Saturday, September 29th, was what I would call a stamp day. I spent most of the day sitting in a train compartment. The only excitement was to have my passport stamped.
Two types of stamps really matter when you are on the road: stamps for postcards, and passport stamps that you can smugly brag about.
Fellow travelers who have European Union passports rarely get stamped within Europe, much to their frustration. I have gotten a lot more stamps, along with the hassle. In Russia, Ukraine and Romania, border control guards held onto my passport (along with other non-EU ones) for almost an hour, enough to make even the seasoned travelers sweat a bit. At the Turkish-Romanian border, all the non-EU people had to get off the train at 3 a.m. to line up to buy a stick visa (20 USD for Americans, 45 for Canadians). Then we had to get into another line to be stamped.
The passport stamping situation, along with the quality of toilets, dramatically improved after Bulgaria (not sure if there was a correlation...). Today I am taking the train from Sofia to Bratislava, Slovakia. Which means that, are you ready for this--I will be stamped once in Bulgaria (exiting), twice in Serbia (entering and exiting), twice in Hungary, and once in Slovakia.

For all the EU people out there, eat your heart out .

For anybody who is still keeping tabs on my stops: 

No.9: Bucharest
No.10: Istanbul
No.11: Sofia
No.12: Bratislava