Romana in Cuptor

Hi Everyone,

The autumn leaves are starting to fall here. It is noticable that there are more and more leaves on the ground and that some of the trees are starting to go into their autumnal colours. So why is it is unbearably hot??!!

I know you've had enough of the continual weather reports from me, but this week and particularly this weekend has been ridiculous. Not a single cloud for 10 days and every day getting increasingly hotter. We reached 39c - 102F - today and they say at night it won't drop below 27c. There is not a breath of wind and I have an intravenous drip feeding me water. This is not just me being a pale faced Englishman - even the Romanians have been complaining, hence the title of this e-mail being the headline of the Bucharest newspaper today: Romana in Cuptor - "Romania in the Oven". I know I will regret this, especially in the middle of January when I am trying to keep all I hold dear warm in the freezing wind, but I am looking forward to winter at the moment. Just think you have 4 months of me telling you how cold it is here. You have so much to look forward to!

Apart from the weather, my apartment is also getting silly. You will remember that my washing machine decided to release all the water in it onto the bathroom floor rather than down the waste pipe. You will also remember the glass in my oven door shattering when the girls decided to use it for producing molten iron. Well, at a time when the weather is supremely hot, my fridge has decided to go on the blink. It has a digital reading on the outside of it telling you the internal temperature of the fridge. Usually it is at 4c. One day it went up to 7c, then 10c, then 14c and after 19c the reading just went to --. Of course I had to eat or throw out all the stuff in the fridge as it is too warm. Thankfully the freezer is working OK, at the moment I have my bed in there! Then this morning my iron decided to empty all its water reservoir over the shirt I was ironing and stop working. When the weather does get colder I can't wait to switch on my central heating - goodness knows what will happen to that!!

Tuesday this week I am off to Iasi with the UK experts, Lavi and Diana. Iasi is in the far north east of Romania right on the Moldovan border. We are all flying with Tarom - Romanian Airways. I have never been on an internal flight with them so this should be interesting. They are forecasting thunderstorms for that day just to add spice to the proceedings.

So better go off and pack.

Hope you are all OK. Take care,

Andrew xx