Hey guys, since my last update I spent three nights in Iasi, Romania and have made my way to Ploiesti.

On Thursday, I crossed the border from Moldova in the early afternoon and made the short drive into the city of Iasi (pronounced like “Yash” would be in English). I went straight to the bar where I had my gig lined up for the following night to work out all the details with them for the show. After taking care of that, I decided to venture out on foot from there to see some of the sights of the city since I was already pretty much downtown. I have to say that I was very impressed with the beauty of the city overall.

On Friday, I got up and set out to see some more things in the city and try some Romanian food prior to my show that night. The highlight of this was the Palace of Culture.

Here are a couple scenes from inside the Palace:

After I checked out the palace, I visited one of the main pedestrian streets nearby where I saw a few more interesting sights and had a great meal of traditional Romanian food for lunch.

After finishing up the exploring I wanted to do, I made my way to College Bar to hang out until showtime. They were having a US style college party for all the students who had just returned from 3 month work trips to the US. They didn’t want me to play until 11pm, only wanted me to play an hour, but fed me twice and gave me more bourbon than you can shake a stick at – in addition to 50 euros. My kinda gig!

On Saturday, I was in full recovery mode. I was originally going to leave and go to Bucharest on Saturday, but I decided to stick around Iasi for one more day because I liked the city and didn’t feel like driving for 6 hours. Instead, I relaxed most of the day and then went out in the early evening to do some busking. This turned out to be a great idea because I had my best night ever on the streets. I made over $100 (mostly in 1 Lei bills, 25 cents, which tells you how many people dropped by) in about 2 1/2 hours and had tons of folks hanging around and taking videos and clapping after every song. It was really a great time. That 2 1/2 hours paid for all 3 of my nights at the hotel in Iasi.

I got rested up on Saturday night after the busking and today, Sunday, I got on the road to my destination of the night of Ploesti – about an hour north of Bucharest. It was super foggy for the entire drive so I couldn’t see much of the scenery which was a bummer. But it was nice and green from what I could see. Along the way, I stopped at a car wash to get the Fiesta ready for Grant and Bing to arrive in a few days and discovered that a bottle of bourbon I had in the car had broken and got on all of the CDs I had remaining to sell. Even though they are plastic wrapped, the bourbon definitely got inside and got the cardboard cases wet and smeared some of the ink. I was pretty disappointed about that and I’m torn on whether to try to continue to sell them in that condition or if I’ll just give them away to people. Luckily, there are only about 25-30 CDs left – the rest have all been sold already!

I arrived to the hotel in Ploesti I had found yesterday on booking.com at about 7:30pm. It’s a 4 star place in the center of the city, but they had a special deal going for $49 and it had a Jacuzzi so I decided to splurge a little. When I checked in, however, I was told that the pool/jacuzzi is closed on weekends. I told the lady I wasn’t too happy about that, so she gave me the breakfast buffet for free and put me in a suite with a Jacuzzi tub. I guess the squeaky wheel does get the grease..

I came to Ploesti because it was on the way to Bucharest, but also because it was the target of Operation Tidal Wave in WW2. Operation Tidal Wave was one of the largest (and deadliest to USAAF) bombing raids of the war and it was targeting the many oil refineries in the area around Ploesti. I’ve linked the Wikipedia article below if you are interested in learning more.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave?wprov=sfla1

I wanted to see the museum related to that, but I found out that it is closed on Mondays after I got here. I have a reservation at a hostel in Bucharest for tomorrow night, but now I’m torn about spending one more day in Ploesti at this hotel so that I can go out exploring around the refineries tomorrow and go to the museum on Tuesday before heading to Bucharest. So I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do tomorrow yet. Either way, Grant arrives on Wednesday evening to Bucharest, so I will be there by then to pick him up! We will then make our way to Belgrade to pick up Bingman on Tuesday. Looking forward to seeing those fellas!

Talk to you guys again soon!