Sunday March 11. Off we went to Rousse, where we have to hang B's art tomorrow for his and N's exhibit which opens tomorrow night. It was a crappy, cold day, and along the way some kid got sick on the bus. Lovely. We got into Rousse around 1.30pm and met O, the guy who's supposed to be looking after us. He's an actor, but he's also connected with the European Cultural Centre, which is where B and N's show will be. Everyone in Rousse seems to know him, and he's really wonderful. Rousse is so pretty - many of the buildings remind me of Vienna because they have statues all over the rooftops and faces peeking out around the doors and windows.

O took us to a little restaurant called Pulp Fiction for lunch, and the owner picked up the tab. I've got a good feeling about this town.

B, N and I had breakfast at our hotel, which is a nice little place. O took us on a walking tour of the town, and we got to see the amazing interior of a building that a friend of his is refurbishing and which was recently used to film part of a movie called Nietzsche Wept. You can stand in one end of the building and look through several rooms at once, because all the doorways are lined up. All the rooms had identical chandeliers, so it was like being in a hall of mirrors, except each room had differently coloured walls. We also saw a house which originally belonged to a banker but is now used as a church rectory. On the ceiling in the main room there's a painted scene of some half-naked women and men cavorting and eating grapes. I wonder how often the priests look at it.

I should buy some more tights while I'm here. It's cheaper than Sofia.

Monday March 12. Around 4pm we all met at the Cultural Centre to start hanging the show. N needed to put her paintings behind glass - I think I must have polished about 300 panes of the stuff. I'm sure I've got OCD, because all I could think of was "must...not...leave...fingerprints...". Other people tried to help me, but they always left streaks, and I couldn't stand that, so I wound up re-doing their work. Sometimes I scare the hell out of myself.

B and N had a couple of TV interviews today at the Cultural Centre, so I stayed away and bummed around town for a while. Managed to find a couple of secondhand clothing stores in my travels. At one point I saw there was a huge crowd gathered in front of the centre (wondering who those famous artists were, no doubt). I had absolutely no inclination to join the crowd.

The opening tonight was by all accounts a success. It's weird to see B in the proverbial spotlight; I'm more used to it than he is, and he usually hates being the centre of attention. He seems ok with it today, though. There was yet another TV interview during the opening, and this time I was pulled into it.

After the opening a bunch of us went to a jazz place called Art Club, where O had me get up and sing some things with the pianist and violinist who were playing there that night. Nice guys, and we had a blast. Another woman got up and sang a couple of Russian gypsy songs. What a great day.

Tuesday March 13. Headed down to the bus station to leave for Bucharest (since we were so close to Romania and wanted to visit it while we were up here) and found out there was no 2.30pm bus (contrary to what our tickets said), so we killed some time walking around until the next bus, which left at 4.30pm. We were a little worried because 4.30pm came and went and still no bus. Wondered if we had managed somehow to miss it - and then around the corner came a little white microbus emblazoned with "Rousse - Bucharest" in huge letters. Hard to miss that. There was only one other passenger on the bus - a Romanian guy - and pretty soon he struck up a conversation with us. He's been living in Canada for a while but has been back in Romania for the past few months, working as a builder. He recycles stone, etc, from demolished buildings. He turned out to be really nice and, when he found out we were hoping to find a hotel or hostel in Bucharest for the night, he said that we shouldn't have to worry about that on our very first day in this new place, and he decided he needed to look after us. When we arrived in Bucharest, he called his cousin E to see if we could all stay overnight at his place. Then he took us to a store where we could buy a Romanian SIM card for my phone, showed us how to use the metro, and then took us to E's apartment, which was a few stops south of the city centre.

E has a really sweet little apartment. The four of us hung out for a while, sipping scotch, swapping histories and taking pictures of each other. After a while, E assembled the bed for us in the living room and gave us a towel and a bathrobe to use (with the explanation "It's clean, and it isn't mine").

Lights out. I grinned up into the dark, marvelling at our crazy luck.