Back from Dacia...

Not the prettiest city in Europe but at least it was 27 degrees

I'm just back from Romania; a country I haven't been to before.  This now means that there is only one EU country (Cyprus) I haven't visited.  

Large, cold and, most importantly, with just one olive. 8/10

I had low expectations of Bucharest, which certainly has more than its fair share of ugly, Soviet era blocks but also has some pretty Austrian-style villas scattered throughout the centre of town.  It's no Prague, Riga or Ljubljana however.  There was some big football match on which made getting a good hotel almost impossible but, again, much to my surprise the Howard Johnson Grand Plaza (the only place with any rooms available) was actually OK with a rather good restaurant.  I had some excellent local wine and they even managed a decent Vodka Martini in the bar.

The Legatus was very well looked after by the lovely Ana

Romanian girls kept telling me that the country had the most beautiful girls in the world.  I have heard similar claims from Russians, Latvians, Lithuanian, Hungarians, Colombians, Argentinians etc.etc. Romanian girls, if one can generalise, tend to have slim figures, long legs, large noses, big brown eyes and slutty looking mouths.  Many of them had very long hair too, which you don't see in Britain that often these days. Well, many of them look like prototypical gypsy girls, of course.  Perfect for me in fact.  So, I wouldn't say they were up there with the Lithuanians or the Vietnamese but  there were a few very fine specimens around indeed and my own companion and aide was not exactly an old dog herself.

Typical Romanian scenery in the bar.  Always something nicely distracting there

So which country really has the most beautiful women?  A few years ago I was in a restaurant in a hotel in Helsinki where I saw an Italian professional cycling team struggling in trying to order dinner from a waitress who spoke only Finnish or English.  I decided to help out with translation and as a result they invited me to join them for dinner.  There was a conversation about which country had the most beautiful women in the world and the almost unanimous consensus (based on the fact that they had only been to countries on the professional cycling circuit) was...Venezuela.  I've never been there so cannot comment but if you like your women "slutty, dark and obvious" as one of my ex-(blonde)girlfriends once observed, it could be a promising territory.

Anyway, back to the other sort of figures.  On my return, of course, I started to think about getting some Dacians.  In my defence, I have been thinking about this since Warlord came out with their Trajan's Column style Romans with armoured sleeves.  Now Warlord Games do a box of Dacians but, inevitably they are just their Celts with a few extra metal bits thrown in.  I am not convinced by this attempt to produce different armies from the same basic figures.  The real issue, looking at some pictures of their Dacians is that the metal heads seem huge.  So I looked at Foundry and their figures, probably because they are Perry sculpts, look rather better.  They will be small of course but then the Warlord Romans are small too.  Hmm!