The Monkey's first stop in Romania was Drobeta Turnu-Severin. It sits across the River Danube from Serbia, and dates from the time of the Dacians, the earliest known inhabitants of Romania. When the Romans conquered the settlement at Drobeta in the 2nd Century, they undertook a massive engineering project: the construction of a bridge spanning the Danube. The bridge has long since disappeared (it was destroyed in the 3rd Century), but here the Monkey inspects the Roman fortress that was built to defend the Drobeta side of the bridge's span.

Inside Drobeta's informative (but at times poorly lit!) Museum of the Iron Gates, the Monkey examines a scale model of Roman Emperor Trajan's bridge across the Danube. Construction took place from 103 to 105. Even the scale model is impressive: it stretches to the far end of the room in the photo above, by the doorway in the upper left corner.

Drobeta Turnu-Severin's water tower is younger than it looks. It went up around 1910, but has a medieval appearance to it. Either way, the Monkey found it a pleasant place to stop for a photo.

The Monkey celebrates becoming the latest Romanian millionaire. Romanian Lei are quite colorful, and the bills are made of a plastic that purportedly outlasts most papers and is harder to counterfeit.

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