And now, Bulgaria!

Vidin is off the beaten path.  It is a quiet town and John and I chose the walking tour of the town.  Our guide walked us down through a park along the Danube to the fortress there and was going to take us right back the same way.  We stopped  her and asked her to direct us to the town center.  It is not as if there is a lot to see, but we wanted to find out for ourselves!

When we walked back toward the town we passed a small synagogue, converted to a church.

There was not a tour that afternoon — time for cruising! John enjoyed his book on the balcony while I worked on a blog. Then we posed after our fancy dinner on the ship.

Rousse was a fun little town.  The downtown area represents beautiful Baroque buildings and hideous square drab Communist era buildings – what a contrast! But I seem to not have taken pictures of the ugliness :)……at least not here.

The pictures below show this famous building with tons of architectural features that are nice!

A couple of the buildings had signs on them that are similar to our historical markers; they represent the best of the time period!

The influence of communism is pervasive in Eastern Europe; you see it in the buildings, in the culture of the people and in the language.

The guide at the halfway time asked if anyone wanted to return to the ship and I said yes since they were going on to the churches built into the rock cliffs – something I was not going to be able to do.  She gave me directions and off I went – one small problem, at the roundabout I went right instead of left.  I only had gone about two blocks when I inquired from a young woman with child “English?”.  She set me straight!  The part that is important about the young woman is that most of the older population in this part of the world have not learned English.  I believe the younger generation learns it in schools now.  Remember, older people grew up under communism.

In the meantime, John and Bryan continued with the tour that went to see the Rock Hewn Churches carved into the mountain outside of Rousse. Bryan described it as straight up the mountain with 150 steps coming down.

Worth noting:  we were today rafted to TWO other ships!!!!  Since this usually involves exiting ours after climbing to the top deck, then crossing over to the next ship and then climbing down on the outside of the next ship, I was not thrilled to see this.  Here’s the good news:  “Gentle Walkers Only” were allowed to exit and go through both ships, using the elevator at the closest one to shore to go down one level to that ship’s exit.  Yay!

We had another afternoon off since we had not chosen the ten hour tour (four of which were on the bus) to Bucharest; we will see it after the cruise. This left time to get all packed up for the next adventure.

We met Tomi and Bryan for a last night dinner at Al Fresco at the rear of the ship.

The next morning we disembarked at Giurgiu, the nearest port to Bucharest, two hours south of the city.

We were off for the next adventure!

Beth