The thing about staying in Tulcea is that it is right across the river from Ukraine. This really didn't occur to us. Not even when we enjoyed the enormous dining room by ourselves. We enjoyed sturgeon and vegetables and papanasi and lava cake. But at 3:30am the hotel shook with a boom. At first I thought it was an earthquake. But there was no after-rumble. I looked at my phone and there was an alert telling me to get to the basement and stay away from windows. So the first thing I did was walk to the wall of windows. I couldn't see anything, but every 10 minutes there was another boom.
Just over there in Izmail, the bombing went on for hours. I just stared at my phone and scrolled twitter. Knowing there was no news made me realize this was normal for Tulcea. And then I watched as the helicopter hit the commercial jet at Reagan National, about 5am. There was no sleeping after that.
Poor Celia had dressed and made her way to the receptionist at 3:30am. They were both from Spain so they chatted awhile. In the morning we stopped by another school and a high school who had taken in Ukrainian refugees a few years back. We had donated 76 mattresses and they were still being used!
We dragged along the rest of the day and tried to catch up on sleep in Bucharest.
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