Location and a bit of history

Finally I decided to open myself a "blog". Don't know for sure what it is , looks like an online diary were I can publish my thoughts about Romania for free. I was thinking to get a domain name and hosting somewhere but this service looks interesting and it's free.

What can I say , Hello and welcome to my blog

Part 1 of the story: The Location and a bit of history

I'm Dan and I want to relate for any visitors that this blog may have some things about Romania, strictly from my point of view. When I'm writing this post it's September 09, 2006. If I would have written this a few years earlier (let's say back in '99) about Romania you would have asked yourself "Where is Romania city located ?" (without any bad thought, but most people who said that were from USA, but not only, I will explain you later if you have time why they said that). We are not a city as you may think , we are actually a country located in south-eastern Europe. Find the Black Sea on the world map and we're next to it. Related now for US visitors: most of US citizens heard of Romania since we were implicated more or less in the wars taken by US and his allied forces with the terrorists. We will talk about some politics later, now let's get back to the location and history chapter.

Romania is divided in 41 counties. Anyways we have an interesting history which can be found on Wikipedia, I won't double post here what is written there.

In Romania you can arrive by plane using any major airline operator (KLM, Alitalia, Tarom, Lufthansa, Malev, Air France, British Airways, Emirates, etc). The largest airport is Henry Coanda Airport (OTP) located in Otopeni, a few kilometeres from Bucharest. Other international airports are Baneasa airport in Bucharest, "Mihail Kogalniceanu airport" located in Constanta county, which is 240 km far from Bucharest, Timisoara airport, etc. Most people come on OTP.
Also you can come by sea or with your car. We have a large road network which is continuous rebuilt (officials say that) but it has a very low road quality mostly. We hope in the next 10 years to have a decent one and at least one or two extra highways. There are 2 current highways now: Bucuresti-Pitesti one (where your car can suffer severe damage, i'm not kidding0 and the recent built (well still under construction for the last 100 km's) is Bucuresti-Constanta. This one links Bucharest to Constanta, it's a "modern highway..." but still doesn't looks like any other european highway, and it took years to build 140 km's of it. Shame on our government for spending the funds to build it for their fun. Road signs are some times very hard to be spotted, take care when driving, many people have accidents for this reason.

You can also get here by train, please see my advices when travelling to Romania post.