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The city of Iasi (pronounced Yash), the capital of the Romanian part of Moldova is slowly getting taken over by the statues of cats. They are all different but all are close to the real size. Some of them are within reach and you can touch them, like this one:



Some of them have wings and are high up like these nice blue ones. I like that couple of pigeons watching them. Seeing these two plunged me into a long daydreaming session about the world where cats could fly.

It is quite a walk.

In Transylvania, Romania.

Some of Romania's mountains from above.

An earthquake a minute ago woke us all up here. I do not know how strong it was but everything was moving quite a bit and there was quite a bit of noise as well. I think it was quite short, shorter than a minute. Some people went outside but we stayed in and I am going back to sleep shortly. People are worried about repeats and are saying that they often come in batches here.

Update: I found it on earthquaketrack, it was 5.6 magnitude (Romanians are reporting 6.1 magnitude) earthquake 5 km from Nereju Mic, Vrancea, Romania.

These guys were working on an installation at Sibiu Tattoo Expo.

Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania

When we visited Transylvania's last gothic fortified church in Biertan (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) they told us how the Saxons who lived there used to deal with the couples asking for a divorce.

To ensure that the husband and wife really thought things through, they were required to live together for two weeks locked up in a tiny room with one single bed, a single plate, just one fork, a single chair, etc. The guide got really excited telling us that it worked so well that although many couples got locked up for two weeks, there was only one divorce while the practice was in use. I just had to ask how many of the rest of the cases ended up in murder trials instead. They did not have that statistics.

On the shore of Romania's heliothermal and salty Bear Lake, which is unique in Europe (being both heliothermal and salty).

The water and the mud from this forest mountain lake apparently are known for their strong therapeutic qualities.

When I was taking this picture I remember thinking whether activists fighting to ban covering one's skin with black mud because of possible racist connotations could appear one day.

We were on a train crossing Romania from east to west (don't do this it really sucks, drive instead). The train stopped in this bleak small town only for three minutes very early in the morning. It was cold, wet and grey and the station was really run down, depressing and almost empty. This old guy was standing there, his head and hands shaking, scanning the train from the front to the end and back anxiously trying to see if anybody was getting off the train. Nobody did and as soon the train started moving he walked away with his two walking sticks, dragging his left foot a bit every third step or so.



I called granddad in a couple of hours and got "What is it about? I can't really talk now, we are driving to Gothenburg today and had to leave the house two hours ago but your grandmother is not being easy about this as usual so I am going through some intense stuff here now so that we can bloody leave already." That was great to hear.

At least that's what her t-shirt said.

In Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania

You may remember that I thought it was a bad idea to base this campaign on not wanting to be stuck on an island with Boris and Nigel because, as little as I knew about Romanian politicians I still suspected that many of them would have been a much worse company to be stuck with than Nigel.

The city in the centre of that campaign is Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania's largest city, second largest city in Romania and home to Romania's largest university and student community.

Today I was told a little bit about Gheorghe Funar, mayor of Cluj-Napoca 1992 - 2004 and currently the General Secretary of the Greater Romania Party and an MP.

I will not bore you with the details of his ridiculous xenophobic policies as mayor (he also ran a huge Ponzi scheme on the side) and will just share a couple of his latest thoughts, which include "World's Jewish Government wants to move Israel into Romanian borders and is trying to exterminate Romanian people by using food additives" and "There are already more than 2 million Jews in Romania working for its destruction". Apparently he also claims that theory of relativity was developed by the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu and was stolen by Einstein (described by Funar as a "retarded individual").

Yeah...well...about being stuck on an island with Boris and Nigel....I think the Brits are probably fine for now.