takin' it easy

So the last few days have been pretty relaxing. We've been in London for 2 days and haven't made it farther than Hyde Park and Buckingham palace. It's been nice to relax a bit though as we have found how tiring it can be to sight see 24/7.

The last full day we had a really fun time at the Prague zoo and walking around in our favorite park.

To be honest the parks in Prague were some of our favorite things. The zoo might seem silly to some people but Prague has the number 7 zoo in the world (we didn't know this before we went, but all the same we went) it was really cool and very well put together we were pretty bummed when we didn't even get to see half before it closed. On the way to the zoo we also came across a really sweet French built chateau where we did some Count of Monte Cristo impressions. Our last night in Prague we watched the sunset over the city from the top of Letna Park and then walked around Prague castle in the evening which was sweet! because it was just like in mission impossible!

The last day in Prague we had a lot of fun going up Petrin hill in a funicular (tram used for climbing steep grades) we ate hot dogs at the top and then walked down the hill enjoying some great views.

Everything went much better with the airport this time we arrived with plenty of time and we've figured out this budget airline deal so we were able to be the last people in line to board but the first to get on the plane (we always take a bus from the gate to the plane). It was the best flight we've had so far, meaning that no one clapped when we landed. The bus from the airport to our hostel in London was much more expensive than we had planned on and thus began a bit of financial worry for us in London however we have found ways to circumvent the pricyness of London.

Our hostel is a bit different this time around there are 300+ beds which is much bigger than we are used to and the room we are staying in has double beds which means that we get to share a bed for the first time in 10 days, Brittany was very happy about this. The bummer is that there isn't a kitchen so we aren't able to eat as we would have liked but there are other ways to eat cheaply.

Saturday we spent the day doing laundry and then getting our bearings around where

we live. We opted to not go downtown because it was a saturday and we figured it would be fairly crowded so we went to regent park which was crowded but it was really fun to watch everyone play football and cricket. We watched a couple cricket matches but couldn't figure it out so we moved on. In regent park there is a small lake that you can rent boats on and though we didn't rent one we watched about 7 teenage boys all crowd onto one paddle boat which almost sank

the weight. Then we watched the lake patrol guy come and kick them off and take there boat away. It was really funny. That night we went

out to eat at a really tastey indian restraunt. We had some good curry and lamb kebabs. After a short walk and a bit of shopping for food for Sunday we headed to bed.

We woke up early on sunday to get to church by nine. It was our first experience on the tube which is undergoing extensive renovations but it a very nice and large system. I really love subways, I think I could ride them all day. Church was interesting, I was disappointed with how many of the members were from the states. I also couldn't believe how many visitors there were. One of the members said that it was about 60/40 visitors to members. About 40 of them were BYU girls here for the London study abroad program. It was really good to go to church as the travel atmosphere isn't always the most conservative. After church we walked to hyde park and ate lunch after which we walked to the Baden Powell house (he is the founder of scouting) and then walked back to hyde park and took a nap.

we walked to Speaker's corner which is the only place in london where you can assemble without a permit. It was a massive congestion of people throwing out all sorts of political and religious ideas without a care for how anyone else felt. I don't know what I expected but it was a lot more abrasive than I pictured. We finished the afternoon off by seeing Buckingham palace

and cheering on some of the contestants in the London marathon. Overall it was a pretty good day, I have really come to appreciate church on this trip as well as the sabbath day as we haven't been able to observe it the way we would like the past two weeks.

The next two days we will be pushing hard to see everything that we can get in. After that we are off to florida to soak up the sun for a few days with Brittany's mom before we fly to St. Louis. Wish us luck!

Give the people what they want to see!

Let's be honest, when I read a blog I like to see pictures and since we've posted so much text over the past few days (don't get me wrong it's been good text) we decided to put down some pics so...enjoy!

Justin with a nice backlit pose, we thought it was funny because it looks like a backdrop...maybe it is...

Brittany's pose

View of Prague from the top of the castle. One of the cool things about Prague is that most all of the old buildings have been preserved unlike a lot of europe which has been destroyed by wars.

Us at the astronomical clock. Every hour on the hour a skeleton turns his hour glass and rings a bell while at the same time some windows open up and apostles go marching by...kinda strange but a must see.

The Tyn church from old town square, the church is named after an astronomer who couldn't get up at a banquet until the king did and subsequently his bladder exploded and he died, never knew that could happen.

Brittany outside the Image Theater we booked tickets here to see a stage show. It was a pantomime about a director who was trying to write and film a horror film interspersed with Blacklight dance scenes that had nothing to do with the plot but were kinda cool. The best part was when this guy was pulled from the crowd and played this henchman, he was hilarious!

Tyn church at night. I wish that I had a tripod as there are some really great shots to be had at night.

This is from the next day april 22nd, we ate lunch near this duck pond and saw lots of ducks as well as children and parents which was kinda fun to watch.

A fun little path that we walked up

I put this one in because it is representative of our time here in the Czech Republic, probably 75% of the men that we see in parks have their shirts off.

Czech Cubism

Well that's about it for the last couple of days. We did visit a The Museum of Communism last night which was really intriguing we didn't have time to take pictures but it was enlightening. 

Prague Day 1

Monday, April 20, 2009
So today was our first official day in Prague. We had a lot of errands to do, and since we didn’t arrive at our hostel until 4:30am we needed to sleep in a bit, so we spent most of the day playing catch up. We woke up about noon, grabbed some food from the supermarket and then headed off to a Laundromat to wash our clothes. We both had our daypacks full of clothes as well as the Romanian sack Justin bought me for Valentine’s Day and we were wearing our pajamas so I’m sure we looked fairly ridiculous, especially poor Justin with his basketball shorts and long socks. We had to take the tram and then walk a fairly good distance to the Laundromat so by the time we got there it was about 2:30pm. We didn’t finish washing our clothes until a little after 5pm and then we headed back to our hostel to put everything away. We took a quick shower and then headed out to get some food.
We thought that we would try one of the local restaurants near the hostel so we ended up eating at a place called Rustica. We knew it was authentic and not a place where tourists usually go because they only had menus in Czech (most of the restaurants have both Czech and English, even the non-touristy restaurants) and the fact that none of the waiters spoke English. It was quite a challenge trying to order food, especially when you don’t speak a single word of Czech. Justin and I both scanned the menu for any word that looked familiar and just ordered, hoping that we hadn’t ordered liver or something equally scary. When we got our food mine was a big steak of sorts and Justin had ordered some chicken skewers. I’m still not sure what kind of steak it was that I ate; I think it may have been pork? It didn’t taste bad, but it was pretty hard to chew. I also got a side dish with my food that was definitely interesting. It was potatoes, onion and small pieces of bacon fat. It actually tasted pretty good, but I couldn’t eat all the bacon fat pieces. Justin’s skewers had chicken, sausage and very large pieces of bacon fat. His fat was about 1 inch tall and 2 inches wide, it was sick, but he ate them. He said they tasted pretty good, but that the texture was really hard to handle. It was definitely an experience to order something and not have any idea of what type of food you ordered.
After dinner we took a tram to town and took a bridge walk. Because there is a large river that runs directly through Prague there are tons of bridges throughout the city, there is one crossing the river at every major road. It’s not like in the states where there is usually only one bridge. We got off the tram at the first bridge we crossed and walked a mile or so down crossing back and forth between over the bridges. It was really beautiful. The city was all lit up, as were the bridges. We even made it to the famous Charles Bridge, for those of you who have seen Mission Impossible it is the bridge the guy falls over when he gets shot, as Justin keeps reminding me. The day started off fairly boring, but ended beautifully. Welcome to Prague.

Craziest Day EVER!! part 2 (this is long, but totally worth it!)

So we spent the rest of the afternoon at the hostel catching up on some homework, playing some cards and just hanging out. Our flight was supposed to leave at 21:40 and there was a train leaving at 19:20 that would get us to the airport by 19:32 so we thought that would be the perfect way to do it. So at 19:00 we headed out the door. On the way out we talked to the front desk and they told us that it would be better to just take a bus and not to take the train. We figured that would probably be fine so they told us where to go to catch the bus and we headed out. When we got there we couldn’t find the bus that they were talking about so we frantically searched around the entire station several times trying to figure out what to do and trying to find this bus. There were lots of other tour buses going to the airport, but we only had 20 EURO with us, just enough money with us to pay for a taxi to our hostel in Prague and those buses were all pretty expensive, or so we thought. We never did find the bus the hostel told us about, but now it was 19:30 and the bus routes took about 30 minutes to get to the airport so I’m starting to freak out now because I really like being exactly 2 hours early for our flights, especially since when we arrived in Italy they never stamped our passports so we weren’t really sure what they was about, but we were hoping that everything would workout okay. We decided that we would just take one of the expensive tour buses to the airport, but that we would need to go find an ATM to take out some more money. We only knew where a few ATM’s were in the train station so we headed to the closest one—out of order, and then we headed to the next one—out of order. By now I’m starting to freak out because we need to get to the airport if we’re going to make this flight. We ran downstairs looking for another ATM and luckily found one there and it was working! Of course the only ATM we could possibly find was the one farthest away from where we were! We tried to take out 20 EURO thinking that would be plenty to get to the airport and we didn’t want to have any extra because then we would just lose money trying to exchange it somewhere. Well, the minimum you could take out was 50 EURO so we said whatever and just took the 50. We found one of the tour buses, which turned out to not be expensive at all only 4 EURO a person and hopped on. I was stressing because the bus wouldn’t get us to the airport until 20:15 only a little over an hour before our flight left. As I’m sitting in the bus I keep thinking to myself that I thought we were supposed to fly out of Rome at a different airport than the one we flew in at, I asked Justin and he seemed pretty sure that we were going to the right airport. I knew that sometime during our trip we would be flying out of a different airport than the one we flew into, it must have been our flight from Bucuresti I kept telling myself.

Well…as I’m sure you’ve guessed when we arrived at the airport there was no flight to Prague! We were at the wrong airport and we only had about 1 hour and 20 minutes until our flight was supposed to leave! We ran to an information desk and they told us that Fiumicino (the other airport) was about 50km away and would cost us about 40 EURO by taxi! Ah!!!! We run outside find the nearest taxi and he tells us that it will be 55 EURO and at least a 30-minute drive, depending on traffic. AH! We tell him that we’ll take it, as we have no other options! We tell him that we need to get there fast so I don’t really know how he did it, but he got us to the airport in 15 minutes, let me tell you we were flying down that highway! We paid him 60 EURO, 55 for the drive and a 5 EURO tip for getting us there so quickly, which also happened to be all the money that we had…hopefully we can find an ATM when we reach Prague so we can get to our hostel. We run inside the airport and start looking for where we need to go, but we can’t seem to find anything that says SMART WINGS (our airline) or anything that says that there is a flight leaving for Prague at 21:40. By this point we are so confused so we go ask information where the SMART WINGS desk is, this incredibly grouchy and unhelpful woman says, “it is down there on the left”…well we’ve already been “down there on the left” for a while now and we didn’t see anything. We figured we might as well go look one more time so we went and sure enough…there was nothing. I walked back over to her, she was thrilled to see me again, and ask her specifically where the desk is. She tells me it is at box 238. Justin and I run to box 238 and …no one is there..? The time is now 21:00 and our flight is supposed to be leaving in about 40 minutes? I walk back over to the unhappy lady and she says, before I can say anything, “it is at box 238”. I tell her that there is no one there and she says, “it is too early, you can only check in 2 hours before your flight leaves”….? What?! Our flight is supposed to leave in 40 minutes. I tell her the flight# and she says, “yes, that flight leaves at midnight 15”…? By this point I am so confused that I just say okay and walk away. I go tell Justin and we figure that we better try to call SMART WINGS and see what is going on so we try to buy the airport Internet, but, of course, there is a problem with the page and we can’t input any of our information. We’re trying to figure out what our options are and decided that it would probably just be best to wait until 22:15 when someone will show up at the SMART WINGS desk so we can ask them what is going on. We have 1 hour and 15 minutes to kill and we both are starving so we go buy some overpriced airport food and sit and wait. When we get back to box 238 it has a large line of people in it so we jump right in line. The line is beginning to get restless because the time is now 22:45 and there is still no one at the SMART WINGS desk. There were a few tour groups that were on our flight so one of the tour guides heads to information and comes running back and says something in either Italian or Czech, I’m not sure which and everyone in line takes off running in a different direction. Hmm…? Justin and I figure we better follow everyone so we take off running too and end up in a line on the other side of the airport. When we get to the front of the line and it is our turn we hand our passports to the checker lady and she starts looking through the computer. A few different times she starts to look really confused, so I’m getting nervous that we’re not going to be able to get on this flight, but luckily she never says anything and then she just hands us our tickets…score!! We had arranged with our hostel to be picked up from the airport when our plane landed so that we wouldn’t have to deal with trying to find a taxi at such a late hour and making sure that we didn’t get ripped off. We called them to let them know that we would be getting in two hours later and the guy that answers says that he has to work in the morning so he can’t come get us and that we would just need to take a taxi…perfect. The only problem with that is that we have zero money because we had to pay 60 EURO to get to the Fiumicino airport (the second airport) super fast even though we ended up having to wait for almost two full hours before we could even check in, talk about a wasted $90. We were really praying that there would be an ATM in the airport because neither the Bucuresti airport or the Rome airport had ATM’s inside them and we ended up having to exchange US dollars, but since we would be arriving in Prague at 2:15am, we didn’t figure any exchange places would be open. We head down to where our flight is supposed to leave from and wait in line. We were supposed to start boarding at 23:30 and again by 23:50 our line is starting to get pretty restless. One of the tour guides asks what is going on and then she announces again something about an autobus, at least that was the only word I could pull out. Justin and I figured that meant that we would have to take a bus to our airplane and I thought I heard someone say something about the plane being fueled, but I’m really not sure. So at 00:05 the doors open and everyone starts walking down the ramp to the outside, since we can’t understand what anyone is saying we just follow and sure enough we all get on a bus. Once we’re all on the bus takes off. We were pretty excited that we were actually going to get on the airplane until the bus starts driving around in circles. The driver has no clue where the plane is! He takes us through this scary back ally and all the passengers on the bus are getting antsy; this is seriously the weirdest thing ever. Finally he pulls up to this airplane that doesn’t say SMART WINGS on it anywhere, but he lets us off and we all jump on the plane. I’m asleep before we even leave the runway, but finally we are officially on our way to Prague!

We arrived in Prague at 2:30am and headed to baggage claim. We were both exhausted and our luggage made it just fine and we found tons of ATM’s!! yay! We took out some money and headed outside to get a taxi, but at 2:40 in the morning, of course, there were no taxis. We sat around for about two hours and contemplated taking the bus, but decided that since we had no city map and no idea where the bus would take us exactly that it wouldn’t be the best idea to take the bus. We tried to fall asleep thinking that when the next flight came in at 5:55am that we may be able to catch a taxi then, but neither of us were able to fall asleep. We found a telephone and tried to call for a taxi, but we only had 50 EURO cents, which only gave us about 1 minute of talk time and it wasn’t enough to tell the lady that there were no taxi’s at the airport, because she seemed to think there were taxi’s right out front. So at 4:00am we decided to walk around until we found one. Luckily we didn’t have to walk that far, just to the next set of terminals before we found a taxi that could take us to our hostel!!! Finally! I guess we should have walked around sooner, but there was only one taxi there so hopefully no one else needed a taxi either! We arrived at our hostel about 4:30am, checked in and headed straight for bed. What a day! This has definitely been the craziest day of our European travel, but I figure that if we made it through today unscathed that we can pretty much make it through anything!

The Craziest Day EVER!! part 1

Sunday, April 19, 2009
I’m pretty sure this has been the craziest day of my life! It started out bright and early at 8am. We woke up and got ready for church and, in the dark, packed up everything that we own and stuffed it into our packs…so goes backpacking. Church started at 11:20am so we figured if we left at 10:15am that would give us plenty of time to get there, since we just had to take a short metro ride and walk a few blocks. Well when we got down to the metro we realized that we couldn’t just take the metro to where we thought, we had to take the metro then catch a train. The only problem with that is that we weren’t sure which train we needed to catch or where we needed to go to catch it. We thought that we should just go for it so we took the metro to where we needed to catch the train. When we got off the metro we figured that the train wasn’t really saving us anytime because it didn’t really look that far, plus we didn’t know where the train was or how to get tickets or when it left or anything like that, so we just decided to walk. Well…we walked and walked and walked. We walked on highways and bridges and almost went through a scary tunnel (Justin decided it was too scary so we took another route). We didn’t know exactly where we were or if we were close to the road we were supposed to be on or not. We figured that we were walking in the right direction and we were trying to follow the train tracks assuming that they would take us to the right road since we should have taken the train in the first place. I was a little skeptical however because the entire time we were walking by them, not a single train drove by. We were about to give up at this point since we’d been walking in unknown territory for about 45 minutes and we were still unsure if we were headed in the right direction. We figured that we would be blessed for trying to get to church even if we never made it. Then miraculously, after crossing over a major highway on a bridge I spotted one of the roads that were in our set of directions! I was ecstatic because that meant that we were at least going in the right direction! We decided that I would navigate because Justin kept telling us to go in the wrong direction so I was even more excited that we were going in the right direction. Sacrament was supposed to start at 11:20am and it was about 11:25am (according to our camera time) by the time we discovered we were actually going in the right direction so we were wondering if we should even go having probably already missed the Sacrament, but we kept on going. We walked some more, we probably walked a little over 3 miles to get to the church today in all, but we finally found it! I’m not sure exactly what time it was when we actually arrived at the church, we had left our maps, and our watch at the hostel and we were going off of the camera for time, but it isn’t very accurate. When we walked in people were singing a hymn and there was a guy in the foyer that was directing us where we needed to go. He handed us a headset and sat us down. We still weren’t sure at this point if we had missed the Sacrament or not, but then we recognized the hymn that they were singing as a Sacrament hymn! We made it! And right on time! (at least for the Sacrament) I really enjoyed going to church in Italy, there was such a strong spirit in that ward. It was so different from church in Iasi because in Iasi there are only about 10 members and this ward had at least 60! It was amazing! I also really enjoyed listening to the talks. For the past 3 ½ months everything has been in a language that I only partially understand so I haven’t been able to understand everything that goes on in church, but with this nifty little headset that the man at the front door gave me I was able to understand everything! Being able to listen to the speakers and partake of the Sacrament was just what I needed and was the perfect ending to such a crazy adventure. Little did I know that leaving church would be just as much of an adventure as getting there.
Justin and I had decided that since we were going to be in a new part of Rome that we hadn’t been in and that wasn’t heavily touristed that we would take advantage of this opportunity and have a look around. When we left the church building it was raining just a little, but we had no choice but to walk. Especially since we weren’t really sure exactly how we were going to get back home because we weren’t really up for another 3 mile hike down the freeway. We walked to a park and found some protection from the rain under some trees and sat down on a bench and ate our lunch. Well, about halfway through our lunch it started raining really hard so we left the bench and took cover under a tree that had a little more protection. We were stuck under that tree for about 40 minutes because of the rain. Luckily I had brought my jacket along, but too bad it wasn’t waterproof because I was pretty much soaked all the way through. Justin on the other hand had nothing but his church sweater on, so he was wetter than I was. It was pretty funny for the first 20-30 minutes being stuck under the tree in a rainstorm that is until our protection started leaking and we were both soaking wet and freezing cold! The rain let up a bit so we decided to make a run for it. We ran to a bus stop and luckily one of the buses was going to the train station, which was right by our hostel. We jumped on and spent the next 20 minutes freezing on Rome’s public transportation. Bring on the next adventure!
part 2 to follow soon. (didn't want to make this post too long!)

We've arrived in Rome!

Our first official day in Rome! It was a very tiring day, but completely worth it. We started it off by heading straight to the Colloseum! We got sucked into taking a guided tour, but it turned out pretty good because we were able to skip all the nasty lines and we learned a lot of cool facts about the Colloseum. We didn’t know it when we bought the tickets, but the tour included a guided tour of the Roman Forum as well, so we weren’t able to spend as much time as we wanted inside the Colloseum, but we got into the Roman Forum for free. I enjoyed being inside the Forum more than the Colloseum. It could have been because it was so beautiful and laid back inside, but I’m not sure. After the guided part of our tour ended Justin and I stayed inside and walked around for probably close to 3 hours. It was really beautiful with gardens and orange trees everywhere. It was amazing to be standing right next to a giant column built sometime near the first century and to imagine what it must have looked like back then. We spent a good 30 minutes sitting on the top of the hill overlooking where the Circus Maximus would have been talking about chariot racing; everything still feels too surreal to me. We spent a really long time at the Roman Forum and ended up leaving it around 4pm. After that we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around admiring all the buildings and the cobblestone streets. We had a small lunch at a little street café and then headed back to our hostel to rest. After we ate dinner in our hostel we went to a street café and had our first Italian gelato, delicious!

Last Day in Romania

Today was our final day in Romania! We woke up at 4am, threw the last of our things in our packs and headed off to Bucuresti. We arrived in Bucuresti about noon and spent the day exploring various parts of the city and we even went to the Museum of the Peasants. I enjoyed being about to see the museum after living in Romania for so long. It was interesting to see how much of Romania’s old culture still continues in the lives of some of its citizens. After the museum I spent the next several hours following Justin around the city looking for the Art Museum, which we never did find, but we had a lot of fun looking. We took a nice stroll through Cismigiu Park (one of the biggest parks in Bucuresti) and rested under some trees next to the pond. It was a typical Romanian day overcast and a little drizzly, we thought it only right for our last day. I’m really glad we were able to spend the last few hours of our time in Romania exploring its capitol. We really grew to love this country and although it may sound cheesy, a small piece of our hearts will forever remain in Romania.

Cetatuia Monastery

I think I've posted as many times in the past three days as I did in the past 2 months...So Brittany and I are watching our neighbors daughter right now while they are in Brasov, we decided on friday to take her with us to Cetatuia monastery. Cetatuia is up on a hill that overlooks Iasi I first noticed it in february but didn't know what or where it was. Last week when we went over to Felica's house (one of Brittany's workers) I noticed that we were right by it. So I looked it up online and we decided to go. It was a little bit of a hike to the top but the view was a lot of fun and we had a really good time.

Some castle-ish thing its probably a restaurant or something we didn't have time to check it out but it looked cool.

This is fairly common in Romania especially in the country. It's impossible to get Maylee to do anything when she sees a horse she just stares and stares.

Heading up the trail Maylee is putting a sticker on her lip.

Me and Maylee on the side of the Monastery. We walked around the whole thing before realizing we went the wrong way and then had to walk back.

This is a picture of Nicolina which is kind of a suburb of Iasi--kind of. We liked this shot because you can see the contrast between the blocs (apartment buildings) and the villas (houses) the color contrast is my favorite. During communism tons of villages were razed and the people were moved into the giant cement blocs that are so prevalent in Romania.

The church at the monastery. It was actually one of the cooler ones that we've been in. It hasn't been redone so the color has been lost but it has been kept up very well so you can see the original 17th century artwork extremely well. Walking into these churches is an incredible experience it really is like walking back in time.

This is a view of Iasi. It is really the whole reason that I wanted to come up here. It was fun to look out and see all the places that we knew. I would try and point out our apartment building but it's near impossible. I wish we could've taken a few more pictures on this trip but our battery kept dying and we barely even got this one but we got some so that's good news.

This is probably our last post from Iasi. It has been an incredible experience and I really can't believe that we are leaving it feels like home. I suppose that from now on there will always be a piece of us in Iasi. 

Now on to Rome, Prague and London!

etajul noua

Dum Dum Dum....

So in the hospital that we work in there are 8 floors however there is a gate that blocks entrance to the stairs which go up past 8. Upon further observation we realized that there was another set of stairs beyond that which could mean a 10th floor! All sorts of suppositions were made as to the purpose of these floors. A secret police station? A mutant orphan agency? Unrecoverables? We were determined to find out however we didn't actually attempt until the last day...

 

It's pretty easy to tell whats up--there while to a lot of people it may look like a office for handymen its obviously a secret training facility for the Romanian X-men. They must like Marilyn Monroe. Its a good thing we left when we did because just as soon as I turned of the camera the elevator opened and we were interrogated by a man that looked like a handyman but we knew better, Brittany thought quick and said that we were looking for floor eight so they other guy took us down to 8 and let us go. Its a good thing neither of them were psychics.

Just another Romanian mystery solved.

can you say 'gata'?

Well this is it! Last day, I wish we could have taken some pictures at the orphanage but there are rules. The orphanage is a lot tougher to leave I think because you get to know the kids really well while the turnover at the hospital is so frequent that you don't tend to get attached as much. So without further adieu here are some pics from the last days. oh and yeah thats the makings of a faux hawk.

Me sleeping with King Tut, we usually make up names for the kids because no one usually knows their names. I think his real name is Vladuț.  I've always liked the name ever since hearing about Vlade Divac I've liked the name Vlade and since Vlad is pretty common in romania maybe I could get away with it naming one of our kids Vlad because Brittany would feel its sentimental plus it beats Nicoletta (which is her Romanian name choice). I've never heard of anyone famous named Nicoletta but I have heard of Vlad Țepes and who doesn't want their child name after him! In the end I suppose will compromise with John. (oh and this isn't a hint its just me rambling).

This girls name is Andreea, yeah they spell it with two es (how are you suppose to pluralize e? weird.) She is pretty funny and really likes to color. She didn't say much until the second day but she would come in and play with us while we played with Mihaeița.

Mihaeița! he really likes to listen to music. Katie brought this stuffed pig that has speakers built into it and after we busted it out it was the only thing he ever wanted. Its always a hit. I really like to color with him though, in fact I found out during these three months that I really like to color.

Botea, also known as the crib monkey. She had this whole break dance-esque method of moving around her crib by laying on her back and then grabbing the rails with her feet and turning herself in circles, it was pretty sweet. 

Brittany with King Tut. We never actually called him that I just made it up right now but I really like it. He's pretty much one of the most beautiful romanian babies we've ever seen (Brittany's words not mine since society hasn't deemed it appropriate for a man to use beautiful when speaking about another male but lets be honest he was a really cute kid).

King Tut

This is me in my newest addition to my romanian collection, manpris! It brings to mind a quote by Dennis the menace 'you gotta be pretty brave to ride a tiger in your underpants' well my friends you gotta be pretty brave to wear manpris!

This is it man!

Well thats about it this actually isn't our last walk home from the hospital but its the second to last which counts for something.

Peace out Romania! 

word to yo motha 

(I hope that doesn't mean anything inappropriate)