My friends are not ones to sit around so we piled into the car and headed northwest towards Drobeta-Turnu Severin. We encountered a river that was—along with the sky—very, very blue. Perhaps all this blueness might be why the waltz was named The Blue Danube. The title refers to a poem by Karl Isidor Beck. The first verse well describes my feelings at this exhilarating encounter with the very same river I left at the other side of the country in Tulcea:

Danube so blue,
so bright and blue,
through vale and field
you flow so calm,
our Vienna greets you,
your silver stream
through all the lands
you merry the heart
with your beautiful shores.

Off in the distance lies the Iron Gate gorge between Romania and Serbia. There, the beauty of the river is bridled by the the Iron Gate Dam I. So much for flowing calmly, but electricity doesn't grow on trees you know. Too bad for villages such as Ada Kaleh that disappeared and the sturgeon whose spawning path was blocked.