyrgyzstan, with a day for touristy activities before making our way back west to Europe, flying into the Romanian capital of Bucharest. The night we arrived in Bishkek, preparing dinner was a bit awkward since the woman who seemed to run the small set of basement rooms (and also might have been living out of a storage closet) stood guard by the electrical kettle and microwave all evening, but after some gesturing and random bits of Russian she happily heated some water for our ramen, let us pop our doner meat into the micro, and grabbed us some dishes and utensils to eat with. As is inevitable, our day in Bishkek started with a hunt for a cafe. Of course, our hunt started far too early (at maybe 9:30 AM?) and it took a little searching to find an open one. Unlike Almaty, Bishkek does not have two quaint coffee shops lining each side of every downtown city block, but a...