Tressa and I rolled into Bucharest, Romania on Sunday, August 23rd after enduring a grueling 19 hour train ride from Vienna. I had feared that the worst was yet to come, as I had
heard some real horror stories about Bucharest hotels, but our hotel turned out to be one of the best we stayed at in Europe. It was incredibly clean, 
air- conditioned, had super friendly staff, and about $30 a night...it was exactly what we needed after 3 months of traveling on a shoestring. On Monday one of the staff at the the Institutul de Speologie arrived at our hotel and walked us to the institute. Erik Trinkaus had warned me that we would never find the institute on our own, and he was right, it was truly in the backstreets of Bucharest. For lunch, the guys at the institute took us to a fun local restaurant where we got to enjoy a Romanian specialty, Modovian Stew, a unique mix of unidentifiable internal organs, polenta and a fried egg. After getting over the initial idea of it, i actually found it to be really good. Back at the institute I worked with the Oase 2 cranium and Oase 1 mandible, likely the oldest H. sapiens fossils in Europe. It was just another one of those fantastically surreal experiences of working with fossils that I never thought I'd ever actually get to see. At the end of the day, the director, Dr. Silviu Constantin, walked us back to our hotel, where we spent the night anxiously watching the news (the room even came with a TV with english stations!) about the forest fires in Greece... our next destination.
