Day 17 - Thursday 11th June

When we went down to breakfast at about 7:15, there were more people in the restaurant than yesterday including some of the French school children who had arrived yesterday afternoon. One of their teachers was keeping a close eye on their manners.

Unfortunately the quality of the breakfast hadn't improved. In fact it might have gone down hill. My poached eggs were more rubbery than yesterday and I was thinking of asking for a steak knife so I could cut them but I decided just to leave them. After one or two sips, we both decided not to drink our cups of coffee.

Alex picked us up at 9am and drove us a couple of blocks to the Danube Delta Museum in Tulcea. This museum concentrates on the fish and wildlife in the Danube Delta. They have good displays of fish in display tanks and stuffed animals in diorama displays.

We then set off south to Histria which is an archaeology site where they dug up ancient Roman ruins about 10 to 15 years ago. Originally it was a Greek settlement before the Romans arrived and built a fortress.

We strolled through the ruins and then looked at the artifacts within the museum building. We were just about the only visitors there.

Outside the building, a pelican had set up a nest on the top of a tall pole. The mother was busy feed 3 or 4 babies while dad sat perched at the top of another tall pole about 50m away.

Suzy had asked Alex if we could visit a beach on the Black Sea and so he took us to Sunshine Beach in Constanta. This is where people from Romania and other countries come in summertime. Many places were already open despite the fact that the official season doesn't start for another week or two.

It is a long sandy beach with plenty of room for many rows of deck chairs. Beyond the beach, there are cafes and parking areas as well as hotels and other accommodation.

We walked out to the end of a long peer to admire the view and take photos. It was a warm sunny day and people were fishing from the wharf and enjoying the sunshine.

Alex took us about 200m north along the beach to a very nice pizza cafe, Papa Razzi, where we enjoyed a delicious meal under large shady umbrellas. There was a gentle breeze from time to time that helped make the temperature more comfortable. I tried a Romanian draft beer called Ursus.

Next we headed back to Bucharest on the motorway. It was about 2:30pm when we left the cafe and about 5:30 by the time we reached Berthalot Hotel - the same hotel one we'd stayed at a few days ago.

For most of the trip today, I sat in the back seat of Alex's car while Suzy sat in the front seat next to Alex. On Tuesday, Suzy had been in the back seat all day and had ended up with a headache and didn't feel well.

It's hot in the back seat because not much of the air conditioned air reaches the back seat. Suzy said today it was also hot in the front seat because the sun was beating in on her as we headed west towards Bucharest.

For this evening, we had tickets to attend an open-air Andre Rieu concert in the plaza outside the parliament building complex. Before we left Sydney, Suzy had discovered that he was coming to Bucharest while we were there and she'd asked Vlad from Balkan Trails to get tickets for us.

Alex very kindly offered to drive us there and pick us up again at the end of the concert. We had dinner at 7pm in the hotel restaurant and managed to finish dinner just in time to meet Alex as he arrived at the hotel at 8pm.

It was lucky that Alex had allowed half an hour to get us there because whichever road he took was jammed with traffic. Eventually he found a way of getting us there - zippy through traffic in various back streets. He dropped us at the back of the parliament building which would also be our pick up place later in the evening.

We then had a ten minute walk around to the front of the building and arrived at 8:30 just as Andre Rieu and his orchestra were parading out of a nearby building towards the stage. The police had stopped us while the procession passed.

It was a huge crowd. I'm no expert in guessing crowd sizes but there must have been somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people - maybe more. They were all lined up neatly in row after row, block after block and section after section. Other people were sitting up the back on the grass hill in front of the parliament building.

We then managed to find our seats and they turned out to be excellent seats. They were in the second row of the second block of seating. We were in the centre of the row and in front of us was a wide passageway leading to the centre of the stage. Suzy had done an excellent job of getting great seats for us.

Andre Rieu is from Holland. He spoke English throughout the performance because he doesn't speak Romanian. He had a lady at a podium on the side of the stage translating for him. However it seemed as though most of the audience understood him when he spoke.

I was surprised how big his orchestra is. He calls them the Johann Stauss Orchestra. They cover all the traditional instruments you'd expect - plus singers. From time to time he would introduce solo singers or small groups of singers or performers.

There were two Australians in his team. One was a tenor from Tasmania - Andre Rieu asked the audience if they knew where Tasmania was. The other Australian was a soprano called Mirusia Louwerse - her performance so incredibly fantastic it gave me goosebumps.

Most of the music was classic music but they made it fun, It was obvious that everyone on stage was enjoying themselves. There was an intermission after about an hour and I expected it would finish at about 11pm.

That wasn't to be because the crowd kept on calling for more. I've never seen anything like it because the encores lasted for more than half an hour. It ended in fireworks - probably this distraction was the only way the performers could have escaped from the stage.

They also did a great job of tailoring the show to suit the local Romanian audience. There was a Romanian man who played a small flute-like instrument that brought the loyal audience to their feet clapping and cheering wildly. In the encore performances, they had singers and dancers in traditional Romanian costumes.

It was an amazing memorable evening. Andre Rieu is a great performer. It was a polished professional act from beginning to end.

We sent Alex an SMS message to tell him that the concert was finished and walked to the place where he'd dropped us off to wait for him.  Initially there were a lot of people around but by midnight the crowd had gone and there was no Alex.

I was just about to ring him, when a car pulled up in front of us. It wasn't Alex's car but it was driven by Alex. It turned out that someone had parked him in and so he could get out to pick us up. Instead he'd borrowed his mother's car to come get us.

His mother's car is also a VW Passat but it is a silver colour, slightly bigger and a newer model. So it had more leg room and the air conditioning worked well. Alex was very apologetic but it didn't worry us - we preferred the new car.

When we got back to the hotel at about 12:15, we finished off the bottle of wine we'd bought at dinner time. It had been another long enjoyable day.