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Got home at about 2am on Monday. You'll be excited to hear that Harghita is now a bird flu zone and presumably other areas of Romania too (it would be a very odd phenomenon if the only two counties affected were Harghita and Covasna - you'd end up with Romanian nationalists pointing to this and saying something about how Hungarian chickens are dirty or something, and Hungarian nationalists positing conspiracy theories about how the State was deliberatley infecting those areas). Anyway, I did finally get disinfected. First, we went through a kind of hi-tech gate system somewhere between Bucharest and Ploiesti where the tyres were cleaned by a deep shag pile carpet, and the car itself was sprayed from all angles with a fine mist of disinfectant. Later, in Malnas village in Covasna county, we were stopped by a policeman and two smiling disinfectors, with cigarettes hanging rakishly from their lips, who proceeded to fire up flamethrower type devices and drench the car in spray. (Someone somewhere is making a killing on all this disinfectant - manufactureres, importers, distributors, whoever, it has to be the biggest boom they've ever seen). The third disinfectation station we passed near Tusnad, was less impressive as all the people (police, spraymen and hangers on) had fallen asleep in their cars and we just drove straight past.

Anyway, I'm going back down to the aiprort on Wednesday night to pick up my parents who are over to visit for two weeks, so not only will the car get lots of disinfecting, but also I'm unlikely to be blogging much until mid-June. Plus ça change.