Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Oct. 6 – Sail to Constanta, City Tour



Statue along the canal
Overnight, we set off for the last leg of our trip down the Danube, which veers north into Romania before entering the Black Sea. The Danube Delta is not conducive to river traffic, so the boat took a canal route to Constanta. Apparently it is only for day-time traffic because we moored overnight and started up again at breakfast. The canal is probably an engineering marvel but not so much for tourism. The highlight of the morning was a session where each of the four guides described an Eastern European tradition – courting girls by squirting water on them, saying goodbye to the dead, marriage, and sheep herding traditions. 

After lunch and a trip through the locks, we docked within sight of the Black Sea and headed out to explore this city, one of the largest in Romania, and a formerly very active port. Joining the EU has exposed the lack of corporate competitiveness in Communist systems and the port hopes to regain their activity level as Romanians improve their ability to compete with the west. The city is undergoing renovations and should look a lot better in the future. We visited an archeological museum where ancient Roman statues were found and preserved in 1962, along with remnants of a mosaic floor at the old port area. Romania became part of the Roman empire nearly 2000 years ago, and their language is more like Portuguese than the other very similar slavic languages on the Balken Peninsula.
Small part of mosaic along old shore buildings

Snake statue found in 1962


Casino

Walking to the shore and unused casino,  we passed a lovely unused mosque (very few Muslims here now) and a church where an outside wedding was getting started. We were allowed to go in the church which looked like a big version of the one we saw in Abanasi and it was okay to take pictures in this one, so I posted them in the other since that was the special place. The casino was being built when the communists took over and of course, you couldn't have people spending time and money at a casino ---way too bourgeois! So it has apparently been left on the coast as a a warning about the decadence of western life. Maybe now that Romania is westernizing, someone will come up with the cash to fix it. Then we headed on the bus to a resort area called Mamaia. Its along the ocean with a lake on the other side of a peninsula -- very busy from June to September and totally dead now. We walked along the beach and marveled at the number of shells washed up -- it was impossible to walk near the water without crunching them by the dozens.
Derelict pier at Mamaia Resort along the Black Sea

Back at the boat, we had our farewell dinner, which included Baked Alaska.

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