Constanta
Forty-five years ago, 1977, my MG Midget was produced in Abingdon and I took my wife and children on a holiday to Constanta, Romania. I have just spent the past day and a half revisiting and walking around Constanta and it is a very different place.
In the late seventies, the “Iron Curtain” countries started to open up to western tourists. The Black Sea coast has some great beaches and the great tsunami of tourists, flocking to Spanish resorts, had peaked and were eager to try new locations. Our holiday was booked for June/July period, I don’t remember the exact dates, and we had an anxious period after a seriously bad earthquake in the January that had affected a large area of the country. However, we were told it was fine to go ahead and so landed in the first Communist governed country we had been too.
My memories of Constanta from then are of drab concrete block buildings, gangs of women...