When I upgraded the room, I was looking forward to the pleasure of having a lazy Sunday morning of waking up late…that was not to be the case. Promptly at 8am construction began, waking us both despite wearing ear plugs. It ceased before we could call down to complain, but by that point we were well and truly up. So much for catching up on sleep. We went to the lounge and had some breakfast, then asked Elena, the concierge in the lounge, about finding the spot for the hop-on-hop-off tour, not wanting to repeat the Belgrade incident. She printed up the map for us and cheerfully sent us on our way. We stopped for a bit at a newly-built church and listened to to the priest intoning many wonderful things before continuing our walk around the immense Parliament, second only to the Pentagon in space, to get to the bus stop. In 10 minutes we were on our away around the central part of Bucharest, but the audio portion of the tour left a lot to be desired: ill-fitting ear-piece, spartan descriptions,and very poorly timed. We got off at Revolutionary Square (the place where the revolution really was televised), admired an ancient church and the service going on there, found a cafe to get some water, then hailed a taxi back to the Marriott. We again prevailed upon Elena to help us with our transportation issue, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet. When I was planning the trip, I intended for us to take the ferry from Constanta to Istanbul, but when we started trying to find the timetable, we were told that the ferry went out of business. No problem, we’ll just take the train, then…except that there is a section of track out in Bulgaria due to storms this winter, and all approaches to Istanbul are torn up due to a new station being built, so that the train is actually is a train to a bus to a train to a bus, with all the switches being in the middle of the night, and no guarantee that our bikes would even be accepted on the buses. The direct bus is scheduled for 20 hours, but can take longer. Facing these facts, we started investigating sending our bikes home directly from Bucharest, and taking a Pegasus flight to Istanbul. Towards that end, I emailed the Bucharest offices of FedEx, UPS, and DHL, and submitted a web form on a ex-pat website for moving quotes, and asked Elena to make some calls. She said she’d email us anything she found out, and we set out for the station for the next train to Constanta. We both crashed hard on the trip, but when the conductor asked if I spoke Italian, I sang the first verse of “Bella siccome un angelo”…and she was a bit taken aback. We got into Constanta and found the hotel with only a little bit of a problem, then went to the restaurant the clerk recommended: The Pub, which had a big green neon shamrock on it. The front half looked like a sparse theme-park version of an Irish pub, but the back was a very modern looking, trendy restaurant. We enjoyed an excellent meal, did lots of people watching, then walked back to the hotel to continue our sleep-catching-up duties.