Rousse, Bulgaria

Friday October 23Russe, Rousse or Rus or whatever.
No one can seem to agree on the spelling, but we'll go with the locals since they have to live with it, Rousse. One of the least of the problems with having a dozen languages within a few hundred miles.

We had until noon (all aboard at 1145), so we decided to take walking tour on our own, with the idea of finding a few of the local geocaches.The first was easy, but the bear was grafittied with a swastika. The next was in a collection of monuments (Park of the Rivivals. ???) that looked like gravestones, with names that are undecipherable, mostly because of the Cyrillic lettering.

The Euros take a bit of time setting up their caches, and the last one was a multi step that had us walking around looking at monuments and buildings trying to find clues to calculate coordinates to find the next location. A complete tour of the city with a GPS guide, and we found the cache in a very surprising place (can't tell, or it wouldn't be a secret cache).

Along the way we ran across a couple of our ship's groups -- seems like we were looking at the same things, just from a different point of view. Fun fun fun.

The city is a mix of updated and dilapidated. The post communist life style has taken a while to grab hold, but take hold it has. The true indicator of progress, parking, is at NYC/LA levels. Streets turning into parking lots is a literal thing here.

Since there is a shortage of things for ex-KGB stooges to do, they now have become traffic wardens. When a car wishes to park, they attack with the same alacrity as if they were nabbing a CIA spy. Pay up or the car is off to the gulag.
The people are friendly, and busy. Stores are open selling the usual capitalist stuff, restaurants are well attended. A lot of smokers, but all in all a pleasant bunch.

Arrived back at the boat on time, and we shoved off for the trip to Belgrade via the Danube's Iron Gates.