A rough night, a busy day, it rained

I think most of the information is in the post title, my bad stomach continued through to the early hours and I will spare your the gory details but thankfully it finally settled down. I won't spend too long on this blog but we have really been catching up first with restoring the kitchen and editing rooms after the fitting of the new boiler and meant restoring a wall in the kitchen as a temporary or even permanent measure where the old boilier was fixed, this has given a great deal more storage possibilities should we be in a position to go ahead with the new kitchen in the coming year. It has been hard work as whilst recovering from an illness I was obviously slightly jet lagged after the flight from Chisinau to Istanbul and then on to Manchester yesterday morning. Anyway it took us all day to get the jobs done including a trip to B&Q who seem to be having a help the customer campaign which is a novel concept for them and for a first time ever they give some service but not cutting timber to size or anything really meaningful.

I managed to get the Croydon and Crawley DVDs done , I might get the covers done tomorrow. I've loading the Croydon clips on our Youtube channel please remember to click on an advert or two each visit. Then We hung out the tarpaulins to dry but then it rained for the rest of the day. I filled up the bird feeders but the flapping tarps frightened off none but the most brave.

This evenings photos are from our visit to the PMR or Ttransniestre, I'll cheat a little bit with another description from Google of this weird little country the capital Tiraspol is almost as quiet as Pyong Yang but not nearly as forbidding and the trolleybus fleet is great.Transnistria (also called Trans-Dniestr or Transdniestria) is a breakaway state located mostly on a strip of land between the River Dniester and the eastern Moldovan border with Ukraine. Since its declaration of independence in 1990, and especially after the War of Transnistria in 1992, it has been governed as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR, also known as Pridnestrovie), a state with limited recognition that claims territory to the east of the River Dniester, and also to the city of Bender and its surrounding localities on the west bank, in the historical region of Bessarabia. The names "Transnistria" and "Pridnestrovie" both refer to the Dniester River.

Unrecognised by any United Nations member state, Transnistria is designated by the Republic of Moldova as the Transnistria autonomous territorial unit with special legal status (Unitatea teritorială autonomă cu statut juridic special Transnistria),[3] or Stînga Nistrului ("Left Bank of the Dniester").[4][5][6]

After the dissolution of the USSR, tensions between the newly created Moldova and the de facto sovereign state of Pridnestrovie (which unlike the rest of Moldova did not wish to separate from the Soviet Union) escalated into a military conflict that started in March 1992 and was concluded by a ceasefire in July 1992. As part of that agreement, a three-party (Russia, Moldova, Transnistria) Joint Control Commission supervises the security arrangements in the demilitarized zone, comprising twenty localities on both sides of the river. Although the ceasefire has held, the territory's political status remains unresolved: Transnistria is an unrecognized but independent[7][8][9][10] presidential republic with its own government, parliament, military, police, postal system, and currency. Its authorities have adopted a constitution, flag, national anthem, and coat of arms. However, after a 2005 agreement between Moldova and Ukraine, all Transnistrian companies that seek to export goods through the Ukrainian border must be registered with the Moldovan authorities.[11] This agreement was implemented after the European Union Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine (EUBAM) took force in 2005.[12] Most Transnistrians also have Moldovan citizenship,[13] but many Transnistrians also have Russian and Ukrainian citizenship. The largest ethnic group is Moldovan (32.1%), who historically had a higher share of the population, up to 49.4% in 1926.

Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia are post-Soviet "frozen conflict" zones.[14][15] These four partially recognized states maintain friendly relations with each other and form the Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations. (Says it all really!!)